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.

Wealthy and bored, Paul and Jennifer Montgomery spend their time in a New York City apartment filled with various amusements. Their routine is upended when door-to-door saleswoman Lisa Schindler drops by and is suddenly taken ill. The couple let her spend the night, and soon, the sophisticated Lisa and her hosts embark on a new set of very adult – and very dangerous – games.

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.

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.

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.