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Review of Dieter Roth and Music : And away with the minutes14.03 - 16.08.2015Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart (Berlin)
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And away with the minutes. Dieter Roth and Music
14.03 - 16.08.2015
Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr Gegenwart
Invalidenstrae 50-51
Berlin
Published at Hyperallergic as Dieter Roths Chaotic and Cacophonous Gesamtkunstwerkhttp://hyperallergic.com/224592/dieter-roths-chaotic-and-cacophonous-gesamtkunstwerk/
Selten gehrte Musik, Abschpfsymphonie. Die Abschpfung, Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (3.2.1979) unter
Verwendung eines Fotos von Roland Fischer, Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser
& Wirth (lt. Zug Website)
In 1977, Friedhelm Dhl, Director of the Basel Music Academy, described Dieter Roth as
an amateur who can say something to musicians on the subject of music, non-music,
not-yet-music, no-longer-music and so on, from which musicians can perhaps learn to
speak musically, to make something out of nothing, to turn something into something
different, something personal, in this case something Dieter-Roth-ish. This process is
now underway, and to facilitate it Edizioni Periferia recently released a comprehensive
one-off (edition of 300) box-set that holds the catalogue raisonn of Dieter Roths work
as musician and music publisher. Roth recorded durational sound pieces and edited many
records, including those by Hermann Nitsch and Andr Thomkins. The box-set includes
Roths clownish Disklavier (1992) piano improvisation and the rambunctious Basel
Music Academy piece Quadruple concerto (1977), released here for the first time.
The exhibition And away with the minutes spins like a rococo confection around this
posthumously release by the legendary and influential German-born Swiss artist (born
Karl-Dietrich Roth but also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot) and his prolific noise
music projects. It is a seductive presentation of Roths wistfully perverse and reclusive
sound art, presented comprehensively for the first time here by curator Matthias
Haldemann. It significantly extends the performative impulse at the heart of the Roth
oeuvre, stressing Roths instruments and performances of music on stage alone (he once
staged a concert of howling dogs) or as a member of the artist's collective in the series
Selten gehrte Musik (Rarely Heard Music). Surprisingly, Roth commonly took up
classical forms and genres such as the quartet and the sonata and reinvented them.
Examples of such are presented in a sumptuous archive assembled by Ursula Block that
goes back to an exhibition of artists records that she presented with Michael Glasmeier
in 1989 in Berlin under the title Broken Music. There are exciting, primordial, passionate,
chaotic, frenzied, chthonic and creative cassette audio works here by Roth and others,
such as Roths enchantingly meandering piano solo Lorelei, die Langstreckensonate
(Lorelei, The Long-distance Sonata) (1978).
I recall that there was none of this cacophonous work in his 2004 show Roth Time: A
Dieter Roth Retrospective at MoMA / P.S. 1, although it was impressive. The osmotic
fusion Roth demonstrated there, and now here, is usually set within the context of the
post-war avant-garde scene that included Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Yves Klein, Takis,
Lucio Fontana, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, but that is merely
a convenience. Like Moorman, for Roth music was of great consequence (his favorite
composers being Schubert, Brahms and Schnberg) and he was an unique composer of
eccentric noise music who built both his own recording studio and many outlandish
musical instruments, like the wonderfully messy Keller-Duo (19801989).
