Dieter Roth. Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst). 1969, published 1961–70
“What’s really incredible about Roth is the way he started to totally reinvent what a book could be. When he began making books in the early 1950s he decided that, for him, a book didn’t need a binding or a sequence or a text or even an image.” – Sarah Suzuki MoMA curator
How about cheese, chocolate and bannanas
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 texts with fat, gelatin, water, and spices before stuffing them into sausage casings. The source materials included 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 philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
It is hard to be believe that the genre of artist’s books has been around for less than 50 years. Many trace its roots to Swiss artist Dieter Roth.
These notorious food pieces involved “pressing” or “squashing” (his terms of choice) such ingredients as cheese, chocolate, lard, sausage, and fruits and vegetables into his books and editions to create works that would eventually putrefy and disintegrate.
MoMA Curator Sarah Suzuki on How Dieter Roth Invented the Artist’s Book | Art for Sale | Artspace.