 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Susan Freudenheim of
The Los Angeles Times
Tackling taboo subjects is often the grist of creativity; many artists love to dig into territory others prefer to leave untouched. For the conceptual artist Erika Rothenberg, a favorite topic is death.
"I'm interested in death and killing," she said with a sly grin during a recent conversation at her Culver City studio. "I always read the obituaries first when I open the newspaper."
It's a surprising comment coming from someone so strikingly sunny, with her long red hair, bright smile and ready laugh. Rothenberg hardly seems absorbed in gothic gloom. Yet she says she likes to explore what makes people tick, and her frank look at the subject of death and its aftermath is just one part of that quest.
Two years ago, on a trip to Venice, Italy, Rothenberg visited a cemetery on the Island of San Michele. There she took two photographs, one showing the gravesite of the 20th century composer Igor Stravinsky, the other that of his wife, Vera. Both are part of a solo exhibition of the artist's work, which continues through April 16 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica.
In the photos, the identical rectangular stone grave markers lie side by side, each inscribed with just the occupant's name. But Igor's is strewn with gifts — bouquets of fresh flowers, a drawing, a wreath and many pebbles — all left as homage to the genius master. Vera's, by contrast, lies starkly unadorned, a bunch of dead flowers at its foot.
"I think there's something to think about there," Rothenberg says, without apparent anger or guile. "These two photographs bring up many questions. What was their relationship like? And it exists after death! He's been dead since 1971, and they still have a relationship." You can imagine Vera perpetually playing a wifely supporting role, Rothenberg suggests, forgotten but essential to her husband's success. You can wonder whether she was always overlooked, perhaps without expectation that it could be otherwise. You can feel for her, or not.
Rothenberg's work asks her audience to respond to dramas, but she does not openly state her point of view. Sometimes she tells stories; sometimes she quotes others'. At times she is inspired by something she's seen or read in the newspaper. Usually there's a touch of satire or ironic humor in the work.
Pondering big issues
In "Monument to a Bear," a concrete tombstone memorializes a real-life bear rescued from a forest fire. The animal, bandaged where it had been badly burned, healed in a Montana wildlife shelter before being returned to the wild; during its recuperation it was a favorite of shelter visitors. Soon after the bear's release, however, it was legally shot by a hunter. Rothenberg's sculpture includes a re-creation of the head and the bandaged paws of the beleaguered beast as well as a bronze plaque presenting an Associated Press news story covering the bear's demise.
This and other recent and early works are part of the show at the Felsen Gallery as is an expanded version of a participatory piece that caused a stir last year when it was first shown in "100 Artists See Satan" at Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. On a table in the gallery, Rothenberg set out a book whose cover art posed the question: "If everyone was allowed one free kill a year ... Who Would You Kill?" Visitors were invited to name their victims on the inside pages, and they did so with ardor, listing politicians, friends and even television advertisers. For the current show, the book will have additional blank pages for visitors to add comments.
"I actually thought people wouldn't want to write in it, because it seems like bad karma," Rothenberg says. "But nope. It was just unbelievable." Some visitors even wrote the artist's name, and she admits she set herself up as fair game.
"Erika says things that need to be said and are seldom said as clearly or strongly," says scientist Stuart Spence, who with his wife, Judy Spence, has collected works by Rothenberg and made donations of them to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Laguna Art Museum. People sometimes see her work as simplistic or political, but Spence sees it as an examination of important social issues.
"Killing is a basic thing that we do," Rothenberg says. "It's a really important part of human life. We may be struggling to get beyond it, but basically people have been doing it since the beginning of time."
Her best-known piece in Los Angeles is in the main plaza of the Hollywood & Highland shopping and entertainment complex, next to where the Academy Awards are presented each year. Just east of the entrance to the Kodak Theatre, which is covered with a real red carpet, Rothenberg adorned the entrance stairway and floors of a second public courtyard with her own version of a winding "red carpet," this one concrete and including dozens of anonymous biographical statements describing the dreams of Hollywood wannabes. Some of them came to act and ended up as technicians. Others got closer to their wish. With this piece, permanently installed since 2001 at the center of the myth and reality of Hollywood, Rothenberg lets us all walk all over the American Dream.
