Dieter Roth: The National Gallery, Reykjavik Art Museum-Harbor House and Gallery 100 Degrees
Erin Scime
It definitely helps when the artist you are curating is your father. Knowing the subtle nuances of his character, strengths, secret weaknesses and idiosyncratic working style of a person greatly contributes to the ultimate communicative factor in which the exhibition installation reaches the audience. Perhaps this is why the recent Dieter Roth exhibition in Reykjavik is so breathtaking. Part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival, this exhibition was housed in three separate museums: Entitled "Train" (May 14-August 21, 2005) it is the largest exhibition of the museum’s history.
Bjorn Roth, son, assistant, collaborator and archivist of his father’s work curated the show. What is strikingly captivating about this installation was the delivery of Roth’s character and humility as an individual, rather than just merely an artist, within the show. Operating almost as if in memoriam rather than ‘major retrospective’, the exhibition houses Roth’s working tables, drawing mats, books, prints and accumulations and sculpted assemblages (in an unexpected Neaveau Realisme comparison I could not shake). Ultimately, the show harbors a mythological property itself. Perhaps this is no surprise, or almost intentional by Bjorn Roth, whose intent it was to demonstrate the element of Icelandic culture (its myths, geography, topography and relationship to a caustic and ever-changing geology of this volcanic island) rooted in Dieter Roth’s art. Shown in his decomposed fruit boxes, topographical renderings in spices, chocolate towers and a banana peel horizontal scroll, these works, unlike any other time I’ve encountered them, seemed to be at home; relaxed and appropriately juxtaposed against the exotic earth of the island that Roth spent the majority of his working life on (roughly 1957-1998.)
Normally I do not become so emotional in a reading of an exhibition, but there was a sentimental factor that I was really pleased and engaged with. For the first time, I felt as if art could be exhibited and credited via a commemorative, humanistic, artist-centered manner without the artist-as-genius stereotypes of the dozens of Picasso, Monet and Pollock shows that have been around and again. In the number of recently emerging Curatorial and Art Conservation graduate programs rising up around the world, there continually is a questioning of conservation issues surrounding the recreation of conceptual or sculptural objects that either have been intended to disintegrate over time by the artist, or objects in which an artist’s ‘instructions’ as a post-mortem record. For instance, in The Large Table Ruin, a piece in which the Roth work tables from the studio in Stuttgart are arranged and installed as a sculpture itself, properties of the artist record and memorialized work are featured as a modular, changing sculpture. In that it is necessary for this work to accommodate and be rearranged according to the venue it will be exhibited within creates a difficult issue. Bjorn Roth along with Eggert Einarsson, both alive and well, must change, alter and recreate this sculpture for every venue. It is as if, through an extended life, Dieter Roth is able to still work on the projects he left behind. But is this the best model for conservation?
There is death in an exhibition, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. For once the artist (and his or her assistants) pass away, the work deteriorates and is forgotten if undocumented and secured in an estate or museum. If anything, experiencing this exhibition has lead me to entertain doubts about the role and significance of the curator in that there is layering that occurs when outside parties interpret and produce history. Seeing this installation in its pure, most authentic form made it really hard to accept the stratum of secondary interpretations that are standard motivations in curating and made me consider the fact that maybe it is better to let things lie in peace to preserve all accuracies and the memorial qualities that are inherent within any given work, rather than credit the curator, who is in effect ‘distance-learning’ as proportionately and as peripherally as the rest of us. Did I just discredit the outsider curator? Not entirely. What I am trying to suggest is how in the past, Roth’s exhibited works seemed to me aggressive and manly. While they still maintain their allegiance to Modernist objectives and integrity as individual pieces, Bjorn Roth’s installation gently discloses his father’s vulnerabilities, his unrestrained relationship to the material and his relationship to Iceland’s foreign geology and customs that housed his latter years. What results is a haunting and unrepeatable memorial space where the unguarded facets of Roth’s personality can (and only in this context) be seen through the recollection of a child who was clearly shadowed by his father’s presence and ambition.
