An evening with New York avant-garde artist Barbara Rosenthal. We will screen the Czech premiere of Dead Heat as well as some of her best-known videos, such as Words Come Out Backwards, Whispering Confessions, I Have a New York Accent, and I've Got the World in the Palm of My Hand, and some rarely shown shorts like Handwriting Analysis, Video Will, and Quotation from Paul Gauguin.
The critics have had much to say: In a full-page NYArts / ArtFairsInternational article about Rosenthal's live series, Existential Interact, in front of KW Kunstwerke during the Berlin New Life Festival 2008, Clare Carswell writes that Rosenthal's works bring "self-invention, self-reliance, charisma, improvisation, and psychic connection to her fellow beings...For an artist so unyieldingly direct in her tongue-in-cheek, zany, poetic, yet astonishingly literal transcriptions, Rosenthal's method of ongoing revision over time yields imagery-and-text products of collaborations between personality and persona, behavior and performance" John Russell, in The NY Times, has called her video "an attempt to come to terms with unbearable realities." Manohla Dargis calls it "incessantly personal, even naked," in The Village Voice. Ellen Handy, in Arts, writes that "Rosenthal's purpose seems to be to combine mass culture and interior monologue, making commentary only by juxtaposition and presentation" which results from "an authority born of constant introspection," as Don Russell, of Washington Project for the Arts, calls it "a well-spring for the intellect and the emotions." Laura Lieberman notes in Afterimage that "her underlying insistence on simplicity creates an intimate, effective directness," concurring with Deirdre Boyle, who writes in Sightlines, "Her very 'lack of style' is ideal." In Dictionary of The Avant-Gardes, editor Richard Kostelanetz considers her "a highly original artist," and video pioneer, Bill Creston, founder of the Video program at NY's Cooper Union for the Adancement of Science and Art sums it up: "Barbara Rosenthal exhibits a very funny take on life, yet it is supremely sardonic. Crisis, fragility, transcendence, divinity, personality, tormented existence, inner emotional states, intellectual purpose, universal connection, and private experience...are her hilarious palette."
Barbara Rosenthal was born in New York City, and at age 11 began her ongoing Journals, which provide source material for all her work. At 14 she began classical training in Painting and Drawing at The Brooklyn Museum Art School, receiving her B.F.A. in Painting from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970, and her M.F.A. from The City University of New York / Queens College in 1973. Her groundbreaking work in Installation, Performance, and Experimental Language began in 1968 (Self-Portrait Room), expanded into Photography in 1973, Video in 1976, Artists' Books in 1980, and Digital Media in 1991. Her cross-media projects have been collected and exhibited in the U.S. by MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, et al, and at recent solo shows abroad in Beijing, Moscow, and Berlin. Books, CD's, videos, and Catalogue Raisonné are distributed by Printed Matter, Amazon.com, and eMediaLoft.org. The Museum of Modern Media, NYC, houses her library and archive.
