Decades before Tracey Emin showed the world her messy bed, and made confessional art a “thing,” Dorothy Iannone was quietly making work about sex, love, friends, and the mundane tasks of our everyday. Iannone’s work (which was often censored over the years and dismissed for its simple, comic book-like style and graphic sexual content) has received renewed interest from the art world recently. In 2009, the New Museum presented her first solo exhibition at a US art venue, which was followed by wide-ranging gallery exhibitions and additional museum shows in Paris, London, and Berlin. A new publication, You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (Siglio Press, 2014) builds on that interest. The book assembles rare and out-of-print artist books, drawings, etchings, and unpublished texts spanning Iannone’s more than 40-year career, and reproduces many of them in their entirety. Included also are a number familiar works like On+On (1979), A Cookbook (1969), and I Was Thinking of You (1975), along with excerpts of a 2011 interview with artist Maurizio Cattelan, as well as conversations with critic Trinie Dalton (who also contributes an essay), and writer Noa Jones.

Born in 1933 in a multigenerational Catholic household, Iannone studied literature at Boston and Brandeis Universities before marrying painter James Upham in 1958. They traveled frequently to Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and she began to incorporate into her paintings the artistic styles from art she had seen during her travels: Japanese woodcuts, Indian erotica and paintings from Mughal Empire, Greek and Egyptian sculpture. Together, she and Upham opened Stryker Gallery in the heart of New York’s vibrant downtown art scene in 1963, and Iannone befriended several European and American ex-pat artists such as Robert Fillou and George Brecht. Soon, a trip to Iceland with another friend, the Fluxus artist and poet Emmett Williams, would forever change her life. She met and fell in love with artist Dieter Roth and after a brief return trip to New York, Iannone left her husband to move back to Reykjavík. She lived and worked with Roth there and in London, Basel and Düsseldorf until their relationship ended in 1974.

Iannone’s work evokes a youthful simplicity. Her images are filled with colorful decorative motifs like stars, flowers, rosebuds, and teardrop-like doodles that complement an abundance of florid texts that frequently accompany the explicit illustrations. While there are crude drawings of genitals on all of the figures whether they are clothed or not, the work isn’t necessarily just about sex. Iannone seems much more interested in exploring what it means to be devoted to someone or something. Flora and Fauna (1973), a drawing on Bristol board with felt pen, is a brilliantly colored scene featuring the mythical Dorothy and Dieter figures surrounded by a lush landscape. Dieter’s and Dorothy’s arms are covered in black patterned tattoo-like sleeves, and Dieter wears black “pants” with white, yellow, and crimson heart shaped figures containing text reflecting on deep commitment to another:

“I am your deepest lover
You cannot resist me
You cover my body with kisses
You touch me as often as possible. I am infinitely adorable
My face is bright and wise and intelligent and beautiful.
I am the only one . . . ”

In an interview with critic Trinie Dalton, Iannone says that when she spoke of “ecstatic unity” in the past, she thought that such a total union between oneself and the other could only happen erotically, but later realized that wasn’t true. “Much later, I glimpsed that this sense of completion was already within myself waiting to be realized […] When I read more recently that in Tibetan Buddhism, another word for enlightenment is ‘ecstatic unity,’ I was still as I let the pleasure of that knowledge silently and without thoughts spread through me,” she said.

Iannone’s art should be read neither as simple memoirs nor as mere erotica despite their frank references to sex and her personal life. The best art always begins with what we know and then expands — a concept Iannone seems to understand well. Although deeply personal, disquieting, and revealing, Iannone’s work somehow manages to make room for the universals in life: the sex, love, “death and taxes” of life. You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends helps provide context and unifying arc to Iannone’s oeuvre, one focused on personal growth and discovery revealed through a blurring of public and private worlds.

