Sub-Rural #47 Dieter Roth at the MCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art is currently exhibiting Dieter Roth’s “Balabild 5” in the McCormick Tribune Gallery. The assemblage/installation is a remarkable example of radical midcentury anti-aesthetics by one of the century’s phenomenal Neo-Dada polymaths, tat also feature his son Björn Roth. Roth died in 1998, but his installations have continued to manifest his subversive, neo-anthropological register. Roth operated a wide swath of platforms, materials and media and had an obsession for strategic material incommensurability. He engaged entropic formal processes to summon chaotic de-constructive art that out-maneuvered Meciunis, Hesse, Polke, Spoerri, and other figures who served as alternatives to the narcissistic rule of Abstract Expressionism and the indolence of institutional historicism.

Roth began his career as a graphic designer and gradually refigured numerous disciplines of fine art, specifically prints and artists books, but also music, film, video and poetry. He steered forcefully into work that undermined the fixations of the West’s materialist bargain in the museums and galleries that safeguard them. He replaced exhibition contexts and conceits with critical alternative displays and materials that conveyed perimeter truths, (border fidelities) of studio artists’ world view complete with ordinariness, decomposition, and empty spaces. Despite an absence for over 25 years his work still impinges critically on artworld publics.

“Balabild 5” seems much more like the conceptual arena of the MCA’s 80’s experimental art agenda, a venue where guerilla artist/architect Gordon Matta-Clark excavated three floors of the adjacent exhibition space and Chris Burden performed his “Doomed” in a seminal body art show. While there is some risk in viewing “Balabild 5”s decrepitude of found objects as mid-century nostalgia, it’s part of the art-culture that advanced todays contextual and demotic art trend. Roth’s “ruin” is one pivot point for the philosophical turn of the 1960’s, when art and real life became inextricably, sometimes uncomfortably, intertwined,

Roth’s work probes other art objects, their arbitrariness, economy, and museological status. Like many radical studio artists of late modern era he collected and destroyed improvisationally. He flaunted the peripatetic, parodied stasis, and was indifferent to authority, privilege, and techno-centrism. He was an artist of his time, akin to Fluxus though he thought their project was naïve and a bit lazy.

The last thing Dieter Roth might have been was lazy, but neither was he conventionally ambitious. He was committed to extending the radical logic of the avant-garde that plumbed the depth of postwar art and politics, a culture of investigation that still resonates. Like all of the artist’s large assemblages “Balabild 5” took years to complete. It’s a document of its production and a particularly potent record of an era, stricken by cold war angst, an anti-monument to displacement and waste. Roughly a third of “Balabild 5”consists of the following in-situated objects such as – “cello and bow, leather suitcase and bag, Easter eggs, color photograph, plastic shopping bags, food and beverage refuse (egg carton, onion, paper plates, vodka bottle, salt shaker, plastic fork, ceramic teapot), lamp, ashtray with cigarette butts, stapler, hammers, nails, plastic and metal pipes, wire hangers, cleaning supplies, sawhorses, level, metal scissors, toys, cast animal paw, metal spring, metal rod, electric drill, cassette-tape cases, audio electronics, printed papers and receipts, and Super 8 film cartridge.”

To say the work is dense with contradiction, avoidance, and absurdity would be a misunderstanding. The assemblage is a cacophony of things that place sign and signified in a morphological and grammatical predicament, a trembling mass of things forgotten, that you recognize but have no code… yet make a place for.