Dieter Roth, at Camden Arts Centre, review The show's title, Dieter Roth: Diaries, is taken from the Swiss-German's fondness for recording the vagaries of everyday life. Indeed, his actual diaries for every year between 1965 and 1998 - conceived as works of art in their own right - are on display. I was amazed to find visitors scrutinising these things like one would the letters of Van Gogh or notebooks of Leonardo. But instead of any insightful frisson into the working of a genius's mind, we're informed that Roth made a bus journey to Basel on New Year's Day 1967. Doodles, crossings out, annotations in red - as well as entries written upside down and in German that's hard to read - all led me to hope these works might actually be part of an elaborate Nabokovian puzzle: a set of interconnected narratives that demand scrutiny, cross-referencing and decoding for their full effect. Alas, though, sometimes a diary is just a diary. Quotidian concerns also figure in Flat Waste, an archive of all the scraps of rubbish less than 5mm thick that Roth amassed between 1975 and 1976. Used tissues, newspapers and cigarette butts appear next to crisp wrappers, beer mats and peach pits, every item placed in a transparent plastic folder and filed within a ring binder. Roth even stuck to his task during trips abroad, which made for some rather confused customs officials when he returned home. Well over 600 ring binders appear on Camden's gallery shelves, and a handful are open for our perusal. There's something faintly absurd about the meticulous cataloguing of one man's detritus - I half expected to be asked to don a pair of librarian's white gloves. Some may see Flat Waste as an indictment of consumerist society; for others (myself included), it invites a literal take on the old critique "contemporary art's a load of rubbish." The exhibition is saved, however, by its final "diary" work, Solo Scenes. Some 128 video screens are arranged in a grid, each showing real-time footage of the artist on different days towards the end of his life. Recalling the subject of a Samuel Beckett novel or late Rembrandt self-portrait, a solitary Roth can be seen in his low-lit apartment unhurriedly going about his business: eating, washing, reading, drawing, even sitting on the toilet and changing cartridges on his printer. He is suffering with a heart disease he knows will soon kill him - yet there's never a hint of playing to the camera for sympathy, just a quiet heroism. From one screen to the next, we witness Roth getting progressively frailer and paler; his coughs grow more pained, his movements more hobbled; life, ever so gradually, is passing from him. The inevitability of death and decay, always a key theme for Roth, is at last deployed to blistering (not blasé) effect. The final video, of a May day in 1998, catches some of his last moments on Earth. Here Roth's life and Roth's art seamlessly fuse, both drawing to a natural, and highly moving, conclusion together. 'Dieter Roth: Diaries', to July 14; camdenartscentre.org