Dieter Roth

February 17–June 24, 2013

  • Introduction
  • Selected Works
    • The Concrete
    • Mass Media Experiments
    • Reinventing Formats
    • Verbal Visual Equivalency
    • Snow
    • Containers
  • Multimedia: Staying Fresh
  • Interview with the Artist
  • Exhibition Checklist
  • Publication
  • Events
  • About the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books
  • Credits
MoMA

Roth’s experimentation with language was intense and varied, from youthful verse to the ideograms he developed in the 1950s to his Dichtungsmaschine (poetry machine) of 1961. His efforts also included poetry in English and German and wordplay in the form of homonyms, puns, abbreviations, and acronyms, often laced with sexually charged or scatological references. In Roth’s hands, language was an inherently unstable system that could be subverted and transformed.

In his ideograms (and in the “stupidograms” on view in this section), image and language are merged into one. As early as 1964, Roth began to develop a codified alphabet of icons—a motorcycle rider, a heart, a hat, a lightbulb—to which he assigned linguistic equivalents. These symbols had enduring value for the artist, who continued to use them well into the future, and also multiple meanings. He described the evolution and transformation of one of these symbols, the motorcycle: “I continued doing variations of this image until I saw that I was actually drawing a scrotum… it’s the same basic form, d’you see?” This form also became a rabbit and, inverted, a heart. Thus, a single icon continuously evolved to represent freedom, sexuality, fertility, and love, and in its multiple simultaneous meanings resists attempts at definitive transliteration.

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birdseed bust
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Dieter Roth. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [birdseed bust]). 1968

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Gorgona
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Dieter Roth. Untitled for the journal Gorgona, no. 9. 1966

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Mundunculum
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Dieter Roth. MUNDUNCULUM: A tentative logico-poeticum, represented as plan and program or dream for a provisional mythebarium for visionary plants. VOLUME 1: Rot’s VIDEUM (MUNDUNCULUM: Ein tentatives Logico-Poeticum, dargestellt wie Plan und Programm oder Traum zu einem provisorischen Mythebarium für Visionspflanzen. BAND 1: Das rot’sche VIDEUM). 1967

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Rubber Stamp Box
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Dieter Roth. Rubber Stamp Box (Stempelkasten). 1968

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Bunny-dropping-bunny
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Dieter Roth. Bunny-dropping-bunny (Karnickelköttelkarnickel). 1968, published 1972–82

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