AIC's 41st Annual Meeting

Brenna Campbell, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Conservation, The Museum of Modern Art; Scott Gerson, Associate Paper Conservator, The Museum of Modern Art; Erika Mosier, Paper Conservator, The Museum of Modern Art

Throughout his career, Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth employed the book format as a key element of his work. Defining “book” as “a community of like-minded things,” Roth stretched and challenged conventional ideas about the nature of artists’ books, employing new formats and techniques to expand the book beyond its traditional boundaries.

In 1964, Roth began a residency at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, with the intention of creating a limited-edition artist’s book. Over the course of three months, he produced about 6,000 drawings, prints, photographs, and notes, binding several hundred of them into a volume which he intended to photograph and reprint as a paperback. The ill-fated edition was never produced. In the 1970s, Roth constructed a table and two chairs to house nd display the book, which he called Snow.

Since its acquisition by The Museum of Modern Art in 1998, Snow has been exhibited a handful of times, always with the album lying open on the table between the two chairs, and a small number of works from the book removed and hung, framed, on the wall. The work’s complexity and its poor condition have limited the ways in which it can be shown. An exhibition opening in February 2013 provided an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Snow, employing conservation treatment, scientific analysis, and digital imaging of the work to change and enhance the ways that viewers and scholars can access, interpret, and enjoy one of Dieter Roth’s most unique and important book projects.