Trinie Dalton and Dorothy Iannone, Dorothy Iannone: You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (New York: Siglio, 2014). Ed. Lisa Pearson. ISBN 978-1938221071, 320 pages, $31.30

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International powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth opened a second New York venue this week, dramatically their footprint in the city with a grand, 24,000-square foot industrial space on Chelsea’s 18th Street.  Replete with original wooden ceiling, rooftop skyline, and sweeping entry ramp, the column-free expanse, designed by Annabelle Selloff respects the former stable that also once served asthe legendary 1970s roller rink disco, the Roxy.  Vice President and director of the New York galleries, Mark Payot said, “The idea in New York is that while we have the classical townhouse space on 69th Street, some of our artists need more of an industrial setting. We looked for a long time, searching for two years until we found this and it’s been one year in the works. We are convinced this space will be important for our expansion, and will create more possibilities for our artists.”

The inaugural show is of the late Dieter Roth.  The show includes reconstructed works by the Swiss-German artist’s son, Björn, with whom Dieter collaborated for over 20 years, now in turn assisted by his own two sons, Oddur and Einar.  Revered as “a performance artist in all the mediums he touched,” Roth was an early exponent of collaborative art, and the 100 works in this show encompass video, installation, prints, and paintings.  Signature pieces like the chocolate towers and colored sugar towers have been re-assembled in the gallery kitchen, using four basic figurative molds. In 1994, the original Sugar Tower collapsed; Roth later advised Björn to use the broken busts to construct the new tower.  Roth collaborated with many artists in the course of his career, including Richard Hamilton, Dorothy Iannone, Hermann Nitsch and Emmett Williams.  Major works like Large Table Ruin and the Kleiderbilder paintings created from the artist’s own clothes are also on show here.  Organized with the cooperation of the Dieter Roth Foundation in Hamburg, the show features several pieces never before seen in the United States.

“No other artist is closer to our gallery identity,” Payot explained. “Dieter Roth is a father figure of our program, with his emphasis upon not just the finished project. His work has been very undervalued in the American market, and Bjorn and his sons have been here since mid-December to create this work.”

Visitors can stop in for a drink at the “Roth New York Bar,” created especially for the exhibition but which destined to remain as a permanent liquor and coffee bar at the gallery.  Upcoming shows are by Roni Horn, Paul McCarthy and Matthew Day Jackson, all of who have acknowledged the shamanic inspiration of Dieter Roth.

Dieter Roth. Björn Roth, January 23 to April 18, 2013, at 511 West 18th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 790 3900

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P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave
Long Island City, Queens

March 12-June 7, 2004

Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Jack of all trades, master of none. He is known as the artist who “not only erased the line between art and life but also pulverized the two into a single process.” But was art ever separate from life? This false dichotomy has propped up the dubious practices of many artists. Roth named volumes of his poetry and drawings Shit, More Shit, Complete Shit, Damned Shit, and Damned Complete Crap. This suggests that he considered the creative process to be no different from a bodily function. At the same time he had the hubris to think that his daily routines, eating, sleeping, reading, and the objects that surrounded him, were interesting enough to be art. The by-products of this so-called blending of art and life needed to be packaged in a clever way in order for the intelligentsia to consider them art.

According to his friend Richard Hamilton, “He had set out on a mission to destroy the art market.” However iconoclastic he was, Roth couldn’t escape navel gazing and the belief in the Midas touch of the artist. Successful artists can’t escape the petrifaction of their work. The two large scale exhibits currently on view at MoMA and P.S. 1 make it clear that Roth’s fear of museums and galleries was well founded. The display of his work behind sheets of glass and in display cases undermines it in many ways.

Dieter Roth wanted to go beyond the purely visual. In the beginning of his career he experimented with Op-Art, the goal of which is to directly impact human physiology and go beyond illusionism. His Literature Sausages consist of chopped up pages from a book pressed into sausage casing. What would Hegel’s oeuvre taste like? This dadaist gesture encapsulates the visual artist’s contempt for the written word. But it also supports the idea that Roth was bitter about his failure as a poet. None of his books of concrete poetry are in print and the literary world never took notice of them.

