Without question, one of the most popular works in the Dieter Roth exhibition Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing, is the seasonally appropriate Bunny-dropping-bunny (Karnickelköttelkarnickel). With Easter just around the corner, jelly bean eggs and chocolate bunnies seem to be everywhere, including here in the galleries at MoMA.

Posts tagged ‘Dieter Roth’
Dieter Roth’s Bunny Leaves More Than Just Chocolate and Jelly Beans
Exhibiting Fluxus: Decomposition Contained in Wait Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth
The title of the exhibition Wait Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth befits a number of the works on display that are slowly decomposing in front of spectators’ eyes. This post is dedicated to one particular pocket-sized perishable—Roth’s Pocket Room (Taschenzimmer) from MoMA’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. In 1968, Dieter Roth—who challenged the boundaries of printmaking and publishing by integrating cheese, fruit, sausage, chocolate, and other organic materials into the process—released an unlimited edition comprising a banana slice on stamped paper tucked inside of a plastic container small enough to fit into the owner’s pocket.
Dieter Roth’s “Nothing” Is Really Quite Something

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, published by The Museum of Modern Art
Pulled from Dieter Roth’s masterpiece, Snow (1964/69), the title of MoMA’s latest book initially reads as something of a dare to stick around: Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth. Whether from the curiosity to see how it ends or the desire to possess something fleeting, this call to action sparked our appetite to consume Roth’s editions slowly in order to savor what might not last.
Wait, later this will be nothing. No really, I’ve seen it for myself.
Exhibition research often takes curators to archives, museums, private collections, and galleries. These are usually pristine spaces, where voices are hushed, light levels are low, and temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. But I experienced something very different as I investigated the work of Dieter Roth (Swiss, born Germany. 1930–1998), featured in the current exhibition Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth.
Dieter Roth’s Hat

Dieter Roth. Hat. 1965. Screenprint over offset. Publisher and printer: the artist, New Haven. Edition: approx. 20 unique variants. The Museum of Modern Art. The Print Associates Fund, 2009. © 2010 Estate of Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth was a singularly important figure in postwar European art—an iconoclast, really—whose wide-ranging practice, including artist’s books, prints, drawings, sculpture, assemblages, sound recordings, film, music, and poetry, reverberated for decades to come. He was associated with kinetic art, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and concrete poetry, often blurring the boundaries between mediums and movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
As a printmaker, he totally pushed the envelope. He sent slices of greasy sausage and cheese through the printing press, stuck strips of licorice onto etchings, glued croissants onto the covers of the books he designed. He also worked with more traditional techniques like screenprint and etching, sometimes combining them to play with different experimental effects.
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