Page 43 - Studio International - February 1973

unstressed as the grid. It seems to me that it is in Dieter Rot at material (sealed off, for the most part, behind
these readings that Green has found the glass or transparent plastic) can form patterns of
material for his new pictures. They are, so to the Hayward marvellous symmetry. Simultaneously one is
speak, the unlooked-for reward of his lengthy forced to view process and material in a new
meditation, and they have allowed him to way. Mould sheet (curdled milk on white
dispense with the grid itself and to return to an handmade paper, 1969) is the signature, not only
open canvas with an enormously enhanced sense of the artist, but of the material itself. The belief
of its possibilities. If the grid is present in his that a work of art should reflect its material goes
new pictures, it is there only as an implication, back, in recent years, to the serious purposes of
or as a consequence of some other process, or as the Werkbund and the Bauhaus. In using
if displaced so that we can see behind it. materials that negate seriousness, Rot gently
It is hard to think of pictures which give a mocks himself In Big Sunset (1968), a semi-circle
stronger feeling of their exact size. Size is of sausage, glued at the horizon line, is the sun;
evident as capacity — it is as though the canvas the grease absorbed in the paper is its corona.
was revealed as a container of some sort, a flat The object is at once a deflation of the banal and
tank. It has just so much room in it and will take a description of nature pleasing in itself.
just so many squares or oblongs. In a picture Clearly, opposites coexist in Dieter Rot's
called Scrapbook it looks as though a square has Dieter Rot's travelling exhibition, which opened universe. Such a situation can create problems,
been placed freehand in the top left corner and last year at the Gemeentemuseum in The for while absence of dogmatism is appealing,
the remaining fifteen squares which fill the Hague, has arrived at the Hayward Gallery in unfocused eclecticism fails to satisfy. Because
picture out are fitted in as best they can be, of this eclecticism he is difficult to pin down. As
London, where it can be seen from now until
some slipping, some becoming oblong or 11 March. Pieces selected for this encyclopaedic if to underscore his elusiveness, the artist's
squeezed out of true, others just able to keep show, which incorporates nearly a quarter signature appears variously in five different
their squareness. In some pictures the century of work, were restricted to books and spellings : 'Diter Rot', 'Diter Roth', 'Dieter
rectangular forms fit neatly and their edges make graphics, the latter being defined as 'objects that Roth', `Diterrot' (conjuring up an Enlightenment
a grid, but more usually the grid is displaced or have appeared in a series and are not thicker thinker) and 'Dieter Rot' (suggesting, in
only a fragment. than two centimetres'.1 Thus Rot's least English, a consumer of decayed food).
Regularity breeds anonymity: one square in a portable works have been excluded, while the Print with Cocoa may seem baffling to anyone
regular grid is identical with another except in definition of 'graphic' has been extended beyond uninitiated in Rot's private language. It is one
terms of its position. But here, where the grid its usual limits. Virtually every known graphic of an edition of fifty serigraphs, each of which is
is the product of the different units, not the technique has been employed, including a unique item. In each print, a field of powdered
other way round, each unit is a unique form. photogram, block print, embossed paper, cocoa, within a plastic cover, is scattered across
There is identity-in-difference, and movable type, photo offset, serigraph and the surface. A different sentence (here obscured
difference-in-identity. This is the key to his by the cocoa) has been hand-written on each;
colour. Colour is what the squares or oblongs are intaglio. Some editions consist of 'unique when combined sequentially, the sentences form
items',2 individual pieces differentiated by the
made out of, not what they are filled in with once handwork of the artist. The handwork may a story. As this print is the only piece in the
they are made. Contrasts of tone, or of warm and involve a heavy impasto of ink, acrylic or other edition included in the show, the story remains
cool, or the scarcely discernible nuance that material. Since 196o Rot has been applying
distinguishes an ice-green from a pale emerald, foodstuffs to his surfaces — bread, milk, cheese, Berlin 1 1970
a charcoal-grey from a blue black — these are the chocolate, bits of sausage, for example. The From a series of 5 screenprints
subtle distinguishing attributes of a particular viewer discovers that decomposed organic of German cities
form, closely linked to the way in which the paint 6x x56 cm
is applied. A square will be brushed out thin and
flat, or colour-over-colour, giving a certain
thickness; or half painted, giving a clue of what
it was and of what it might become; or ruled out
of lines, the drawing of edges invading the
painting of areas. In some pictures the identity
of each form will be stressed by a slight overlap
with its neighbours, as though by some extra
charge of energy it had broken free from the
binding arrangement. Or it will be slightly
askew, or sliding like a shutter.
The sum of these differences gives each
picture a totally different aspect, for all that
structurally one picture is 'like' another.
Each offers an unmistakable spatial
experience — closed and crowded, open as if
pierced with windows, still and dark. There
isn't much that can be said about this side of
them without lapsing into an unacceptable
subjectivity. But this is a reflection on criticism
and its present difficulties, because I am
convinced that it is here, where a picture takes
on the qualities of a place, that it shows its real
vitality. q
ANDREW FORGE
77