Many of the drawings in this exhibit look like blind contour drawings and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. “Tibidabo,” (1978) is made up of pre-recorded sounds of dogs barking in a dog pound in Monte Tibidabo, Barcelona, hundreds of photographs of the dogs taken by Roth and his sons, and 1600 playful “speedy drawings” of sausage like dogs. Supposedly Roth got depressed while making these recordings, but I guess he felt we would get more out of them. The combination of lamentful dog sounds, photographs, and playful drawings is disjointed but not provocative. Without resorting to video or film, Roth combined image and sound and assemblages and sound, but the sum and substance of these disparate elements fails to be emotive. The multiple stimulants are distracting. Just because the art stimulates more than one sense doesn’t mean the viewer has a deeper experience.

Roth was not able to completely circumvent the artist’s need to synthesize. The ugly and monotonous assemblages which take up the last few rooms of the MoMA exhibit are made from studio detritus and cassette players playing random sounds or snippets of music. None of these assemblages really hold together and the music doesn’t add to the objects, and vice versa. Paint is half-heartedly slathered on them, and the assemblages made of articles of clothing have gobs of glue poured on them. The purpose of the glue and paint is to unify the whole. Unification of a surface is an age old task performed by painters and sculptors alike, and Roth could not escape it. Just because you are sloppy about it or use off-beat materials doesn’t mean the goal is any different.

Roth was obsessed with his own image and the biodegradable materials he used might be a stand in for his own decaying physicality. His use of food and other biodegradable materials is nothing new. Check out the African art section of the Met when you get a chance. Most of the works made from biodegradable materials are behind glass. This cancels the impact the works have on the olfactory system. The glass and wood containers or frames which hold the art made of spices and rotting stuff overpower the art. With some of these objects, the glass covering them is foggy in spots and often the work is little more than a muddy indiscernible mess pressed behind glass. Some of these pieces are easy to make out and we view them as paintings. We can appreciate the discoloration, the mottled surfaces. No matter how off-beat the materials are, we still focus on formal qualities of the work. The impact of the chocolate lions and self portraits is not amplified by the repetition of forms. They do give off a pleasant subtle odor but they are ugly lumps. “Portrait of the Artist as Birdseed Bust,” (1970), has an interesting patina.

The oil paintings Roth did in the early seventies, fragmented rebuses floating in front of anonymous horizon lines (“Self Portrait as Volcano,” (1973)), aren’t very good. These kitschy images prove that Roth wasn’t much of a colorist.

“Flat Waste,” (1975-1976/1992) is a faux archive of common objects that are small enough to fit into plastic sleeves and 623 office binders. Roth put cigarette butts, bottle caps, soiled napkins and tissue paper, and magazines into the sleeves. Roth plays the archivist, neatly packaging and presenting personal/impersonal objects. Typically, an archive will include a finding aid, guide or inventory, which helps users find their way through the collection, and an introduction to the collection which briefly describes the contents. The classification of objects is done in a very systematic way. Everything is broken up into groups and sub-groups. Nothing is haphazard about this process. This conceptual art piece toys with the idea of the archive, creates a semblance of order. A major flaw of much conceptual art is that it borrows from the sciences, solemnly or mockingly emulates them, but lacks their vigor. The conceptual artist plays dress up. This is a boring record of his existence, and like other works in this exhibit it is a tautology.

“Solo Scenes,” (1997-98) is diaristic. On 128 monitors we see Roth puttering around his living quarters naked, robed, and fully dressed. He is awake, asleep, defecating, reading and writing, making art, chatting on the phone or with visitors, and eating and drinking. Roth tried to deflate the mythic image of the artist but failed to do so. These actions are being viewed by us because they are being done by an important artist. This installation gives us the illusion of omnipotence. If we add it all up do we have the sum total of a life? In a strange way this installation reinforces the psychological opaqueness of the artist and his life and works.

More obsessive/compulsive energy is on display in the “Reykjavik Slides,” (1973-75/1990-1993). 30,000 continuously projected slides of all of the houses or dwellings in Reykjavik, Iceland are meant to impress through the sheer uselessness of the task the artist set before himself. You have to wonder what the point of the monotony is. The images of house exteriors and the lack of interior shots emphasize the alienated or misanthropic feelings of the photographer. But again, we are impressed more by quantity than quality.

