Rachel Rosenthal spent her early childhood in pre-war Paris among the Monets, Chagalls, and Pissarros in her family's art collection. Her parents, frustrated artists themselves, gave her ballet and painting lessons, and when the war struck, they sent her to the...
[more]Rachel Rosenthal spent her early childhood in pre-war Paris among the Monets, Chagalls, and Pissarros in her family's art collection. Her parents, frustrated artists themselves, gave her ballet and painting lessons, and when the war struck, they sent her to the High School of Music and Art in New York. She returned to Paris after the war; meeting Merce Cunningham and John Cage there convinced her of two things: first, to devote herself to dance and theater; second, to move back to New York. The young Rosenthal spent the next few inspiring years studying with Cunningham and soaking up the vibe of a postmodern circle that included Cage, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Lou Harrison, and Robert Rauschenberg.
In 1955 Rosenthal went to Los Angeles to grow theater in the desert. She founded the Instant Theater, her company for ten years. Much like the Living Theater, it created Happenings: improvised collages of images and text that drew upon techniques of invoked chance pioneered by her old mentor Cage. Instant Theater also strove to communicate accessible ideas in order to avoid alienating audiences. Then, in 1966, Rosenthal began to seek a new direction. Shutting the Instant Theater down, she briefly returned to visual art and later got involved with the women's movement, creating personal-is-political solo Performance confessionals. Starting with a piece about her bad knees in 1975, her autobiographical work explored the various reaches of her body, culminating with 'Rosenthal's Brain' in 1987.
During the 1980s Rosenthal went global, conceiving lofty spectacles about science, nature, neurology, and evolution that would come to define her work from then on. 'Gaia Mon Amour' addressed the ruin of the earth in 1983; 'filename: FUTUREFAX' addressed it again in 1992. The avant-garde environmentalist didacticism of these works has tended to fare best on the college circuit. Said Rosenthal in a 1994 interview, "I secretly would like to speed up our extinction to allow Earth to recoup, yet I do works that attempt to transform our way of thinking and being, in order to avert that catastrophe. It's a paradox!" It would be difficult to find a more precise image of the paradoxes that are Rosenthal than the Annie Leibovitz photo of her, in which the big, striking, bald lady is buried up to her shoulders in desert dirt.
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