Dieter Roth: Artist Dieter Roth – The Big Brown Armageddon

Chocolate, dear children, is not always sweet and delicious. In the world of bitters, it can taste quite bitter. I mean the world of the artist Dieter Roth (1930–1998), who cast himself out of chocolate and then let himself collapse, so to speak, under his own weight. Entire landscapes made of chocolate were created by his hand, becoming cloudy, dry, brittle, insects nesting in them until, to the horror of desperate conservators, the whole thing crumbled and atomized.

It all started harmlessly, with chocolates and chocolate kisses. Dirk Dobke, the leading Roth expert, dates the artist’s first use of chocolate-containing materials (“Roth-Zeit”, 2003) to the mid-1960s. Roth used drypoint etchings to draw out the chocolates and kisses, which at that time alternated with sausage and dairy products. In this phase, transience still seems quite enjoyable. One thinks of “Sunsets” (1968), in which our native star is represented by a slice of salami.

By no means do these images only work as long as the salami hasn’t gone moldy and gone. No, just when there is only a speck of grease left, the sun has found an ironic afterimage; it has gone from the ball of hydrogen that will soon burn up (in seven billion years) to an organic trace, a cute dirt. This is also humanization.

But in Roth there is no humanization without animalization. The eight “Bird Plates” created in 1966 bear witness to this. These are striking gravure etchings onto which some chocolate biscuits and eggs, some fried eggs, have been squeezed. The title could suggest that these works are no longer intended to attract art-loving people, but rather hungry birds. Because they result in a first highlight in Roth’s chocolate art: the “Bird Food Bust” from 1968; the full title, based on James Joyce, is »POTH.AAVFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Bird Food Bust)«.

The bust, which shows the then 38-year-old Roth as an old man, is made of chocolate mixed with bird seed. Placed in the garden, the artist’s avatar would have been eaten by animals as wild as they were tasty; Of course, collectors, gallery owners and other beneficiaries knew how to prevent this. The well-read Roth also alluded to the fate of the chained Titan Prometheus, whose liver was pecked alive by an eagle.

Around 1968, when Joseph Fischer began training for his role as anti-fascist war minister, Roth staged a brown chocolate Armageddon. The Cologne Cathedral, the Stuttgart transmission tower, the city of Basel, dolls, knights and his iconic motorcyclist – in often room-filling assemblages everything sinks into brown mass, which now actually, pardon my French, appears to be a big piece of shit.

One should always be careful about suspecting political motives in Roth. But he spoke very vividly about the hell of Nazism and the shivering nights of bombing he endured. He writes about himself in his “CV of 46 Years”: “He grew up, aware of himself among the evil Germans in horrible Hanover, at the time of the mad reign of a rager, called Hitler, dearly beloved murderer, who was conjured up by the terrible Germans man-eating villain on earth, often confused with the mad rager in heaven, called God, that villain, an extremely mass-murdering phantom bajazzo, often called Mr. Brain Dreams.” (“In there in front of the eye”, 2005) And if we then have a garden gnome in chocolate sunken so that only the pointed cap is visible, we can confidently assume that this also means a German in the brown swamp.

At the same time, the artist himself appears here as a mass-murdering god. It is he who floods Germany and half of Switzerland with chocolate mud. But mostly he murders himself. It’s not for nothing that one of the earliest chocolate works, a dark panel painting with a blob of chocolate cream slapped onto the middle, is called “Self Portrait”; It was created in 1964 in the USA, where Roth was teaching at the time, in the town of Providence, which means “providence”.

From the shapeless self-portrait, which was followed by several similar ones, after the bird food bust, mass-produced ego figures were created, which the artist arranged on glass and stacked on top of each other. As a “self” or “lion tower,” these stacked armies of the self reached a height of almost three meters in Basel, and a total of eight meters in Hamburg, in the “Schimmelmuseum,” which was demolished after protests from neighbors.

Chocolate mass remains fragile even after hardening, which is exactly what Roth believed in the material. Cooling was intentionally not provided in the mold museum, so the construction made of chocolate selves, which rose to the dreary Hamburg sky as the new Tower of Babel, regularly collapsed in the summer. It was then rebuilt by a team of Sisypheans, mostly led by Björn Roth, the artist’s son.

In the Mold Museum, Roth bravely adhered to the method that was also used in the “Garden Sculpture” (from 1973) or in the “Tischruine” (1978–1998): tidy up nothing, clean nothing up, change nothing. In the kitchen, for example, there were electric cookers available to liquefy the chocolate mixture. This occasionally overflowed and a brown layer covered the hotplates. Then a pane of glass was quickly placed over it, a new hot plate was placed on top, and we continued.

Process art is dirty art. While everything in Dieter Roth’s Cyclops Cave was doomed, the only thing that remained constant seemed to be the fine, noble smell of chocolate that hung in the air. Chocolate fades, but chocolate stays too. It is the simultaneously tough and volatile substance in which we are all stuck.

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