Item #4589 La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, John Cale. Signed and Numbered Lithographed Poster for the 1964 Performance by the Theater of Eternal Music / Dream Syndicate. Dieter Roth.

La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, John Cale. Signed and Numbered Lithographed Poster for the 1964 Performance by the Theater of Eternal Music / Dream Syndicate.

1964. Item #4589

[Philadelphia]: Diter Rot, 1964. Approximately 17 1/2 x 19 1/2”, lithograph in black on tan paper.
Signed by Diter Rot, and numbered 6 of 7. Matted and framed in black.

A poster made by Diter Rot for a performance by the Theatre of Eternal Music during his pivotal
and and contested 1964 residency at the Philadelphia College of Art. The poster is previously
unseen by us, and does not appear in Rot’s Catalog Raisonné. This, coupled with the minuscule
edition leads us to suspect that it may be unrecorded.

The poster is a record of a profoundly important period for both the group and Rot. This was the
most powerful line-up of the project, and is the first public performance in the period in which the
group was developing the long work the Tortoise, and shortly before Cale left. It was also the first
use of amplified string drones by the group, a landmark moment in minimalism. [Strickland p. 158].
In 1964 Rot was nearing the end of his infamous residency at the Museum, which had expected
him to make a “constructivist style” book more in line with early experiments. It was at this time,
in the year that he made his first food sculpture, that Rot more fully began to explore materiality
and participation in his work. Rot made thousands of prints and involved his students fully in the
process of creating the work, even to take away the prints they liked, a process that so threated the
Museum’s idea of what a book was that they rescinded their offer to publish it, and at the end of the
year Rot left for RISD.

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