Image /text Art
Although, like many avant-garde artists, Barbara Rosenthal’s work is difficult to classify, it is usually described by categories of movement or media, even though many projects fuse elements from several: conceptual photography, surreal photography, artists' books and objects, installation, performance, video, film, cartoons, text-based art, mail art, and writings (in all forms of literature and exposition).
One important series that appears in several forms is “Homo Futurus,” which comprises two artist’s books of that title (one a blank book, eMediaLoft.org, 1984 and one with text and images, VSW Press, 1986), a wall work (shown at the Carlo Lamagna Gallery, 1987-88), and several print editions of various sizes. The purpose of this project has been described as lending insight into what makes us human, particularly in terms of ideals and values, and lending insight into the production of art, by citing information from the artist’s own experience and practice, as well as from various news sources. Imagery consists of reproduced news photos and articles, postcards, and personal archival and family photographs, juxtaposed with Rosenthal's "Surreal Photographs". Text is edited from Rosenthal’s Journals.
One line in the 1986 book is "All history, documentation, journalism, diplomacy, thought, art, culture, etc., serve only to influence behavior of single individuals at single moments." This particular line, designed as text-based art, has also appeared in Rosenthal's print suite "Provocation Cards," first issued as an anonymous Mail Art series in 1989, later as a portion of her video-performance "Lying Diary / Provocation Cards", 1990, and then handed out during live performances 2005-9 in New York, Berlin, and Prague, hung as wall art at the Lucas Carrieri Gallery (Berlin, 2009), and enlarged as a billboard (installed in Padua, Italy in 2010) for the Fourth Tina B. Prague Contemporary Art Festival. Each time, the text and the image of the text were increasingly refined.
In the Tina B. Prague Contemporary Art Festival, October 2009, she represented the United States in both Performance Art and Text-Based Art, for which a second billboard, also an insight from Homo Futurus, reads "The Flaw of the Ideal Is That It Does Not Encounter Time or Touch.".
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