“Floor,” (1975-92) is the wooden floor which was in Roth’s Iceland studio. Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of P.S. 1 tells us that, “[A] studio floor is just as much a work of art as the works it supports.” Not really. The context the floor appears in forces us to consider it as art. Once again, we are supposed to believe in the magical powers of the artist who can turn anything into art. The sheer size of the floor and the way it is precariously propped up against the wall is impressive, but why should we take interest in it, except for the fact that it is the studio floor of the famous artist Dieter Roth.

“Garden Sculpture,” (1968-96) relates to another anemic genre perhaps initiated by Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, from 1961. This 60′ long mass of stuff includes household items, plants, jars full of icky liquids, and video monitors showing footage of the installation being made. To include information about the making of the object in the object itself is a tiresome gesture that has been repeated by way too many artists. Seen as sculpture this is a mess. Common objects are elevated to the lofty realm of art without any transformation taking place. It is like wandering around the basement of a suburban house but not as mysterious. The display of the different tools that were used to make “Garden Sculpture” in the adjoining room is really pointless and didn’t enhance the experience of seeing the work in progress. Once again we are supposed to be overwhelmed by the size of the installation. The fact that this installation is ongoing or never complete is supposed to add to its meaning, but this just makes it pretentious.

Roth’s art didn’t develop. He started over and over again. He was a dabbler. There is something disingenuous about much of this exhibit. Roth’s boredom with visual art is palpable. His use of off-beat materials and his monotonous conceptual art did not disrupt the art market, but will probably keep art conservationists busy for years.

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Rachel Harrison, Hirsch Perlman, Dieter Roth, Jack Smith, Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks Gallery until September 13 (523 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-243-0200)

“A working facility when Stankiewicz was there, this is now part of Seattle’s Gasworks Park.”

Thus reads the caption to a text illustration in the fulsome catalogue that accompanies a new show reassessing the modern American sculptor Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983). The picture shows a disused oil and coal conversion plant, fenced in, arrested in what British neo-romantic painter John Piper liked to call “a pleasing state of decay.”

The gasworks are now part of a riverside park, to be savored for their weird and inadvertant sculptural beauty. I wonder whether in some degree the efforts of artists like Stankiewicz, who was stationed in the town during his military service, has informed our culture that we can now appreciate industrial detritus. Go to the old printing factory that is now the people’s art palace Dia:Beacon and you can see a room of unsentimental yet aestheticized photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher of similar facilities.

As surely as decaying plant can transmogrify from social scourge to aesthetic marvel, so can the value and impact of an appropriated medium. The overall impression of the nicely installed show of around 40 pieces at the AXA Gallery is of elegance. This is interesting as Stankiewicz’s material of choice was junk – tools, implements, machine parts, engine parts, unidentifiable scrap.

The rusty surfaces are always in an advance stage of atrophy, but there isnt a hint of threat in the mottled textures or jutting edges. On the contrary, the evenness and consistency of the metals, with their treacly blacks and earthy browns, has the glowing aura of classical sculptural materials like bronze or marble. “The Miracle of the Scrap Heap” is how critic and sculptor Sidney Geist termed Stankiewicz’s achievement, in a phrase that serves as the exhibition’s title.

The problem is that the “miracle” was unfailing. There is barely any ambiguity in Stankiewicz’s choice of medium, although that choice was a defining feature of his career. Rarely has the hackneyed term Midas touch had such pertinence: By so truly transforming junk into an art material, he lost any *double entendre*. In achieving such rich surfaces from poor materials, he smoothed away the very *frisson* that should have given his creations edge. The triumph of art was too complete.

Stankiewicz is being presented as a seminal figure in the emergence of a new aesthetic. He is certainly an undervalued link in the chain from cubist collage to postmodern appropriation. But the handsome, likeable, substantial work on view here reinforces the traditionalism of Stankiewicz, not his subversiveness.

