City, Country, River … or
the precious accumulation of mistakes
(Hartmut Kaminski about his cooperation with Dieter Roth on the occasion
of the Dieter Roth exhibition in N.Y., Anitsch Gallery, October 2006.)
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Early 1970. One day Dieter comes into my workshop and brings a black & white photo by his brother which is glued to a brown formicaplate. A cosy, peacefuI image. A place in the city, green with trees and surrounded by well-kept middle-class houses, a little Fiat car is chugging into view. Only three people promenade in the shade. A Sunday morning in front of the station of Solothurn, a little provincial Swiss-German town.
“Do you like it? Then go for it and do something with it!“
This was Dieter‘s way: no ultimate instructions, no orders, no affectations of a boss. He didn‘t want to push his own artistic creativity but challenge the creative potential in his partner and integrate that into his own art. We had been working together since 1968. I had printed the screenprints “print with cocoa“: certain forms still wet from the printing process were sprinkled with cocoa and then put into transparent plastic folders with a handwritten sentence from one of Dieter‘s stories. lnto the “thomkinspatent‘ we poured fruit and vegetable juices which were supposed to mould and dissolve the paper including the image. “What shall I do with this photo?“ “Print it would be best“, said Dieter. So we buy thick white cardboard and order a reproduction of the photo on plastic film. Then Dieter gives me total freedom with printing. I can do whatever my heart desires: so I change colours, let them thicken, so they only reach the paper in some spaces where they get through the screen or I thin it out so it smears and drips. Sometimes I just let the colour run out, or I take different screenprinting-frames, strung with very fine or rather rough-textured silk, lengthen or shorten exposure times, which copy the reproduction of the repro-film onto the screen. Sometimes I rake the colour through the screen with the squeegee with little force, sometimes I press it through violently and so change the image. Or I paint the screen‘s photo level in different thickness which prevents an even true copy of the photo. All mistakes shall be integrated in the picture.- Dieter and I agree on that.
Besides the many technical possibilities to manipulate (or playfully creative possibilities with the colour, the screen or the print‘s intensity) I particularly remember one incident: To transfer the photo onto the screen, the latter had to be coated with a photosensitive layer. Onto this the transparent reprofilm is placed and weighed down with a heavy glass plate. An ultraviolet-lamp is then lighting the image. One day my daring construction with this lamp collapses and the bulb splits the glass. ‘Oh it provided us with a fine structure today“, was Dieter‘s remark. So we leave everything be and lit up this “mishap“ with a new lamp. The result: as a second layer on top of the place in front of Solothurn station we see a structure of splintered glass. It got printed exactly this way. But the real reason for the many-layered changes was the primitive or rather simple state of my workshop. Everything had to be done by hand. The printing plate was an old unused kitchen table - of course without a vacuum fixture which keeps the paper from shifting during the printing process and the colour wasn‘t raked through the screen with a machine but by hand. Also when exposing the image, the vacuum to hold it in place was missing. Only the weight of the glass plate pressed the plastic film onto the screen which lay on a rubber foam mat. This way fine lines in the grid pattern couldn‘t be reproduced adequately which led to moir structures in the picture.
Normally these are the pitfalls and sufferings haunting every printer but we welcomed this accursed mistake and it could unfold in all its beauty and with all its many aesthetic charms. And what was the result of all this imperfection, this chaos of colours, this playing with mistakes? After printing with about 4 colours we eye every picture after every printing stage if in these hallucinatory colour-combinations and artificially created atmospheres “some raise their voice and indicate they are finished“ (as Dieter put it). And then the other prints are “taken to cleaner‘s“ until after 20 or 30 layers of colour the last ones give up resistance and now all of them please their master‘s eyes and heart and he rewards them with signing them “Dieter Rot“. But what had happened in the production of “square in front of the railwaystation in solothurn“ can be called a revolution in print graphics: the finished, printed images weren‘t just reproduced artworks whose forms were repeated in all the copies. But every print was an original, comparable to a painting or a sculpture, each one of these 100 prints was unique and distinctive. The single prints only bore a faint resemblance to the photo-motif from which they started. The process of printing is more comparable with the job of a gardener who brings up his little plants and watches them growing bigger and bigger till the fruit has ripened. He can´t overlook the whole process of the plant´s growth but with his experience he can set the optimal preconditions for his success. And in the end the plant thanks him with a gift: the well-earned fruit.
Dieter had used my workshop and my skills to produce his originals in the form of print graphics. The printer with his equipment and his technique were for him what a brush is to a painter, what hammer and chisel are to a sculptor. The dividing line between an original and a reprint was unmade. Before Dieter had made some prints which he had called UNIKATE. Like with “thomkinspatent“ or later with “at home” colour of one printing plate was changed during the printing process of one print-run. For example, Dieter wrote his wishes to me for “at home“ directly onto the original plastic film and it got printed: “from white to yellow“ or “red to brown“ or - adding to the changing colours - different pictures were created through the cocoa, the fruit and vegetable juices and the beginning decomposition. But the fundamental form, the image, stayed even when the prints look different in colour.
