Dieter Roth
Schokoladen­plätzchenbild

For the multiple Schokoladenplätzchenbild (Chocolate Biscuit Picture), Dieter Roth (Diter Rot¹) arranges 36 flat bars of After Eight dark chocolate filled with peppermint cream in a square, fills the gaps with yoghurt and vacuums them between two large-format, rectangular plastic films that frame the chocolate field like a passe-partout. Despite the airtight packaging, the combination of chocolate and soured milk in this material image undergoes an uncontrollable decomposition process. The formally strict arrangement of the chocolate bars, which can be read as an ironic quotation of Minimal Art grid structures, dissolves and is visibly replaced by a disorderly decomposition process, at the end of which very different results emerge. The limited edition Schokoladenplätzchenbild thus consists of a series of 50 unique pieces.
Roth, who used chocolate as a material on various occasions, for example in Edition No. 34 Entenjagd (Duck Hunt), 1972, or in his contribution to the rolling cabinet En Bloc (EB20) equipped by artists from Galerie Block, had begun to work with organic materials in the early 1960s, including far more perishable foods such as sausage, cheese and leftovers. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Block in 1968 was an exhibition of accumulations of perishable materials, described by Roth as Schimmelhaufen (Piles of Mould), which can be imagined as layers and assemblages of materials on horizontal support surfaces. Schimmelhaufen, as the title of the exhibition also suggests, take mould, decay and decomposition processes as their subject and, despite the material expansion of sculpture into the ephemeral, are above all a radical attack on art’s claims to eternity.
The edition object Schokoladenplätzchenbild is numbered and signed on a label located underneath the chocolate field between the foils. It is also exposed to the decomposition process, so that the information given there – depending on the course of the material processes – is hardly or no longer recognizable.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte

¹ Galerie Block used the spelling of the artist’s name Diter Rot for exhibitions and editions, which the artist himself used alongside other spellings for his signature.