Keller-Duo (19801989) built with Bjoern Roth. Kisten mit Klappdeckeln, Trinkutensilien, Audiokassetten,
Radiogerten, Aufnahmegerten, Lautsprechern, l, Acryl, Marker, Elektro-Klaviere, Violine, Kabel u.a.m. Dieter
Roth, Foundation, Hamburg Foto: Florian Holzherr, Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Everything Roth made as instument involved acting out a central concept of art-music-
life as utterly indivisible, a single enterprise in which materials are placed subservient to
emotional and sensual experience. Roth was not an artist who accepted formal
restrictions. Indeed, in seeking to annihilate them he embraced a spectrum between
Duchampian chance alteration and vast accumulation over time; often inviting the natural
world to have its way by using unstable fruit, chocolate, and sugar. Perhaps most
gallantly, he invited the dilution of his own authorship through regular concentrated
collaborations with others, including his own son Bjrn Roth. In her essay Film and
Theater, Susan Sontag identified this sort of Roth-like all-embracing tendency as a
breaking down of the distinction between artistic genres, and, as such, as one of the two
major radical positions of early (mid-1960s) post-modern art (the other trend stridently
maintaining those distinctions). This all-embracing gesamtkunstwerk ideal, which Sontag
goes on to identify as a desire for a vast behavioral magma, is typical of Roths work
when he churns musical instruments into visual art. Of course he was far from alone, as
this gesamtkunstwerk ideal of breaking down distinctions is clearly detectable in some
aspects of Fluxus, Actionism, Happenings and in the Expanded Arts that flourished
throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Roths link to Fluxus involved, among other things, his
interest in music/sound, in ephemeral materials and in an anarchic prankster humor. Like
many then, Roth was a sculptor (albeit often using fugitive materials like baked dough,
chocolate, mayonnaise, rabbit shit), painter (at times making use of used tablecloths),
skilled printmaker, collagist, poet, video diarist, elegant draftsman, publisher (in 1975 he
founded Zeitschrift fur Alles, a journal that published anything submitted to it) and noise
musician. He intensely experimented with once interesting nonconformist techniques
around the loose gesture (something now almost obligatory within Zombie Formalism,
hence conformist). Specifically, Roth generally tried to blur the boundaries between
performance and sculpture, theater and visual art, high and low culture (a goal, one must
admit now, that has ended up being merely mostly low). Yet And away with the minutes
succeeds as art by recalling Greek Dionysian ritual as a fruitfully rich model for the art of
the future because, as Wagner explained in Art and Revolution, Dionysian ritual involves
the community in a fusion of the arts by embodying one singular ideological dramatic
purpose. Wagner perceived this Greek unity as the ideal, or to put it succinctly, unity is
the ideal born out in Roths cluster-fuck work. That is its goal and fulfilling telos as total-
art, to embody singularity of unified thought and (implied) unified identity (even though
the binary opposition between the recognition of Dionysian and Apollonian
consciousness would seem to a priori conflict with such an imagined unity).
Though Swiss, I was not surprised to find Roth in Berlin, as he was a regular presence
here both as an artist and as a musician. In the 1970s, jointly with his Vienna artist
friends Gerhard Rhm, Hermann Nitsch and Gnter Brus, he organized the Berlin
Dichterworkshops (Poetry Workshops) and gave several concerts in the Selten gehrte
Musik series, whose title was coined by Oswald Wiener of the Wiener Gruppe (Roth
performed with Gerhard Rhm and Wiener on Berliner Dichterworkshop in 1973).
Alongside such documentation are early works on paper, like the cubist influenced Ohne
Titel (1950), and music objects-combines like the striking installations Bar 1 (lautloses
Bild mit Bar) (Silent Picture with Bar) (19831997) and Bar 2 (19831997) which
served in Roths lifetime as the hub of social gatherings where music was played.
Ohne Titel (1950) Schwarze Kreide und Collage auf Papier, Kunstmuseum Bern, Sammlung Toni Gerber
Schenkung 1983 Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Bar 1 (lautloses Bild mit Bar) (19831997) Audiokassetten, Radio- und Kassettengerte, Lautsprecher, Videokamera,
Blasinstrumente, Fotos, Spielzeug, Alltagsgegenstnde, Malutensilien, Glser und Flaschen u.a.m., l und Acryl auf
Holz und Leinwand, auf Rdern Maria s Walter Schnepel Kulturlis Alaptvny, Budapest / Museum Weserburg
Museum fr moderne Kunst, Bremen Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Interactive cassette mixing pieces, such as Triptychon (1979-1981), allowed a very
simple but always pleasurable experience of overlapping channels of Roths sounds,
dictated by the punch of buttons. The results provided a number of auditory rewards.