Marcel Duchamp, the housegod of postmodernists, is recalled not so much for his strategy of *objet trouvé* – laying claim to an unmediated mass produced object as art – as for the symbolist allegories of such objects in his paintings. Even in Duchamp’s day, the cranks and wheels that also find favor in Stankiewicz were steeped in nostalgia. They were virtually Victoriana.

Stankiewicz trained in Europe with old-school modernists like Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger. In New York his name was linked with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and neo-dada. But Stankiewicz seems temperamentally incapable of any kind of aggression or brutalism, or even submission to chance – which is, in a way, passive aggressive. He was a classic modernist: a maker, not a breaker-down. He is far closer to Picasso than Duchamp. (In turn, his influence was more on Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic artist, than on minimalism or arte povera. This show, appropriately, travels to the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel next Fall). In Stankiewicz’s hands, junk is merely stuff to the point of transparency, like paint. Rawness and rust are his patinas of choice, rather than signifiers of angst or anything portentous.

But this doesn’t detract from the pleasure or satisfaction of his work one iota. His wit is protean, and his sense of humanity enthralling. Often he recalls African art, especially when he goes for spiky, fiddly edges, as in “Tribal Diagram” (1953-5). His subtle transformations can turn, say, a gas tank and a cylinder can into a middle-aged couple, as in the 1954 work in iron of that title. More “grown up,” abstract pieces are masterful essays in drawing in space, which can stand their own next to a David Smith.

He seems happiest, though, intimating human or animal forms. Although his complexity is playful and invigorating, he is especially magical when intervening the least, in the untitled steel piece from 1963-9, for instance, where a moulded machine part affixed to a half-circle of tubing has the poise of a classical portrait bust.

***

“Miracle in the Scrap Heap” is definitely for all the family. For a nervy coda, check out the five-person summer group show at Matthew Marks. Curated by Jeffrey Peabody, a director at the gallery, this grouping gathers artists of different generations who extend Stankiewicz’s penchant for junk.

There is something of a misnomer, however, in identifying detritus as “materials immediately at hand.” Often, artists will have to scour unlikely places to find just the right kind of trash, whereas in a professional studio, marble or clay, the time-honored materials, really are just at hand. Two of the pieces in this show by the German Dieter Roth (1930-1998) actually count among their materials chocolate, yogurt and fruit juice. In his handling, the material is as remote from sweetness and luxury as Stankiewicz’s machine parts are from pollution or exploitation.

Two personalities of markedly contrasting sensibility dominate this show – Roth and Jack Smith (1932-89)- to the point where the presence of the three younger and living artists seems timid and tenuous. Artists of markedly contrasting sensibility, Roth and Smith represent dark and light, tragic and comic, with tellingly different relationships to the materials they use. Although Roth’s mixtures of drawing and collage are artfully put together, they have about them a sense of disintegration, chaos, entropy. In their deep-set brooding romanticism they cast gloomy, nihilistic shadows, whereas the garish, flamboyant, extravagant creations of Smith, the filmmaker and cross-dressing performance artist, are a riot.

Both artists found a use in their assemblages for the ubiquitous mass-produced pens of the era. In Roth, the familiar green Pentels are simply stuck to a surface, forlorn signifiers of impotence. In Smith’s “The Crab Ogress of Mu,” however, painted Bic pen bodies keep company with plastic flowers, glass beads, seashells, costume jewelry, tin cans, and other scrap to form a fabulous hanging fetish. Walking past it, one can almost hear it jangle like a skeleton in the cupboard.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, August 21, 2003

* Hirsch Perlman takes snail-pace exposure photographs in which he makes light by waving around various objects, but it is the light, surely, not the objects, that are the object. Rachel Harrison has a fondness for boring video and trashy toys, but these days, who doesn’t? Rebecca Warren’s work in (we are told) recycled artist materials are purportedly deconstructions of masculinity but that doesn’t register visually in her expressionistic sculptures.

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