Content and formula

- Notebtook, Page 283, 3rd Variant, Basel 1998

Where should one begin in writing about the artist and his work - the organization is rhizomatic, the intentions don't proceed in a single direction but are a system of tangled paths twisting through a thicket that's never been cleared, paths that are also perhaps lines of flight? Dieter Roth often fled out of shame, out of all "aggressive modesty," as he himself called it. Two months before his death, at the opening in Zurich of his exhibition at the Graphische Sammlung der ETH - where his highly refined, formal concrete-poetry works of the '40s could be viewed as well as the fantastic volumes of poems and drawings from the '70s like "Scheisse" (Shit), "Mehr Scheisse" (More shit), "Gesamte Scheisse" (Complete shit), "Verdammte Scheisse" (Damned shit), "Verdammte Gesamte Kacke" (Damned complete crap), and "Gesamte Verdammte Kacke" (Complete damned crap) - a memorable encounter between two artistic worlds took place. Roth was signing one of his exhibition posters as a round man in a close-fitting dark suit and tinted glasses (let's call him K.) sat down close beside him and addressed him - in a slightly pushy way - with the words, "Dieter Roth? Hi, I am K., nice to meet you. I like your exhibition." Roth turned to the '70s art star, gazed directly into the tinted lenses, and said calmly, "Who are you? I don't know you!" K. shrunk slightly, saved himself with a brief, patronizing smile, and repeated, somewhat in disbelief, "l am K. I am an artist, l live in New York." With a completely innocent face, Roth answered: "Nevertheless, I don't know you. I don't know who you are!" As the celebrated New Yorker noticed that he wasn't getting across, he recovered with the helpless joke, "Well, then maybe you know my wife, she is an artist too and she also lives in New York!" To which Roth replied by merely shaking his head. Finally, K. gave up and positioned himself, slightly enervated - grinning, half with embarrassment, half with-arrogance - beside the artist David Weiss in order to observe the phenomenon of Dieter Roth from a safer distance. Roth continued signing his posters, apparently unmoved, until he furtively leaned over toward me and said, with a straight face, in a low voice: "Well, this guy's a real toughie, isn't he?"

Later, as we were passing through the long corridor on the way to dinner, I wanted to ask him whether he had actually not recognized the famous Conceptual artist or whether that had just been a little power game when he said, "That's the worst, isn't it, on these occasions, these shams, these sham toughies." By this I guess he meant everything - the embarrassment of every opening, his age and alcohol-related forgetfulness, the vanity with which the well-known wanted to share the stage on his night, maybe even the vanity of being an artist in general. Later I discovered that K. had found a dictionary of artists, searched out the entry under his name, and laid it open to that page on the table in front of Roth. One could hardly have staged the encounter between artistic antipodes better: K., an artist who, with a single work, derived from a single "concept" heavily inspired by an early-twentieth-century logico-philosophical text, became world renowned and who has been engaged ever since with formal variants on the same theme; Roth, who never trusted any "good idea" or concept in his polymorphic work-in-progress; K., the prototype of the artist who paints with philosophemes, always for the salon; Roth, the angry philosopher and poet, who, driven by angst, lust, and melancholy, in the face of the sheer transitory thingliness of the world, cannot free himself, above all not from the material in the sense of "Complete Shit."

Actually, he understood himself to be a writer, a poet. "That's more agreeable than war!" he wrote on December 16, 1990 (I can write here, on my chair, in my room, on my page undisturbed). "But the body is going under." His concept of the poetic was free of lyrical escapism; when he wrote poetry he played a language game as amusing as it was hopeless - or maybe even a language battle against chaos and entropy. Only under the premise that making art is a special form of creative waste production was he able to endure that all-encompassing sense of shame from which so many other self-confident, successful artists feel totally free, a feeling of ridiculousness and embarrassment that arises, if, as a "timid person" (and this is how Roth saw himself) one must claim to be an artist, to bring forth art, with all the loftiness attached to it: significance, order, beauty, truth, etc.

Writing means thinking and thinking, in Roth's case, meant a rage-driven ordering of all that assailed him, of the incessantly decaying Big Real. Thinking meant writing poetry - Dichtung - in the sense of the condensation (Verdichtung) of garbage, in this case, the precipitous words and sentences that briefly molded themselves to thoughts and then became frayed again, disintegrated, to become new garbage, to form a new poetic humus. But this dung remains fertilizing only if while writing/writing poetry/thinking all the smallest and largest feelings of the thinking subject and the circumstances - particularly the fragilities - of his writing body also carne into play.