Correspondence course

By 1990 (more or less - which box are the journals packed in?), aided and abetted by Roth's friends, I found myself in Basel with a plot now fully hatched to persuade the artist to agree to an exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, where I was then director of programs. By this point I better understood the foibles and singularity of his work and with quixotic pride was convinced that Dia might at last give him a deserved audience in America. I was warmly welcomed with coffee and pastries and conversation, allowed to roam and explore the studio - a storehouse and workshop seemingly without beginning or end but with a sixth sense of order, a private dialect that I hoped with practice and a good ear I might be more fully able to master. We exchanged letters and books, I made other visits to Basel, and we began to discuss how an exhibition might take shape. Of course, in the end that meant Roth traveling to New York. Here the journey ended. No answers to my letters.

Not too long afterward, I left Dia, but I always retained the hope that some day the conversation would begin again. There might be some situation that Roth would find friendly enough, if not enticing, to persuade him to undertake a journey. For in the end I realized that was all that could be said or asked. For Roth art was not a series of appointments and transactions, exhibitions and objects. Art was life itself, banal and grand, selfish and kind, reticent and exposed, controlled and impulsive, fleeting and monumental - all we have as human beings with a contingent presence on earth.

Stranger than the way my journey began, on the night Roth died I found myself flying from San Francisco to Basel. With no plans to see him, I arrived and was told of his death. Like a pilgrim, the next days were spent visiting the sites of his art in Basel and Zurich, celebrating what had been left behind as much as the force that had created the exquisite carapace that could never quite separate art from life. It is we and it is art that have been left behind. I trust in the years ahead I will know something that has previously eluded me, and I know that something of what I will learn will be due to Dieter Roth.

Gary Garrels is Elise S. Haas Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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