Dieter Roth “I hate it if I notice that I like something, if I am able to do something, so that I just have to repeat it, that it could become a habit. Then I stop immediately. Also if it threatens to become beautiful.” Roth drew on the similarity between chocolate and feces in appearance and no doubt saw his works as coming to fruition when they turned rancid. Shit Hare (1975), which embodies the organic process of decay, illustrates some of Roth’s subversive tendencies. Pressed into the shape of a chocolate Easter bunny, rabbit excrement reverses the viewer’s response, turning an initial attraction into revulsion. Ironically, the piece was commissioned by Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery because Roth had been working with food. The maverick Roth, however, not wanting to deliver what was expected of him, instead presented food’s opposite. Having taught for a short period (1968–1971) at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Joseph Beuys was his colleague, Roth also saw the commission as an opportunity for a biting commentary on the artist-prophet. For Roth, food and other organic materials were a way to defy established categories and frustrate those who wished to nail down his work and his identity. He did, after all, refer to museums as “funeral homes,” implying that once art was in a museum, it was on its way to burial in the archives of history. from http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.3.ARTVIEWS.%206%20PIECES.htm Adding to that, rabbit excrement is used as a fertilizer—and we all know how “prolific” bunnies are—so Roth’s Shit Hare performs a weird double inversion to gesture back to the hare’s role as a fertility symbol connected to the Easter holiday.

Dieter Roth

“I hate it if I notice that I like something, if I am able to do something, so that I just have to repeat it, that it could become a habit. Then I stop immediately. Also if it threatens to become beautiful.”

Roth drew on the similarity between chocolate and feces in appearance and no doubt saw his works as coming to fruition when they turned rancid. Shit Hare (1975), which embodies the organic process of decay, illustrates some of Roth’s subversive tendencies. Pressed into the shape of a chocolate Easter bunny, rabbit excrement reverses the viewer’s response, turning an initial attraction into revulsion. Ironically, the piece was commissioned by Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery because Roth had been working with food. The maverick Roth, however, not wanting to deliver what was expected of him, instead presented food’s opposite. Having taught for a short period (1968–1971) at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Joseph Beuys was his colleague, Roth also saw the commission as an opportunity for a biting commentary on the artist-prophet.

For Roth, food and other organic materials were a way to defy established categories and frustrate those who wished to nail down his work and his identity. He did, after all, refer to museums as “funeral homes,” implying that once art was in a museum, it was on its way to burial in the archives of history.

from http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.3.ARTVIEWS.%206%20PIECES.htm

Adding to that, rabbit excrement is used as a fertilizer—and we all know how “prolific” bunnies are—so Roth’s Shit Hare performs a weird double inversion to gesture back to the hare’s role as a fertility symbol connected to the Easter holiday.