This had changed fundamentally with the beginning of the city and landscape prints. These printed images of Dieter are compared again and again with Andy Warhol‘s “Marilyn Monroe“ or “Mick Jagger“ series. These can come to mind when one sees several of our city or landscape prints next to each other in an exhibition. But the difference to them is even bigger than to Dieter‘s own works of “thomkinspatent“ or “at home“. Warhol changed the various printing forms (for example the hair in one portrait) within one set by combining differently designed portraits. But within the print-run of the printed copies - the colour was not changed within the single forms. Marilyn for example for portrait Monroe No.3 has the same yellow in her hair and this is reproduced as reprint as often as the number of copies of this graphic print or portfolio is. Only through the addition of the print portraits hanging next to each other we get the impression of variations, a variety of colours. But they are the single prints of one print-run, for example that of Marilyn 1 (yellow hair), Marilyn 2 (red hair) and Marilyn 3 (blue hair) etc. which even have the same photo as their blueprint. Explained in a different way: the set is made of 4 portraits with the same motif 1- 4 (for example M.M.). The motif (photo portrait of M.M.) consists of say 3 printing forms a, b, c. Here Warhol only changes the colour, for 1a he for example takes a yellow, for 1b a red, for 1c a blue. But through all 100 copies these colours stay absolutely identical. So in effect we are dealing with a classical print graphic which achieves its variation in colour only through the change of colour within one set. But now for the “accumulation of mistakes‘ which results in this incomparable diversity (Reichtum!) of forms and colours on Dieter Roth‘s city and Iandscape prints.
With Dieter, this ‘accumulation of mistakes“ was not only a creative recipe to produce pictures of a new kind. This program came from his life‘s experience and convictions. lt was part of his philosophy of life which characterized him beyond measure. For him it was: not aiming, planning, perfectionism enforce creativity and the diversity of our human existence, but and above all, the mistakes. Let‘s look at how people live together, the form of human existence with its deformations, handicaps, its differences and its peculiarities in feeling and thinking. But exactly these aberrations and mistakes which society judges as superfluous and useless and the Nazis had labelled “unwert“ (unworthy) can be the deciding patches of colour in the whole of a picture which add a radiance to an artwork, bring a glow and make it one of a kind, ingenious. And maybe this will keep happening in the existence of humankind? This was and is exactly Dieter Roth‘s conviction
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The specialty of the city- and Iandscape prints:
While Dieter and I were working with only a single positve reprophoto on “square in front of the railwaystation in solothurn“ we had positives and negatives made from other photos his brother Hartwig had taken, for instance “view of the emme“ and “berner oberland“. This gave us a much greater range of possibilities. With “cologne“ Dieter chose a yellow kind of paper and for “heidelberg“ an orange-red one. “heidelberg“ was the only one of these on which we printed a white passepartout frame in addition. When one of these frames slipped during printing and the image was “off“ visibly Dieter signed this extra print as a special variation.
For “cologne“, “heidelberg“ as later for “düsseldorf“ and “munich“ he chose no personal photo anymore but bought regular black and white postcards which were on sale at every newsstand. For “düsseldorf“ we even reprinted the subtitle “Düsseldorf -- Hochstrasse und Thyssen-Haus“. For this print we experimented extensively with the repro transparencies of the postcard: we cut the positive and negative transparencies into four identical rectangles and simply exchanged these in one colour printing process. For example we would tape one positive into the upper left corner, one negative into the upper right. The lower left had another negative, the lower right another positive rectangle. All kinds of combinations were tried out. There were even prints where we copied samples of the transparencies mirrored or symmetrical by laying them on upside down. And there was another specialty with “düsseldorf“: it is the only city print for which Dieter painted 3 original films. In these he accentuated the buildings skyline and hatched some shadows. “munich“ was made with 4 plastic films: beside the bitmapped positive and negative we had another positive and negative produced which were merely black and white without any intermittent grey that could suggest a grid pattern. With this I had a lot of possibilities to play, I could create a certain surface or reliefeffect if I wanted.
But works of art are not just works of art (l‘art pour l‘art) particulary not Dieter‘s. We had a prepaid order for “munich“ and we both loved contemporary Munich, the “Englische Garten“, the beer gardens etc. but at the same time we sensed, hidden underground, the old Nazistench. lt is known that Dieter was born in Hanover in 1930 to a German mother and a Swiss father. In 1943 he moved to Switzerland. Although Dieter never explicitly took a political stance nor commented, everything that was right wing or had to do with violence, oppression or injustice was deeply revolting to him. Through my protestant education in a public school I also had a deeply rooted resentment against anything Nazi or Neo-Nazi. My Iifes work, particularly my later films, prove that. With this love-hate-relationship in our heads and souls we started printing the “munich“ series. Of course the result were prints which like “cologne“, “heidelberg“ or “düsseldorf“ were just brilliant in their sheer beauty. But Dieter and I particularly liked “munich“ which at first sight looked “grotty“, “unaesthetic“, “dirty“ and “smeared“. “Oh, aren‘t they beautifully ugly?“ remarked Dieter with a smile, or: “Well, this one is top ugly - unsurpassed!“ and put them with the good ones, the ones ripe for being signed. And they were: the many aesthetic stimuli in the background or the details battled with the ugly facade. And this embodied exactly what we had wanted to express with our “munich”
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(Hartmut Kaminski about his cooperation with Dieter Roth on the occasion
of the Dieter Roth exhibition in N.Y., Anitsch Gallery, October 2006.)
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