In her essay "The Myth and the Mythmaker," curator Kathleen Edwards wrote that Roth was influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus and Conceptual Art. Buzz Spector contributed an essay "The Artist as Archivist, The Book as Body: Dieter Roth's Gesammelte Werke." He defined an Archive as a "repository of texts and/or images organized around a given subject. It provides for a relation of general equivalence between its components, and for a means of sorting through their accumulation. Unlike dictionaries or encyclopedias, which define words or ideas in relation to general linguistic or cultural models, and whose cognitive "force" is directed centrifugally, toward the margins of a discursive terrain, the force of the archive is centipetal, drawing in traces of its concern that coalesce to form clearer - which is to say, denser, more focused - insights into the meaning of its subject." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.