The Book's Undoing: Dieter Roth's Artist's Books

Dieter Roth, a Swiss artist trained in printing, revolutionized bookmaking in the 1950s. He transformed the book from a knowledge transmission tool into an art object, opening up new possibilities for books as art. His work explored non-linearity and conceptual spaces, often using the traditional codex form in innovative ways or creating unbound works with multiple entry points.

Roth's first artist book, "Kinder-buch" (Children's Book), created in 1954, is a 28-page spiral-bound work filled with colorful, die-cut geometric shapes. Devoid of text, it encourages self-directed exploration. As pages turn, shapes transform, creating a visually polyphonic and temporal performance. The compositions grow in complexity, demonstrating a delightful crescendo and decrescendo of visual rhythm.

In 1955, Roth created "Bilder-buch" (Picture Book), constructed from 20 sheets of multicolored view foil with square cutouts. This book, also without pagination or bibliographical information, allows compositions to develop through blending colors and layering squares. It invites a nonlinear experience, permitting the reader to move backward and forward, creating multiple compositions and sharing control with the author over the content's presentation.

"Volume 8" represents a significant departure from traditional book structure. It comprises two identical portfolios of approximately 20 loose sheets with die-cut lines. The unbound nature allows readers to arrange and overlay pages as they wish, fostering spontaneity and improvisation. This work highlights the reader as an active participant, creating a unique and unreproducible experience with each engagement.

Roth's investigation of conceptual exhibition space culminates in the self-referential "Copley book." This work stages the book's production process as an artistic performance, with the final product documenting its own creation. It's a biographical inventory of everything used to make it, including letters, notes, and directions, presented in an inconspicuous book-sized box. The Copley book offers a dialogue between its format and production history, and between the reader and a disjunct object that can be accessed and arranged in any direction.

The Copley book defamiliarizes the traditional book by deconstructing its object. Unlike his earlier works, it lacks direction or a recognizable visual theme. It operates as an archive, a mini-gallery of itself, where paratextual elements become the story. A humorous example within the Copley book is "Schneewittchent" (Snow White), a single-page book that opens to an empty room, symbolizing the absence of an expected narrative and inviting readers into the conceptual space of the book itself.