Barbara Rosenthal

Barbara Ann Rosenthal (born 1948) is an American avant-garde and conceptual artist, writer, performance artist known for her interdisciplinary and existential works.^[1][2]

Barbara Rosenthal
Barbara Rosenthal standing in her top-floor loft at 727 Avenue of the Americas, NYC, in 1990
Born	Barbara Ann Rosenthal 1948 (age 76–77) The Bronx, New York
Nationality	American
Education	Brooklyn Museum Art School Art Students League Carnegie-Mellon University Tyler School of Art in Rome New York University Institute of Art History City University of New York
Known for	Avant-garde art, writing, performance, photography
Notable work	Journal: Volumes 1-71 Homo Futurus Surreal Photography Conceptual Photography Provocation Cards Existential Cartoons

Rosenthal's multimedia work combines X-rays, brain scans, and text drawn from journals and the clothing she wears.^[3] Her work often explores existential themes and has been noted for its philosophical underpinnings.^[4] In 2021, her archives were acquired by Queens College.^[5]

She has used pseudonyms such as "Homo Futurus", the title of one of her books,^[6] and "Cassandra-on-the-Hudson"^[7] which references themes in her creative work.^[8] In 2022, she trademarked "Homo Futurus".^[9]

Rosenthal resides and works in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.^[10]

Early life

Barbara Rosenthal was born in The Bronx in 1948.^[11]

At the age of 11, Rosenthal wrote a weekly column for her town newspaper, The Franklin Square Bulletin.^[12]

Education and early career

Rosenthal started her education at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1963, where she studied figure drawing and painting with instructor Isaac Soyer.^[13] From 1964-1966, she continued her education at the Art Students League.^[11][13]

She later attended Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her BFA in painting in 1970. During her sophomore and senior years, she was the editor of the literary art magazine Patterns.^[13][14] She spent her junior year studying abroad at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy, studying art and art history ^{[citation needed]}.

She received an MFA in painting from Queens College in 1974.^[11]

During her years as an art student and teacher, Rosenthal supplemented her earnings as an assembly-line painting artist and a go-go dancer at clubs, including Metropole Cafe and Club Mardi Gras.^[15] She also worked as a stringer photojournalist for The Village Voice, East Village Eye, and The New York Post.^{[citation needed]} From 1972 to 1974, she taught printmaking and was a director, set designer, and lighting technician for several performances at the Lakeside School, a private high school in Seattle, Washington.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching positions and other employment

Rosenthal's first college teaching position was as a sabbatical replacement instructor of painting at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, in 1976-1977. In 1982, with video pioneer Bill Creston, she founded the Museum of Modern Media (eMediaLoft).^[16] Since 1990, Rosenthal has taught writing as an adjunct lecturer at the College of Staten Island of The City University of New York (CUNY/CSI). Rosenthal has also taught photography, video, multi-media, painting, drawing, design, crafts, and art history at other colleges, including those in New York, The School of Visual Arts (SVA) and Parsons School of Design. She was the editor and producer of The College Council Faculty Affairs Newsletter at Parsons. She also taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography at Nassau Community College in 1994. ^{[citation needed]}

She co-founded the Outrageous Consortium with filmmaker Margot Niederland in 2005. She founded The Museum of Modern Media in New York City in 2006.^{[citation needed]}

Writing

As a writer, Barbara Rosenthal produces aphorisms, slogans, quips, poetry, stories, novels, text-based art, artist's books, pamphlets, art criticism, reviews, and essays.^[17][1] Most of her aphorisms concern the nature of time and reality. They are issued as "Provocation Cards", which she hands out free in performance or on the street.^[2] Her fiction, like her visual art, presents a grim worldview, depicting surreal surroundings in which a lone individual faces incomprehensible situations.^[18] Rosenthal is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine and is known for her principled stand against art as advocacy, which she labels "retrogarde."^[19] This sets her in opposition to many prevailing political, cultural and feminist trends in contemporary art.^[19]

In 1982, Rosenthal became an associate member of the Women's Institute For Freedom of the Press, Washington, DC.^[20]

Performance

Rosenthal's performance art has utilized installation, projections, voice, music, and abstract sound to convey themes of individuality, identity, and time.^[2]

Her first performance/installation, "Self-Portrait Room," was performed in 1968.^[21] From 1976 to 1984, she performed in videos by placing a stationary camera in front of a single-action life situation. In 1984, she began staging such actions, although still for video, sometimes with other performers and sometimes cutting segments together, such as the 1984 piece Colors and Auras, with poet Hannah Weiner and Sena Clara Creston. Rosenthal's ventriloquism video, How Much Does The Monkey Count, was made in 1988 and was reprised at CBGB in 1991^[22] and the Living Theater in 1992.

