Dieter Roth: Reykjavik Slides

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Time Out says

In a cool concrete room in the sartorial heaven of Savile Row sits a project of such awesome scope it may have bypassed grandiosity and headed straight for lunacy. Dieter Roth, the Swiss-German artist known for concept books, foodstuff pieces and rabbits sculpted out of rabbit poo, also photographed every building in his adopted home of Reykjavik. Iceland doesn’t have the largest capital, but it’s not exactly a village either. And Roth died at only 68, in 1998: even with help from his sons, it’s amazing he found the time.

The size of the project – more than 30,000 slides, either clicking through projectors around the room or stored in cabinets near the entrance – is only a small part of its craziness. Roth wanted to put equality on a pedestal. No building is better than any other building, in his philosophy: he’s an artist on the warpath against notions of beauty. Yet some of these pictures are lovely, while others (most) are not: some of the broad skies gleam, some of the buildings entice, in contrast to the many concrete boxes or corrugated shacks. The absence of artistic judgement only leaves greater space for our own, which is soothing until anxiety sets in. What should we like? Who will guide us if the artist won’t? Similarly, those images passing as relentlessly as squares of scenery through a train window first calm (it doesn’t matter if I miss something) then agitate (I’m continually missing something!).

‘Reykjavik Slides (31,035) Every View of a City’ is less art than an intellectual exercise, and it fails as both: Roth apparently chose which of the many images would be displayed, so there is a hierarchy after all. But if you want a quick holiday from status anxiety, right in the capitalist heart of a city too big for any person to photograph in its entirety, turn your back on Ozwald Boateng and head into Hauser & Wirth.

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