Dieter Roth: Diaries

Dieter Roth (1930-98) is one of late-twentieth-century art’s major figures, widely known and respected for the diversity and range of his practice; the multiplicity of his artistic identities; the collaborative and subversive nature of his approach to art; the way his work collapses artistic genres and the hierarchies between them; and the lack of distinction in his output between art and life.

This book focuses on one of the primary spaces in which Roth merged art and life — the diaries he kept throughout his life. These provided somewhere to record appointments, addresses, lists and deadlines, but also ideas, drawings, photographs and poems. His diaries teem with graphic exuberance, and are a rich source both for Roth in the making of his work and for anyone wishing properly to understand it.

This publication is the first to focus on Roth’s diaries and to begin to examine the impact they may have on the production, reception and interpretation of his art. It was published to accompany an exhibition of Roth’s diaries, notebooks, copybooks and related works at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh for the 2012 Edinburgh Art Festival. In reproducing some of the pages of the diaries, it hints at the wonders they contain. The diaries are an immense project; a rich academic seam still to be mined. The exhibition and publication were and are an important first step towards a proper scholarly consideration of Roth through this most intimate of forms.

Contents include an introduction from Fiona Bradley, Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery and essays by Sarah Lowndes, Jan Voss, Andrea Buttner and Bjorn Roth. There are also extracts from “Dieter Roth: Gesammelte Interviews (Collected Interviews)”.