I hate it if I notice that I like something, if I am able to do something, so that I just have to repeat it, that it could become a habit. Then I stop immediately. Also if it threatens to become beautiful. 2

Dieter Roth was a sculptor, poet, graphic designer, performer, publisher, musician, and, most of all, provocateur. Born to a Swiss father and German mother in Hanover, Germany, in 1930, he was sent out of Nazi Germany to live in Switzerland with foster parents. He received his training in graphic design in Bern, where he also became interested in avant-garde design and poetry, publishing some of his work in Daniel Spoerri’s magazine material.

If Roth was subject to change, so were his works. His artistic styles waxed and waned; they were flexible and unstable, resistant to classification. Each work had a life of its own. Roth’s intention was to make time visible by allowing organic objects to decompose, with no attempt at conservation or intervention. He was also interested in the factor of chance: works were not to be fully controlled by the artist, but to develop according to the conditions under which they were kept. Temperature, humidity, light, and the presence of insects and bacteria would continue to alter the objects after the artist declared them finished.

One example of this mutability is Small Sunset, begun in 1968—an unlimited series of works that parody a traditionally romantic theme with their decidedly unromantic material. The works—formal compositions of a sunset over the sea—are made of two sheets of paper and a slice of salami. The fat from the salami has slowly soaked into the paper in each case, but, because of the varied conditions in which they were kept, each Small Sunset is now unique. This similarity of origin and evolving difference was a theme that Roth repeated in other series.

Roth was also fascinated with the painterly, textural aspects of grease stains, mold formations, insect borings, and blotches of rotting organic material. These uncontrolled developments gave his works autonomy, distinct from the meaning-making in which artists normally engage. Whereas Beuys invested materials with symbolic significance even in their decomposing state, Roth “made” art that relied not on the artist, but on the works’ environmental conditions interacting with their organic ingredients. Nature itself played a large role in the authorship of Roth’s widely varied oeuvre.

Among Roth’s works are many self-portraits, often in objects or representations that make no visual reference to his appearance. Reflecting his desire for disguise and a shifting identity, they present the artist as salad, dog feces, and bird feeders, among other things. Several of his self-portraits—two exhibited here—take chocolate as their sculptural material. One work, his contribution to the multi-artist portfolio Artist Mail (1969), is a round splash of chocolate on a green board, titled simply Self-Portrait. The other is the marbled edition of Chocolate Lion (1971), also known as Self-Portrait as a Lion, which exists in dark- and white-chocolate versions as well. In contrast to the nobility and permanence traditionally attributed to art (and to the kingly pride the lion symbolizes in Western culture), this work is ephemeral and looks more like a harmless puppy. In terms of verisimilitude, Chocolate Lion counters the customary somber artist’s self-portrait, yet bears a closer real-time resemblance to the artist: like a human body that lives and dies, the chocolate changes and decomposes. This work displays the artist’s characteristic wit: his nose-thumbing at those who take the value of art to be its high purpose and permanence.

Thirty years after the creation of the object, the chocolate smells of rancid fat, contains insect holes and cracks, and bears the marks of its many handlers. What was sweet is now spoiled; what was fresh has become stale; what was appetizing has turned moldy. Though initially it is tempting to see Roth’s work—especially with chocolate—as “cute” or “sweet,” time aids in creating a second, less appealing interpretation: dissolution. Roth’s belief in impermanence is revealed in his art through the use of fluid, metamorphosing material that, ironically, becomes firmer as the works age and decompose. The effect is as multivalent as Roth’s identity, as contradictory as it is true. This dual effect of the work—attraction and repulsion—contrasts with the stability of the institutional art that Roth saw as devoid of life, spontaneity, and joy.

Roth drew on the similarity between chocolate and feces in appearance—as the American artist Paul McCarthy does today—and no doubt saw his works as coming to fruition when they turned rancid. Shit Hare (1975), which embodies the organic process of decay, illustrates some of Roth’s subversive tendencies. Pressed into the shape of a chocolate Easter bunny, rabbit excrement reverses the viewer’s response, turning an initial attraction into revulsion. Ironically, the piece was commissioned by Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery because Roth had been working with food. The maverick Roth, however, not wanting to deliver what was expected of him, instead presented food’s opposite. Having taught for a short period (1968–1971) at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Joseph Beuys was his colleague, Roth also saw the commission as an opportunity for a biting commentary on the artist-prophet.

Beuys’s work often drew on the mythological significance of animals—especially the hare, for both its religious connotations and its procreative powers. The most well-known example is the ritualistic performance piece called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), in which the artist, sitting in a gallery with his head covered in honey and gold leaf, talked to a dead rabbit that he cradled in his arms, and occasionally touched the hare’s foot to artworks. With Shit Hare, Roth undercut Beuys’s spiritual weightiness. Like a jester, he provided his own insights through satire—asking how seriously we should take a self-appointed religious or artistic leader.

Poëmeterie (1968) is composed of mutton cubes inside a plastic bag on which poems from Roth’s magazine, poeterei (no. 4), have been printed. The poems are about death, decay, impermanence, excrement, and eroticism. The bag thus literally blends eros and thanatos—sensual poems with rotting flesh. Through its possible allusions to sacrificial rams and lambs it bears religious undertones reminiscent of the literary musings of Georges Bataille, whose dadaist writings on the erotic and the grotesque appealed to Roth.

For Roth, food and other organic materials were a way to defy established categories and frustrate those who wished to nail down his work and his identity. He did, after all, refer to museums as “funeral homes,” implying that once art was in a museum, it was on its way to burial in the archives of history.