don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance.

captivated me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the jacket.

It consists of twenty sausages in assorted sizes, hanging, as in a German butcher shop, in two

rows, and is titled Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Works in Twenty Volumes. Roth had

removed the labels from the individual volumes in a matched set of Hegel’s Werke, and pasted

them onto corresponding Würste. Much as I admire Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, it was

delicious to see its two volumes chopped into bits, stuffed into casings and displayed as what

Roth called “literature wurst.” It was a witty critique of metaphysics that might have caused even

those of my professors who were logical positivists to break into thin, sarcastic smiles.

The only piece by Roth I recall having previously encountered was a cheese book–part of a

Fluxus collection that had been acquired by the Getty Foundation from the estate of Jean

Brown, an avid enthusiast. A Getty official ushered me into a roomful of largely unclassifiable

objects, randomly placed on steel shelving. It is a tribute to Roth that his is the only piece I

remember. He had flattened a lump of blue cheese in a plastic folder, clasped in a simple cheap

binder. I regret never having seen Roth’s legendary 1970 exhibition at the Eugenia Butler Gallery

in Los Angeles, which consisted of thirty-seven suitcases in assorted shapes, stuffed with

various cheeses, and called Staple Cheese–a play on “steeple chase” to which Roth added “(A

Race)” in case someone missed the point. In the nature of things, the art was attacked by flies

and maggots, and the stench is reported to have been unendurable. I only read about it in

Artforum, after Roth’s death in 1998.

None of these avant-garde creations prepared me for the impressiveness of Roth’s oeuvre as

a whole, on view at MoMA-Queens and PS 1 through June 7. If I’d been asked to imagine what

an exhibition of Roth’s work would look like, I would have supposed something like that room

at the Getty–a jumble of eccentric odds and ends, very few of which would have been seen as

works of art before 1960. To my surprise and delight, the author of the cheese book turns out

to have been one of the masters of twentieth-century art.

Specialists have employed a German term–entgrenzen–to describe Roth’s procedure as an

artist. It means, roughly, to overcome boundaries. Roth’s personality was such that if he

encountered a boundary, he would find ways of eliminating it. Fortunately, he came of age in

the 1960s, when the spirit of Entgrenzung flourished as never before. Later in the decade

Entgrenzung would spread from art to politics, with the rise of movements challenging

boundaries of race, gender and sexuality. But its initial impulses were artistic, and can be traced

to Marcel Duchamp, whose “ready-mades” blurred the boundary between works of art and

commonplace objects like snow shovels, bottle racks, metal grooming combs and urinals.

The next important figure in the history of Entgrenzung was John Cage, whose project was

erasing the boundary between music, as traditionally defined, and the racket of ordinary life:

sirens, coughs, static, whispers, farts. Cage’s composition students at the New School–the

cadre of the Fluxus movement, led by Cage’s visionary protégé George Maciunas–went a step

further, seeking to erase the boundary between life and art. By the end of that revolutionary

decade, there were few if any boundaries left to overcome in art, or for that matter in life.

I have tended to regard boundary erasure in art as largely a Manhattan contribution–downtown

through Cage and uptown through Dr. Suzuki’s seminar in Zen at Columbia–but I now see that

it was part of the spirit of the times. Roth was a gifted designer with advanced tastes, dedicated

at first to Constructivist graphics and concrete poetry, but he had a need for something even

more radical, which he found in the work of Jean Tinguely, a fellow Swiss. It has been said that

the decade was dramatically inaugurated when, at the opening of Tinguely’s exhibition at MoMA

in 1960, his construction, Hommage à New York, self-destructed in the museum’s garden with

a lot of smoke and clatter. Roth met Tinguely later that year in Basel. “Everything was so rusty

and broken and made so much noise,” he said of Tinguely’s work, likening it to “a paradise that

I’d lost.”

It’s tempting to see Roth’s mature work as an effort to re-create that lost infantile paradise by

way of detritus, noises and noxious smells. “Paradise Regained” would have been a fitting title

for the Roth retrospective in Queens. What one feels is that he turned his entire life into art and

created, through his unmatched ludic power, a world of amazing compilations that, like a

natural wonder, takes one’s breath away.

Like his peers in Fluxus (a term coined by Maciunas), Roth was reacting against the repressive

aesthetics of Modernism, a project that received its clearest formulation in Clement

Greenberg’s 1960 essay “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg’s view was that each art is defined

through the medium specific to its practices, and that under Modernism each art is obliged to

purge itself of everything alien to its essence. In painting, this meant the elimination of illusion,

since the painted surface is essentially flat. The ultimate aim was to achieve purity. In a sense,

Roth’s Constructivist works were thoroughly Modernist in impulse, exhibiting the clarity of pure

design. What Tinguely opened for him was a paradise of impurity, a world of infinite mess–just

what he needed to break out of the ascetic order of Modernism.

In 1967 Roth began to craft what he called “Islands,” made out of kitchen scraps, which he

nailed to panels painted blue. He was living in Reykjavík at the time, and his inspiration was

evidently the Westman Islands–a group of islands off the southern coast of Iceland. Just a few

years earlier, the world’s newest island, Surtsey, had emerged abruptly in the Westman

configuration and become a kind of natural laboratory, in which the coming of life could be

observed taking place. Roth doused the food scraps with sour milk or yogurt and poured

plaster over the whole. In no time at all, mold formed, decay set in, and the insects that Roth

called his “collaborators” arrived. One might say that “Islands” embodied the spirit of Fluxus in

visibly decaying into pools and puddles of slime. And for some years thereafter, Roth

experimented with use of food as his medium, making prints out of squashed bananas and

exploiting milk, sausage, cheese, of course, and above all chocolate, counting in each case on

the processes of rot and decay to help life turn into art–and vice versa.

Three years ago I saw a work by the late Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth that so captivated

me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the jacket. It consists

of twenty sausages in assorted sizes, hanging, as in a German butcher shop, in two rows, and

is titled Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Works in Twenty Volumes. Roth had removed the

labels from the individual volumes in a matched set of Hegel’s Werke, and pasted them onto

corresponding Würste. Much as I admire Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, it was delicious to

see its two volumes chopped into bits, stuffed into casings and displayed as what Roth called

“literature wurst.” It was a witty critique of metaphysics that might have caused even those of

my professors who were logical positivists to break into thin, sarcastic smiles.

The only piece by Roth I recall having previously encountered was a cheese book–part of a

Fluxus collection that had been acquired by the Getty Foundation from the estate of Jean

Brown, an avid enthusiast. A Getty official ushered me into a roomful of largely unclassifiable

objects, randomly placed on steel shelving. It is a tribute to Roth that his is the only piece I

remember. He had flattened a lump of blue cheese in a plastic folder, clasped in a simple cheap

binder. I regret never having seen Roth’s legendary 1970 exhibition at the Eugenia Butler Gallery

in Los Angeles, which consisted of thirty-seven suitcases in assorted shapes, stuffed with

various cheeses, and called Staple Cheese–a play on “steeple chase” to which Roth added “(A

Race)” in case someone missed the point. In the nature of things, the art was attacked by flies

and maggots, and the stench is reported to have been unendurable. I only read about it in

Artforum, after Roth’s death in 1998.

None of these avant-garde creations prepared me for the impressiveness of Roth’s oeuvre as

a whole, on view at MoMA-Queens and PS 1 through June 7. If I’d been asked to imagine what

an exhibition of Roth’s work would look like, I would have supposed something like that room

at the Getty–a jumble of eccentric odds and ends, very few of which would have been seen as

works of art before 1960. To my surprise and delight, the author of the cheese book turns out