Rachel Rosenthal

A parable of the Hollywood image-making industry told through a pastiche of narrative cliches.

Peter and Katherine Witner are Southern California super-yuppies with great jobs but no center to their lives. When they both lose their jobs and begin marital infidelities, their solution is to start their own business together. In order to find meaning to their empty lives, they follow various New Age gurus and other such groups. Eventually, they hit rock bottom and have to make some hard decisions.

A mysterious woman in black moves in with married Manhattan thrill-seekers and helps one trick the other.

Rachel Rosenthal, through a performance art workshop, challenges a group of young Los Angelinos on a journey to discover, embrace and illustrate their sense of self.

Video of Rachel Rosenthal’s elaborate performance staged as part of 1984’s Carplay series at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. KabbaLAmobile, commissioned by Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum in 1984, was performed in the Department of Water & Power parking lot. Seven expert drivers and cars from Tom Anthony’s Precision Driving Team and music by performance artist The Dark Bob support Rosenthal’s text. While the cars dance and perform stunts in Kabbalistic formations, Rosenthal chants and declaims both twelfth-century Kabbalistic poetry and copy from automotive magazines in order to show how materialism has supplanted spiritual values in our culture.

Since its inception, performance art provided a forum for those artists whose work challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo. In "Sphinxes Without Secrets", performers, curators and critics unravel the mysteries of performance art and ponder the world women confront today.

Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.

RACHEL’S BRAIN, a video collage of a solo to music commissioned by 1987’s Los Angeles Festival, explores the human brain and its place in Gaian evolution. Rosenthal derives witty and provocative visual metaphors and quotes from science in order to explore the disproportionately developed fascism of our most celebrated organ. Rosenthal plays several personae, among them Marie Antoinette, the “flower of the Enlightenment”, and a familiar hominid ancestor of ours. The piece ends on an existential note,Rosenthal searches for a non-existent deity whose absence remains obscured behind the clouds.