Commercial success
Rothenberg's own migration to Hollywood, where she lives, was not part of her dream. Born and raised in Manhattan, she studied art at the University of Chicago, then returned home to New York, the city she thought she'd never leave again. Looking for work, she landed in an advertising agency and, noting that the best jobs were for art directors, she took a class at the School of Visual Arts in New York that promised her a graphic design portfolio by the end of a semester's work. Indeed, after the class she landed a job; for the next seven or eight years, she says, she worked as an art director at the McCann Erickson advertising agency, dreaming up print and television ads. Her clients included Coca-Cola and the New York Times, and she says she made plenty of money but worked around the clock with no time to make her own art.
Finally, after saving for a year, she abandoned the high-paying job and began to live her dream as an artist — on little money. During the next few years her work began to be recognized, and she met her future husband, Albert Litewka. He wanted to move to L.A., and she agreed to join him. They came in 1986, a time when L.A.'s art gallery scene was far more minimal than New York's.
"When I went to parties, people would say, 'Why did you move here?' " she remembers. "No one would ever say that now. But there were fantastic artists here, and it was an incredible community. So even though I desperately missed New York, I liked L.A." Litewka developed a business in entertainment marketing; they have a daughter in high school, and Rothenberg is fully integrated into the L.A. scene.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, with equal-opportunity provocation. Thanks to her advertising background, which taught her to integrate language and visual statements, her art is both accessible and memorable.
"The fine balance she achieves between lightness and seriousness is what really distinguishes her work," says Carol Eliel, curator of modern and contemporary art at LACMA. "She's at her very best when she combines her really strong graphic visual sense with her intelligence and wit."
"What I love about art," Rothenberg says, "is that it can give you space to have a variety of responses. My work gives you space. But you step into that space and everything changes."
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release 2005
PLEASE NOTE: Erika Rothenberg's Opening reception is Saturday March 19, 5-7pm
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
ERIKA ROTHENBERG
March 19-April 16, 2005
Erika Rothenberg’s first solo show in Los Angeles in five years will include new, humorous photographs, paintings and sculptures loosely about memorials and homages, including works involving public participation.
Erika Rothenberg’s eighth solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery includes a large scale photographic diptych of the graves of Igor and Vera Stravinsky at the Venice Cemetery in Italy. Igor’s grave, laden with gifts left by admirers, is contrasted with the barren grave of his wife, Vera. Another memorial, the concrete sculpture Monument to a Bear, presents in text and image the turbulent story of a cub burned and rescued in a forest fire, ultimately to be killed by hunters once released back into its natural habitat.
Everyone Who Sat On This Chair and Some People’s Rules are homages to the people who contributed to them. For Everyone Who Sat on This Chair, Rothenberg asked people to sit on a wooden chair, while she painted small watercolor portraits of the participants, and later affixed the paintings to the chair. The resulting sculpture contains a pictorial memory of everyone who ever sat on it. For Some People’s Rules, Rothenberg collected people’s rules for living and painted a series of plaque/samplers. Examples: Tony’s Rule: Never eat orange food; Felicia’s rule: Don’t do drugs on Valentine’s Day. Public participation of a different kind is evident in the installation Who
Would You Kill? A book and a quill pen sit on a table. On the cover of the book is the statement, “If everyone were allowed one free kill a year, who would you kill?” Visitors are encouraged to write in the book and read what others have written.
Over the past five years, Rothenberg’s work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Laguna Art Museum; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Mass MOCA and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She has executed two public art projects: The Road To Hollywood, in Hollywood, California in 2001, and Freedom of Expression National Monument in New York City, 2004, commissioned by Creative Time. Freedom, in collaboration with architect Laurie Hawkinson and performance artist John Malpede, was a re-creation of a piece originally installed twenty years ago in lower Manhattan. Christopher Knight, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called the Road to Hollywood “an exceptional work of public art…it ranks among the best public art projects in L.A.” Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, said about Freedom of Expression National Monument: “Anyone who wants to can mount the platform and speak his or her mind. Try it. It’s an American tradition, to be exercised in the art world and everywhere else.”
