DIETER ROTH DIARIES
Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street - Edinburgh
2 August–14 October 2012
The Fruitmarket Gallery
is proud to present this exhibition of the work of Dieter Roth (1930–1998), one
of late-twentieth-century art’s major figures. Roth was an artist of astonishing
breadth and diversity, producing books, graphics, drawings, paintings,
sculptures, assemblages, and installation works involving video, sounds, and
recordings. He was also a composer, musician, poet, and writer. Art and life for
Roth flowed readily into each other, and much of the material for his artistic
output came from his everyday life.
This exhibition is the first to focus on
the theme of the diary in Roth’s work. Roth kept a diary throughout his life,
and saw all art-making as a form of diary keeping. His diaries were a space to
record appointments, addresses, lists, and deadlines but also ideas, drawings,
photographs, and poems. They teem with graphic exuberance, and proved a rich
source for his work. The Fruitmarket Gallery is fortunate in being able to show
Roth’s diaries to the public for the first time, as well as the hand-produced,
photocopied ‘copybooks’ he made from them to sell to favoured collectors and
friends, and two major installation works.
Many of Roth’s major works can be
understood as kinds of diaries. In the mid-1970s, he attempted to record a year
of his life through rubbish, collecting, and preserving all rubbish less than
one or two sixteenths of an inch thick. The resulting work, Flat Waste,
celebrates and subverts the ordering principle of the diary. Solo Scenes, a vast
video diary, records the last year of Roth’s life on 128 video monitors.
Although Roth died in 1998, his work remains of interest to artists and
audiences alike. He has a particular connection to Edinburgh, having been part
of Richard Demarco’s exhibition Strategy: Get Arts at the 1970 International
Festival. This will be the first time his work has been seen in Scotland since.
The Fruitmarket Gallery has produced a major new publication to accompany
the exhibition. The book includes essays by Fiona Bradley; artist Andrea
Büttner; and writer and curator Sarah Lowndes. It also includes new texts by
Björn Roth, the artist’s son and long-time collaborator and Jan Voss, who worked
with Roth on his book projects, as well as a selection of interviews with Roth,
translated into English for this publication. The book also reproduces pages of
Roth’s diaries for the first time, alongside images of installation works which
relate closely to the theme of the diary.
