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Apr
21
2009

Feb
4
2009

  • All of this situated Mr. Roth within a post-war European scene that included Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and others who experimented with unorthodox techniques and who generally tried to blur the boundaries between performance and sculpture, theater and visual art, high culture and low.

  • But the dark undertone and furious, obsessive energy of his work ultimately separated him from many of the more lighthearted Fluxus artists. Perhaps despite himself, he was a fluent draftsman and expert printmaker, and his drawings and prints contained his wild energy within peculiarly virtuosic forms. Compared to the innumerable self-described artists of the last several decades who faked their way through his sort of work, Mr. Roth was the genuine item.

    By nature he was tireless to the point of neurosis, and, among other things, this led him to experiment with numerous untested materials and techniques. ''When I was young I wanted to become a real artist,'' Mr. Roth once reflected. ''Then I started doing something I felt wasn't real art, and it was through this that I became a well-known artist.''

  • It helps to think of Roth as a performance artist in all the mediums he touched. Materials were oddly immaterial. Everything he did was a kind of feat, an acting out of an idea, often on a grand scale.
  • As you pick your way through the show at the Modern, it becomes clear how anything-is-art liberation sometimes turns into everything-I-do-is-art egomania. The most alluring, visually exciting works at the Modern almost inevitably resulted when Roth had the fewest materials to work with, as in his drawings, or was diluted by some form of collaboration.
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