Dieter Roth

Three years ago I saw a work by the late Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth that so captivated me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the jacket. It consists of twenty sausages in assorted sizes, hanging, as in a German butcher shop, in two rows, and is titled Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Works in Twenty Volumes. Roth had removed the labels from the individual volumes in a matched set of Hegel's Werke, and pasted them onto corresponding Würste. Much as I admire Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, it was delicious to see its two volumes chopped into bits, stuffed into casings and displayed as what Roth called "literature wurst." It was a witty critique of metaphysics that might have caused even those of my professors who were logical positivists to break into thin, sarcastic smiles.

The only piece by Roth I recall having previously encountered was a cheese book--part of a Fluxus collection that had been acquired by the Getty Foundation from the estate of Jean Brown, an avid enthusiast. A Getty official ushered me into a roomful of largely unclassifiable objects, randomly placed on steel shelving. It is a tribute to Roth that his is the only piece I remember. He had flattened a lump of blue cheese in a plastic folder, clasped in a simple cheap binder. I regret never having seen Roth's legendary 1970 exhibition at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, which consisted of thirty-seven suitcases in assorted shapes, stuffed with various cheeses, and called Staple Cheese--a play on "steeple chase" to which Roth added "(A Race)" in case someone missed the point. In the nature of things, the art was attacked by flies and maggots, and the stench is reported to have been unendurable. I only read about it in Artforum, after Roth's death in 1998.

None of these avant-garde creations prepared me for the impressiveness of Roth's oeuvre as a whole, on view at MoMA-Queens and PS 1 through June 7. If I'd been asked to imagine what an exhibition of Roth's work would look like, I would have supposed something like that room at the Getty--a jumble of eccentric odds and ends, very few of which would have been seen as works of art before 1960. To my surprise and delight, the author of the cheese book turns out to have been one of the masters of twentieth-century art.

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