From 1976 to 1996, she was the leading female actor in the Super-8 films by Bill Creston. Seven other films produced by Rosenthal were also screened at The Museum of Modern Art in 1989.^[23][24]

In 2005, Rosenthal crashed the Performa05 Festival in NY with Existential Interact wearing her image-text "Button Pin Shirts" and handing out Provocation Cards in front of the Guggenheim Museum and White Box Gallery in New York.^[25] This interaction (often also incorporating Identity Theft Masks) was performed at various iconic street locations in New York,^{[citation needed]} Berlin,^{[citation needed]} Prague,^{[citation needed]} London,^[26] Brussels,^[27] Paris^[2] and Brisbane.^[28] She represented the United States in both performance and text-based art at the Tina B. Prague Contemporary Art Festival in 2009 and 2010.^[29]

Rosenthal’s project Existential Interact was featured in a full-page spread in the 2011 issue of Emergency Index, an annual documentation of performance art.^{[clarification needed][30]} In 2013, Rosenthal began including video morphs in her work, beginning in I’m Growing Up, which was performed at Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn and at AudioPollen in Brisbane, Australia. This project utilizes the Identity Theft Masks, but Rosenthal herself stands immobile as a white screen on which photographs of her own changing image are projected.^[2]

Photography

Rosenthal is noted for her photography through which she "depicts original perceptions that imply psychological narrative".^[8]

Until 2005, she exclusively shot in black and white, which she hand-processed and printed in her darkroom. Since 2006, she has also worked with color film, continuing to hand-process black and white film while sending the color film to a commercial lab. However, she scans and digitally prints both types of negatives.^[31][32]

Of all her working styles and genres, her work is most readily shown in art galleries. In the past few years, she has had solo or two-person photography shows in Peanut Underground, NYC (2013); Studio Baustelle, Berlin (2013); Visual Voice Gallery, Montreal (2012); and Galerie Glass, Berlin (2011). As with all her media, she works in several forms. Her Surreal Photography retains its full-frame rectangle. It comprises categories she calls Free Birds, Renegade Horses, Trapped Figures, Tiny Houses, Strange Neighborhoods, Aberrant Trees, Dangerous Forests, Sinister Landscapes, Eerie Locations, and Dark Continents.^[33] About 200 of her Surreal Photographs have been published by Visual Studies Workshop Press in her offset books. From 1978 to 1988, she also worked as a photojournalist at New York newspapers including The New York Post^[34] and the Village Voice.^[35]

Video

Since 1976, Rosenthal has made over 100 videos. She has worked in different formats as the technology has changed, including 1/2" open reel, 3/4-Umatic, VHS, mini-DV, and HD.^[36]

Rosenthal's work uses devices such as disruption, rhythm, repetition, manipulation of sequencing and audio tracks, decrease of interval, divisions on the screen, presentations of tension and release, relentlessness and endurance, which Australian art historian Barb Bolt refers to as Rosenthal's "choreography."^[1]

The first works, The Haircut and The Bath, began with 1/2" open reel portapak partnering with Bill Creston.^[37] In 1982, she won a Festival Prize for Helen Webster: Cancer and Self-Discovery at the Global Village Video Festival in New York.^[38] In 1988, her videos Leah Gluck: Victim of the Twins Experiments and Women in the Camps were shown in the installation at The Jewish Museum, New York.^[39]

Besides partnering in New York and Missouri with Bill Creston in her early videos,^[36] as well as his films,^[23] she has partnered in Berlin, Germany with DJ RoBeat for several of her videos and live performances since 2008.^[8]

Art philosophy

In a videotaped 1992 panel discussion with critic Ellen Handy about art-making at The Gallery Of Contemporary Art in Fairfield, Connecticut, she enumerated many "dictums that guide [her] production: that pattern serve as color; that as few materials are used as possible; that as little space is used as possible; that there be no embellishment or superfluous element of design; that a work be visible and present new elements at every distance; that it engages a viewer differently from separate vantages; that it reaches several centers of the psyche simultaneously; so a viewer is left with room to freely associate; that mystery is always present; that it does not advocate; that it does not mimic past successes; that it can maintain its veracity in an imaginary room of great works; that it be available to everyone and that it be both produced and priced at lowest possible cost."^[40]

Recent solo exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include the following:

