Peter Roehr
OSMOS
50 E 1st Street
May 6–July 3
Peter Roehr, Untitled, 1964, typewriter ink on cardboard, 4 x 4".
As an artist, Peter Roehr explored making objects that could be mechanically reproduced. He worked feverishly at times, but ultimately rejected the idea of being an artist, his life ending shortly thereafter, when he died of cancer at the age of twenty-four. Of the five mixed-media works and a three-part film on view, two are punch cards, both untitled and created in 1963, with numbers zero through nine running serially in individual bands across the rectangular paper. Here, machine-stamped micro voids replace the work of the artist’s hand and exemplify Roehr’s minimal interest in artistic production.
Roehr’s creative process focused on systematic patterns and structural order within everyday life. One 1966 paper on cardboard work, also untitled, is a square stock sheet of thirty-six red starburst-shaped stickers. Each circular crimson symbol is spaced evenly from the other to form a grid. Likewise, in Untitled, 1964, a square expanse of countless Ts is typewritten over cardboard. As objects, the two works highlight the artist’s ability to rework media specifically through presenting it (a sheet of stickers or a printed letter) as an object itself, with minimal manipulation. As images, the pieces show a structural order with no single focal point. These are entropic images; possessing an expansive focal plane in which content (red starbursts or a sequence of Ts) and form are identical, similar to the second law of thermodynamics in which energy is divided equally among particles.
The austere, exacting works on paper are countered by the boisterous Film-Montagen 1-3, 1965, which is screened on a suspended panel from its original 16-mm reels. Jazzy saxophone notes, whirring automobile traffic, and marketing jingles for shampoo and gasoline play ad nauseam as corresponding images of sunlit skyscrapers, glistening headlights, caressed hair, and rotating motor oil logos project repeatedly in tandem. For the series, Roehr excerpted brief clips from popular advertisements and looped them into repetition, which both scraps away their enchanting narrative qualities and exposes their underlying filmic structure. The film and the surrounding works rekindle an awareness of contemporary society’s relentless productive output and the artist’s own fascination with the consumption of his work. Roehr left us with many parting words, among them: “You can consume as much as you want, but you have to be aware of it.”