Rachel Rosenthal

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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