Barbara Rosenthal ~ New York

Artist statement: "My work is a manifestation of my soul and psyche. Soul connects me to the universe, psyche to inner self: to DNA plus physical and mental experience. The work connects me to you."

Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice: "Rosenthal's work is incessantly personal, even naked, with an emphasis on language realized through stories, puns, songs, names and confessions."

Bill Creston, Director, The Museum of Modern Media: "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 within a historical period are her palette: No matter what her medium, she clearly produces Existential Art."

Alphabet Clock
(aka A to Z Clock)
By Barbara Rosenthal
New York: Barbara Rosenthal, 2007. Edition of 12.

4 x 4 x 3". A working Westclox electric alarm clock with exterior painted black and clock face covered with a contemporary digital print photographed from an age-mellowed 1987 original. In fitted cardboard box on which A to Z Clock plus artist's name are hand-stamped in red.

Barbara Rosenthal: "Do we read from L to R, but not tell time that way? Wake up to letters instead of numbers. This clock is read in a normal clockwise direction, but A starts at position 11, since we read from left to right from the upper left corner, which, as numbers, is not position 1, but 11. Time will tell. Time plays tricks."
$800

Button Pins:
2010 Boxed Set
By Barbara Rosenthal
New York: Barbara Rosenthal, 2010. Edition of 12.

7 x 7 x 4" cardboard box holding ten unbound 6 x 6" pages enclosed in ten clear plastic bags. One page has a description of each pin plus an artist's statement; the other nine hold thirteen button pins (2.25" in diameter) made by the artist on her hand-operated button pin machine. The pins employ photographs, video stills, digitized images and text. The cardboard box has identifying material plus a digital copy of a photograph showing a display of Button Pins. Signature etching into back of each pin.

Barbara Rosenthal: "The medium is not a message. Commonly worn to publicly announce political opinion, here these button pins are provocatively used to voice inner personal thoughts silently shared by many."

Milton Fletcher: "Rosenthal began her Button Pins after hearing photographer Duane Michals scorn people who wear button pins advertising their politics. Rosenthal uses political media, but externally-focused sloganeering is replaced by existential, self-revelatory voices from her head, inwardly or outwardly directed."

Boxed set Includes: "I am not myself today," "Dust to Dust," "You Go First," "Lend / Give" (two pins), "I've Got the World in the Palm of My Hand" (three pins), "Money = Honey," "Private Eye," "Nice" (two pins), and "BrainScan: TR 9002."
$1,175

Pocketful of  Poesy
By Barbara Rosenthal
New York: Barbara Rosenthal, 2003. Edition of 12, with variations.

9 x 9.5 x 1". From Barbara Rosenthal: "A hand-sewn, blue denim pouch, titled with hand-stenciled, bright yellow letter, each 'pocket' is filled with small colored cards bearing the artist's poetic lines, insights, enigmatic phrases and photographs, as well as a few of her short stories, poems, journal entries and personally designed and xeroxed port-cards, some of which are from her exhibitions, performances and screenings since 1976. Her name is stamped on the pouch with the red rubber stamp familiar to gallery-goers in NY, periodically appearing on street posters around the city, and as her signature in visitors' books. Purchases can add more material as desired."

Barbara Rosenthal: "... an outgrowth of my habit of saving scraps. The idea itself is a pun on 'posey/poesy,' from the singing game about the bubonic plague in 14th century England, when children filled their pockets with flowers to mitigate the stench of rotting corpses in the street..The denim comes from actual clothing I wore out. The grippers and thread come from the sewing box I took from my mother's drawer after she died in 1983. Some of the cards were left over from post-card editions I no longer send out, and some were announcements left over after presentations.

"I've made other pieces from what is essentially garbage ... but this is the first non-utilitarian scrap art I've made from cloth, and my first cloth book.

"I had a cloth book when I was a child, containing activities like shoe-lacing, ribbon-tying and grippering, and I managed to find a similar one for my children when they were young. Both those books likely had something to do with creating this piece, but both had sewn bindings, and were more 'booklike' than Pocketful of Poesy. However, although I list this small edition with my objects (because beyond its contents, its physicality demands attention to itself), I consider any contained collection of separate pages, bound or unbound, except what is obviously a manuscript meant to be presented differently at a later date, a book, or at least a book-work, and if it is created by an artist, then an artist's book."
$1,275

Homo Futurus
By Barbara Rosenthal
Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop, 1986. Edition of 500.

5.25 x 8.25"; 48 pages. Smyth sewn binding, printed spine, cover varnished black, white and cyan. Offset printed. 37 surreal photographs and 26 trompe l'oeil overlays. 34 pages of continuous journal form entries as texture-to-be-read.

Barbara Rosenthal: "Private, public, social and universal materials from news sources, literature, science, and personal archives mix in unified visual-verbal double-page images to reveal a philosophical perception of art and humankind."

L. Schneider, Score Magazine: "On the first page of Barbara Rosenthal's book, Homo Futurus, she writes: 'Making art: discontinuant processing of raw experience.'

"And Homo Futurus is exactly that...an artist's documentation of the processing of the 'raw experience' of life. It is a kind of scrapbook, composed of diary-like prose-poetry entries, with photos, letters, newspaper clippings and other oddments superimposed on the text.

"As in a family album or journal, Rosenthal's book encompasses the entirety of the artist's life; nothing is too inconsequential or too personal or too painful to mention - from a line her daughter says, comments on the creative process, refrigerator troubles, to an account of her mother's hospitalization and death.

"According to Rosenthal, the visual material in the book - the snapshots, etc - only appear to obscure parts of the text. In reality, she says, the words were cut and the poetry written to the shape of the pages to give the effect of 'missing' words. The reader's possible frustration with the seemingly incomplete text was intentional, she said, 'to indicate the intrusion of the world's data...on the running flow of an artist's/individual's conscious or stream of conscious.'

"'That frustration with interference,' she says, "is very much a part of my life, and writing....It is this constant butting up of the external and internal flow of language and information and imagery that I mean to convey.'

"Convey it she does. Spanning a period of two years (1982-4), the book is a compelling glimpse of a life charged with psychic energy. It seems to be only a chapter in what must be a much large work, the life of Barbara Rosenthal."
$25

You & I Cardgame
By Barbara Rosenthal
New York, New York: Barbara Rosenthal, 1986. Edition of 12.

3 x 3 x 2"; 150 cards. Typed on a manual typewriter, xeroxed onto white cardstock, and cut by a papercutter. Cards housed in a lightweight paper inner box, which sits in a heavier outer box on which is a digital copy of a photograph of the prototype as a title label.

Barbara Rosenthal: "A packaged card game about Art and Life. Rules are included, but purchasers are encouraged to vary them. Two players organize and trade word-cards, slowly revealing attitudes toward self and other. Originally designed by the artist to play with art/life performer Linda Montano in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Easter Sunday, 1986."
$1275