Rothenberg’s work has been widely exhibited at museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. Rothenberg has taught at Cal Arts, UCLA and Otis College of Art and received grants from the Getty and Norton Foundations. Her work is in many private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art. New York; LACMA, MOCA, the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. March 19, 2005 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Shirle Gottlieb of Artscene
Ask anyone in the theater world and they’ll tell you a little known secret: good comedy is very serious business. While on the surface it may tickle, titillate, delight or flirt with your senses, it has an underbelly that roams from outrageous ridicule to poking sacred cows or correcting social injustice. At rock bottom, good comedy is about survival.
No one understands this better than Erika Rothenberg, as her current exhibit attests. On display is a series of humorous photographs, paintings
Take the double entendre “Sign of God.” Placing her tongue firmly to her cheek, Rothenberg photographs a gigantic billboard high against a beautiful blue sky. With a marquee that screams “Looking for a sign of God? This is it,” it looms over advertisements for “1 Hour Cleaners” and “Yum Yum Donuts.”
Then there’s a color photograph of the sign that marks the official site of “Los Alamos.” Mounted in a rustic wooden frame it proclaims: “Atomic City. Birthplace of the Atomic Age & A-Bomb. Site of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory & Museum. Gas, food, lodging. 18-hole championship golf course. Picnic areas & other fine sports facilities.” Need we say more?
Or how about “Who Would You Kill,” which was created last year for the “100 Artists See Satan” exhibit (Grand Central Art Center’s answer to the Laguna Museum’s “100 Artists See God” show). Rothenberg fabricated a quilted book that resembles a wedding album with a cover that reads, “If everyone were allowed one free kill a year. . .who would you kill?” She placed it on a table with a quill and holder, then wondered if anyone would have the guts to sign it. She needn’t have worried. It was completely filled the first day. A new book has been made for this exhibit and visitors are encouraged to both read and write in it. What a hoot!
“Monument to a Bear” is a concrete memorial sculpture that tells the story (in word and image) of a cub burned in a forest fire. Rescued by wildlife workers, it is nursed back to health, then released into the wilderness--where it is killed by hunters. The irony is hilarious but bitter.
If you missed the nationwide press coverage of the “Freedom of Expression National Monument,” a short explanation might help you appreciate the photograph of this famous public art work. Inspired by Soviet agit-prop, it was originally created in 1984 by Rothenberg, architect Laurie Hawkinson, and performing artist John Malpede on landfill left from the construction of the World Trade Center. Taking the form of a Constructivist-style megaphone on top of a six-foot tall platform reached by climbing a ramp, this delightful bright-red contraption was viewed as a First Amendment Rights monument that enabled anyone who was interested to speak his mind.
Last year, the FOENM was reassembled to allow people to talk back to and in the space formerly occupied by the twin towers on the eve of the Republican Convention. “Bring the boys home,” yelled one New Yorker after climbing the steps. “Elect Ralph Nader” said another, while a third shouted “Read Thucydides.”
Looking at Rothenberg’s photograph, everyone acknowledges that the “sound and fury” of a few brave voices never reaches the current administration. But you can’t help smiling at the Dada-esque courage of this “blowing in the wind” group exercise.
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 by Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times
Hollywood & Highland is negligible as architecture, but this enormous new retail development in the heart of downtown Hollywood can boast something few other shopping malls can: an exceptional work of public art. Erika Rothenberg's "The Road to Hollywood" ranks among the best public projects in L.A.
The work, as its familiar road-movie title suggests, is happy to accept pop clichés, from which there is no escape in a mass culture world. The trick is not to avoid, deny or denigrate them, but to give them surprising new life. Rothenberg does.