Triptychon (1979-1981) Privatsammlung Schweiz Ausstellungsansicht, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr
Gegenwart Berlin Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Foto: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns
In the course of the research for this show carried out jointly by Kunsthaus Zug, the
Hochschule fr Musik / Musik-Akademie Basel and Edizioni Periferia over a period of
several years, a large amount of unpublished material was brought to light from the
artists archives in Iceland, Hamburg and Basel. This material includes numerous audio
and video recordings such as the dramatic Mnchner Konzert (1974) (the first of the
Selten gehrte Musik concerts) that was performed in Munichs Lenbachhaus and Roths
solo Quadrupelkonzert (Quadruple Concerto) (1977), performed at the Basel Music
Academy. As part of this research project, 25 hours of interviews with Roths co-
musicians were recorded under the title Selten gehrte Gesprche (Rarely Heard
Conversations). They can be heard in the exhibition and online at
www.dieterrothmusic.ch.
When in a tipsy disposition I particularly admire Roths fluently woozy for brass
arrangement Abschopf Symphonie (1979) and the virtuosic November Symphonie
(1974) as they exemplify his idea of culture as a conflict between Dionysian excesses and
the bourgeoisie as related to the gesamtkunstwerkkonzept (concept of the total-artwork).
They also both burst with the dark undertone of too much sloppy schnapps, something
that separated him from many of the more jocular and conceptual Fluxus artists. But he
took a much less dark approach when integrating musical instruments with cassette
players and other audio devices into impromptu loosy-goosey chaotic assemblages, such
as Stummes Relief (Silent Relief) (19841988) and the sprawling Bar 1 (lautloses
Bild mit Bar), a remarkable gesamtkunstwerk admixture of the romantic aesthetic
rationalism of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the materialistic sensationalism of Ludwig
Feuerbach.
Stummes Relief (Silent Relief) (19841988) Zerbrochene Violine, Leim, Acrylfarbe, Marker, Malutensilien,
Sperrholz, Zeichenutensilien, Abfall in Geigenkoffer in Plexiglaskasten, Sammlung Aldo Frei Dieter Roth Estate
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Bar 2 (19831997) Privatsammlung Ausstellungsansicht, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum furGegenwart Berlin
Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Foto: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns
Bar 2 (19831997) is a frantically hand-made arrangement which displays an obsession
with life as art as sound as sinister humor. A peripatetic mind tied to a grueling work
ethic is clearly sensed behind such a work, even while I sensed an overall conveyance of
craving connected to an acute awareness of drunken gaiety. One easily thinks of Friedrich
Nietzsches brilliant Genealogy of Morals where he writes of a fundamental shift in
aesthetic belief concerning Wagner, the theoretician of the gesamtkunstwerk, a concept
has been expanded and given different colors of meaning as the idea took on a broader,
and less formally synthetic sense of unity.
Roths apparent concept of the total-artwork takes on two meanings which need be
differentiated, as I wish to stress one sense (the less Wagnerian sense) of this concept and
not the exact, precise sense which Wagner intended. Rather, I am interested in using the
more generalized sense of the concept in discussing Roths work which the notion
attained as it circulated and mutated throughout Europe and the Americas. To further
complicate things, Wagners theoretical conception of the gesamtkunstwerk is double, as
one sees when reading The Artwork of the Future in tandem with Art and Revolution in
which Wagner, under the influence of Mikhail Bakounines revolutionary writing,
connected aesthetic-spiritual optimism to anarchist force as a way to combat the
encroachment of efficiency and productivity endemic to the instrumental logic of the
Industrial Revolution.
Though it is also problematic, as the fragmentation (albeit unified in collage/montage)
aesthetic intrinsic here shows us, Bar 2 is relevant in discussing interpretations of the
gesamtkunstwerk in terms of immersive worlds. Here the stress lays less with the fusion
of normally discrete art forms and more on the totalizing, harmonizing and engulfing
immersive effect of the art experience. Indeed, with Bar 2 Roth demonstrates this
extended, comprehensive sense of the idea which the notion attained in Adrian Henris
significant book Total Art, a book which concerns Environmental and Kinetic Art,
Performance, and some Happenings of the 1960s and early-1970s. In it Henri adapts the
term gesamtkunstwerk in historically contextualizing a stream of art in the 1960s and
early-1970s as work which sets out to dominate, even overwhelm; flooding the
spectator/hearer with sensory impressions of different kinds. It is not meant as
information but as experience. With this sense of a seamless union that would sweep the
viewer to another world, we can immediately see here how Roths Bar 2 succeeds at
this hyper-poly-media objective.
Joseph Nechvatal