Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer: Collaborations, Hauser & Wirth

Human males are always a bit more passive aggressive than animals in their bid for dominance (it’s the lack of claws). But with words or brushes there seems between some to be the outlines of a struggle. Sometime great rivalries take expression in correspondence or comedy double acts, but this Spring at Hauser and Wirth we get to sit in on the respectful squabbles of two artists, and friends, as it played out in their work.

Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer were friends for more than 40 years, and when they met they would draw, paint and scrawl on the same sheet of paper - or whatever else they could lay their hands on. The result of these sessions, which unfolded like unplanned piano duets, are the “Collaborations” coming to the H&W space.

Roth and Rainer first met in Vienna in the 1960s, at the height of the movement known as Viennese Actionism. The initial idea of this short sharp school was to reject “commodifiable” forms of art, i.e. painting, drawing; in favour of an “action” before a live audience. So “art” stopped meaning “things” and instead became the process that went into making them. Except Viennese Actionism didn’t usually focus on the making of traditional objects d’art, moreover preferring nakedness, masturbation and faeces galore. Perhaps luckily for Hauser & Wirth, both Roth and Rainer were at the milder end of the movement.

Rainer was quite deeply involved with this Viennese cultural scene, but already had a legacy as an Abstract Expressionist, using fat ‘expressive’ wodges of paint in his work. Roth was famous for artist’s books such as Daily Mirror (1961), where a newspaper was cut into 2 cm. squares and bound as a 150 page book, and was becoming interested in the Fluxus movement for its Dada, anti-art spirit. In the mid-1960s he began to use food in his work, fully expecting it to rot (and even occasionally referred to himself as Dieter Rot). So, what did this clash of odd-couple personas look like?

The answer is: a wild, turbulent half-collaboration, half-palimpsest produced during a series of meetings from 1972 onwards. Rainer’s large “brushwork”-style splats cover Roth’s pencil-like marks, which in turn seem to make fun of Rainer’s overt artsyness in a good-natured exchange that happens over photographs, portraits, collage and paper. Look out for the immediacy and interaction of them – one of the most entertaining aspects of this show is trying to work out who did what bit, and who gets the last word. 

This is the kind of art you can’t commodify. It is like sitting in on the writing sessions for Lee & Herring or Fry and Laurie: an intimate, affectionate tug-of-war that’s hugely different from the solo works of either artist.

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Hauser & Wirth is open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am - 6pm