Barbara Rosenthal
4 archival digital print collages of scanned articles of clothing belonging to the artist, and still worn, since the 1960s; Each piece comprises 12 prints, sewn back-to-back and together by the artist with black cotton thread. Each is placed in Artelope See-Throughs, and hung by Steel Binding Rings suspended from Blond Wooden Hangars, 26 x 38 inches each, $2800
Clothing rack, transparent empty suitcase, canvas-and-clear garment bag, wooden hangers and a suite of 4 shirts pinned with 65, 2-1/4 inch Button Pins (circular) and Blank Name Badges (rectangular) bearing existential text and/or imagery.
The pins are designed, printed and manufactured by the artist on her hand-operated button pin machine. Inside each collar is Rosenthal’s clothing label (Red Rubber Name Stamp on white linen, hand sewn with black cotton embroidery thread, with her trademark knotted trailing threads). Shirt is Carhardt XL thermal cotton, the brand and size Rosenthal owns and wears during performances with these same pins. Each shirt is displayed hung on a wooden hanger, and is approximately 18 x 42 inches. The suite of 4 is packaged on wooden hangars in a clear-and-cotton-canvas zipped garment view-bag (42 x 22 x 3 inches); for transport and storage, bag and contents are folded (hangars separated) down into a clear plastic suitcase viewing box (14 x 17 x 6.75 inches). $5000
Photographs, video stills, digitized images and text, in metal button pins attached to paper. In a sturdy white box, 10 self-contained 6 x 6 inch pages with 13 real 2-1/4 inch button pins designed, printed and manufactured by the artist on her hand-operated button pin machine. Signature etched into back of each pin. Box also contains: Artist’s statement and bonus material. Number 4 from an edition of 10, Boxed set. $1200
Button Pin Pages. $100
Statement
I made these prints from some of my clothes. I’ve had a lot of my clothes since the ’60s, and I still wear them. Naturally, they’re turning to rags and disintegrating. I keep sewing them back together, and reforming them by sewing them together with one another. So they don’t disappear altogether, I made one of my interns put them on my scanner, but they were too big, so she scanned them in sections, and when I printed them out, I sewed the sections together, and when they didn’t quite fit on the pages, I reproportioned them in Photoshop.
Commonly worn to publicly announced political opinion, button pins are provocatively used to voice inner personal thoughts silently shared by many. The medium is not the message.
Theme: Art + Artist, Art + Life, Public + Private, Existentialism, Identity, Communication, Language.
Biography
Born in The Bronx, in 1948, Barbara Rosenthal is an avant-garde artist who produces idiosyncratic combinations of words, communicative sounds, gestures, objects and pictures. Her zany, philosophical, content-rich, and often humorous work investigates the relationship between an artist’s psyche and the outer world, with the anthropological extrapolation of that relationship to that of all human beings.
All objects and images are produced directly by her, and comprise objects and materials used by her in the course of real life, plus an occasional addition of resonant found or appropriated sources and quotations.
Her videos have screened at the NY Jewish Museum, Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Berlin Directors Lounge and Berlin Lettretage, and her artist’s books are in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The Tate and the Berlin Kunstbibliotek. She’s been reviewed in Flash Art International, NYArts, The Village Voice and The NY TImes. This year, she represented the United States in two media, Performance Art and Text-Based Art, at Tina B: The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, and her text-art appeared as billboards in the city of Padua, Italy.
She began keeping Journals and writing professionally (a weekly column in a Long Island newspaper) at age 11, and the professional study of art at age 14 (Brooklyn Museum Art School, with Isaac Soyer). She created her first Performance/Installation piece, “Self Portrait Room”, in 1968, before those genres were named. She has the usual degrees from good universities, and has been teaching art, media, and literary subjects at good and mediocre colleges for thirty years.
