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Artist's Project: Rachel Rosenthal
KabbaLAmobile Performance by Rachel Rosenthal
Los Angeles, 1984.
Rachel Rosenthal is one of the most accomplished pioneers of performance art in the United States. Her work delves into autobiography, politics, consciousness, and the cosmos. Rosenthal and her parents fled Paris during World War II and settled in New York City. She began her early training in visual art, theater, and dance with Hans Hoffman, Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator, and Jean-Louis Barrault. After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, she established Instant Theater, a center of early 'happenings' on the West Coast. Instant Theater attracted a small audience consisting of artists associated with the Ferus Gallery, including Wallace Berman. She was a leading figure in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles during the 1970s. During the 1980s, her workshops—The DbD Experience—had a large following among artists, dancers, and theater practitioners. Unlike psychodrama, the workshops were, according to Rosenthal, “much more spiritual and abstract and artlike, often on a mythical level” (Roth, 31). Between 1994 and 1997, she reinvented Instant Theater as TOHUBOHU!, a multicultural improvisational group. The Hebrew phrase Tohu va-vohu refers to the formless, chaotic state of the universe before Creation.
DVD cover of Rachel Rosenthal's KabbaLAmobile performance
KabbaLAmobile (1984) was a performance presented in Carplays, a festival co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles) in conjunction with the exhibition The Automobile and Culture. According to Rosenthal, KabbaLAmobile addressed “how we’ve replaced spiritual values with materialistic concerns and how we still yearn for the transcendent and the mystical in our lives.” Rosenthal blended texts Sefer Yetzira (Book of Creation), the writings of the 13th century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, and copy from automotive magazines. She states, “I discovered that the literatures that deal with both subjects [Kabbalah and cars] are very similar insofar as they are both ecstatic and completely esoteric. No one can understand either one until one is an initiate. In the long run, spirituality isn’t found exclusively in this or that, so why not in cars? Cars, too, reflect the universe.”
Screenshot from the KabbaLAmobile
Performance's Video
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Readings:
Moira Roth, ed. Rachel Rosenthal. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Rachel Rosenthal and Una Chaudhuri, ed. Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2001.
Link
www.rachelrosenthal.org
http://hdl.handle.net/1964/446
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