• "Barbara Rosenthal: Authenticity in Art", Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, Oct. 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal: The Medium is NOT the Message", Art Forum/Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, Sept. 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal: Existential Interact with Provocation Cards" and "The Secret of Life and Other Shorts", Peanut Underground Art Projects, New York, NY, Aug. 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Existential Interact, Paris", Esplenade du Trocadéro, Paris, France, Feb. 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Existential Word Play", Studio Baustelle, Berlin, Germany, Feb. 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Mini Video Retrospective: Existential Word Play", Millennium Film Workshop, New York, NY, Jan 2013
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Surreal Photography: Trapped Figures and Tiny Houses", Visual Voice Gallery, Montreal, Canada, Nov. 2012
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Existential Word Play", Montreal Art Centre, Montreal, Canada, Nov. 2012*
• Decade Of Madness: Barbara Rosenthal – Photo Projections & Reading", Fourth Street Photo Gallery, New York, NY, 2012
• "Barbara Rosenthal With DJ RoBeat On Stage", Joe's Bar, Berlin, Germany, 2011
• "Barbara Rosenthal Filmabend", Galerie Glass, Berlin, Germany, Aug. 2012
• "Journal Into Art: Barbara Rosenthal – Reading With Projections", Central Booking Artspace, Brooklyn, NY, 2012
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Das Tagebuch gibt mir Ideen, Lettrétage: Das junge Literaturhaus, Berlin, Germany, 2011
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Flying Objects, Photographs & Videos, Morgenvogel Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2011
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Existential Interact, Grand'Place, Brussels, Belgium, 2010
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Summer Solstice Mask Performance, Stonehenge, UK, 2010
• "Barbara Rosenthal – Video Poetry, Lettrétage: Das junge Literaturhaus, Berlin, Germany, 2010
• "Barbara Rosenthal: Existential Wall Works, Photography, Drawing and Performance", Lucas Carrieri Gallery, Berlin, Germany, June 26, 2009^[41]
• "Barbara Rosenthal - 33 Existential Videos", Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany, June 25, 2009^[41]
• "Existential Interact", a series of street performances in front of KW Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art during the Wooloo Berlin New Life Festival in Berlin, Germany, June 2008^[42]
• "Existential Cartoons", an exhibition of digital prints, DVD projections and animated cartoons at the L-Gallery of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, June 2007^[43]
• "Barbara Rosenthal Contemplates Suicide," a Bathroom Installation of printed and sewn objects, button pins, and video at the Pool Art Fair, Chelsea Hotel, NYC, Oct. 2006^[44]
• "Devolution of Self", an exhibition of digital prints on mylar, roped to ceiling, floor and each other, at the Pickled Art Centre, Beijing, China, June 2006^[44]

Rosenthal's group shows include venues such as the Jewish Museum (New York)^[39] and the Stenersenmuseet Museum, Oslo, Norway.

Major collections

The largest holdings of Rosenthal's works in Europe are at Artpool Art Research Center^[45] and the Tate Britain Library, London, England. The largest American holdings of her work are in The Dadabase Collection of The Museum of Modern Art^[46] and The Whitney Museum of American Art.^[47] Her archives, including over one hundred volumes of workbooks and Journals and fifty drafts of her unpublished novel, "Wish For Amnesia", are currently housed at eMediaLoft.org, NYC and bequeathed to the Special Collections of the Hunt Library at Carnegie-Mellon University upon her death.^[48]

Grants, honors, and awards

In 2013, Barbara Rosenthal received participation in the New Museum's XFR-STN Transfer Station media archiving project.^[49]

In 2006, Rosenthal received an Artist's Residency from the Red Gate Gallery, in Beijing.^[50] Other residencies include: Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY in 2000; Amiga Computer Video Imaging Residency Grant at Adaptors/Brooklyn, NY, in 1996; Electronic Arts Grant Video Residency, Experimental TV Center, Owego, NY in 1989, 1990 and 1991;^[51][52] Harvestworks Audio-Video Residency, NYC in 1988; and Video Arts Residency at Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT in 1988.

Rosenthal's monetary awards have included a Media Presentation Grant from Experimental TV Center, Owego, NY in 2000;^[53] Finishing Funds from Film Bureau in NYC 1991; a New York State Council on the Arts Video Facility Subsidy Grant at Margolis/Brown Adaptors, Brooklyn, NY in 1998; a Finishing Funds Grant from Media Bureau/The Kitchen in NYC, in 1988; three Artists Space/Artists Grants in NYC 1986, 89 and 90; and a Creative Arts for Public Service C.A.P.S. Grant in Video, New York State, in 1984.^[11]

Rosenthal received a Medal of Honor from the Brussels Ministry of Culture, Brussels, Belgium, in 1990. Rosenthal received a Global Village Documentary Festival Award in NYC in 1983. She has been listed as a Fiction Writer, Poet, and Spoken Word Artist by Poets & Writers, NYC, since 1986.^[54] She was elected membership in Pi Delta Epsilon National Publications Honor Society, USA, in 1970.

Selected works

Books

• Clues to Myself, Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY, 1981 ISBN 0-89822-015-7
• Homo Futurus, Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY, 1986 ISBN 0-89822-046-7
• Sensations, Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY, 1984 ISBN 0-89822-022-X
• Soul & Psyche, Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY, 1998 ISBN 0-89822-121-8
• Weeks (collaboration with poet Hannah Weiner), Xexoxial Endarchy, Madison, WI, 1990

Pamphlets and saddle-stitched books

• Existential Cartoons, L-Gallery of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, 2007
• Catalogue Raisonné, The Museum of Modern Media, NYC, 2007
• Children's Shoes, eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1992
• Introduction to the Trilogy, eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1985
• Names/Lives, eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 2001
• Old Address Book, eMediaLoft.org, N.Y.C., 1984
• Structure And Meaning, eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1981