Dieter Roth

Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst)

1969, published 1961–70

Between 1961 and 1970 Roth created about fifty "literature sausages." To make each sausage Roth followed a traditional recipe, but with one crucial twist: where the recipe called for ground pork, veal, or beef, he substituted a ground-up book or magazine. Roth mixed the ground-up pages with fat, gelatin, water, and spices before stuffing them into sausage casings. The source materials include work by authors and periodicals that the artist either envied or despised; they run the gamut from lowbrow illustrated tabloids to well-regarded contemporary German novels to the works of Karl Marx and the influential nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Roth turned literature into a metaphorical object for intellectual consumption and physical subsistence.

Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017