“Why Shouldn’t We Be Pigs?”: Olfactory Experience and the Destabilization of the Human and the Nonhuman in Dieter Roth’s Biodegradable Works

The practice of the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth is distinguished by his pioneering use, since the early 1960s, of biodegradable materials. Roth’s literature sausages (1961-74), his “pressings” and “squashings” from the 1960s and seventies and his many works made from chocolate, cheese and spices, explicitly address and evoke the proximal senses of smell, taste, and touch. Relying on the activity and production of nonhuman beings, forces and matter (such as birds and various microorganisms) these works reveal nature’s capacity to trouble representational form and expose the artwork’s material embeddedness in a complex web of ongoing processes and relations that extend long past the spectator’s engagement with the work. Considering Roth’s work in relation to his comments and writing, I argue that Roth’s turn from Concrete art to process-based works was rooted in his growing discontent with the idealist and ethical premises of modern art and aesthetics. More pointedly, Roth’s incorporation of unstable organic material and his growing concern with the proximal senses aimed not only at the destabilization of the art object, nor the hierarchy of the senses but, more broadly, at the conceptual distinction of the human being from the animal, and of culture from nature. Predating preoccupations with human relations to the natural environment both in early earthworks from the late 1960s and in contemporary practice, Roth's work problematizes both an instrumental and romanticized view of nature, while underscoring the significance of the proximal senses for critiques of modern art and its philosophical foundation.