"The Road to Hollywood" begins as a pathway embedded in the shopping mall pavement. It adapts this earthbound form from the sidewalk stars in the nearby Walk of Fame, the handprints and footprints in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre next door and the red carpet that Oscar-hungry royalty traverses on the way to the Academy Awards. Rothenberg's path starts at the Hollywood Boulevard entrance, climbs the staircase, winds its way around the phony Assyrian-style central court and ends out back on a patio overlooking Highland Avenue.
The path, made from red concrete, is interrupted by several dozen marble mosaic panels containing brief narratives explaining what prompted a variety of people in all walks of entertainment life to come to Hollywood. Funny, stupid, poignant, manipulative, straightforward, lucky—they run the gamut. A sample:
"I was working in an office in New York, and my boss said to me, 'You're not so good as a secretary; is there anything else you'd like to do?' So I moved to L.A. and began taking acting lessons."—Actress
"I was teaching at UCLA when a producer called, looking for a student to score a sci-fi movie. 'I'll send my best student,' I said, but I sent myself instead."—Composer
"I was a welfare mother who got herself together and wrote a one-woman show that made it to Broadway."—Movie star/TV host
"I came here from the Virgin Islands and got a job cleaning toilets. Eight years later I co-founded a grip truck service."—Key grip
The anonymity of the speakers is important, because it establishes a galaxy populated by Everyman and Everywoman. Some stories seem authentic. (Didn't that happen to fill-in-the-blank?) Some seem made up. (That couldn't have happened!) Others seem like they could happen to you. The great Hollywood cliché about the blurring of reality and fiction gets revivified. In the process, your own reason for coming to Hollywood enters the scene.
Rothenberg's "Road to Hollywood" leads to an oversized, period-style daybed made from sturdy fiberglass and located on an open patio that looks out toward the mythic Hollywood sign in the distant hills. Climb aboard and say "cheese": This spot is to become one of the most photographed places in town—which means, one of the most photographed places in the world. A cultural tourist, you star in your own picture.
The lumpish Babylon Court at the center of the shopping center means to recall the city's first big-time tourist attraction, erected nearly a century ago. It's loosely based on the grandiose sets for D.W. Griffith's 1916 movie, "Intolerance," which drew hordes of gawkers to town. The dully common theme-park architecture fails, though, because all it offers is false memories, rather than creating a
vivid opportunity for new ones.
Rothenberg fixes that. Her work addresses Hollywood & Highland as its own type of stage set. She calmly sizes up the shallow fantasy, injects it with a dose of honesty and fractures it through a human kaleidoscope. Her savvy work puts the Hollywood back in Babylon.
--CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
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 by Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times
Voids are made for shape-shifting: images of transformation sparked by hope for the future and fear of the unknown. For almost two years, many images have taken the form of possible "cultural uses" for ground zero. An opera house by Sir Norman Foster? An art museum by Frank Gehry?
These are plausible, even worthy ideas. But they are misplaced. They could go anywhere. While they may satisfy the craving to fill up the void, as quickly as possible, they bear no historical relationship to the events that brought the void into being. Nor do they match the cultural value of the void itself. That vast emptiness has stimulated the public to create its own self-portrait in the incessant stream of fantasies that people have been sketching around this site since Sept. 11. The most recent of these fantasies has just arrived in the form of a small brochure titled "The Campaign for a Museum of Freedom." Put out by a committee headed by Tom A. Bernstein, co-owner of the Chelsea Piers sports complex on the Hudson River, the pamphlet outlines in general terms an idea that has been circulating for more than a year in civic and political circles.
Unlike the art museum and opera house, the Museum of Freedom does emerge from the specific historical circumstances of the site. Unfortunately, as described in the brochure, the concept distorts those circumstances toward political ends. I have a strong suspicion that this campaign is going to fail. Still, the pamphlet deserves a prominent place in the permanent record of ground zero fantasies. Brief as it is, this document nonetheless performs a valuable service. It exposes, more explicitly than we critics have, the degree to which the ground zero design process has become saturated with political ideology.
The cover bears an artist's rendering of an aerial view of the site, as it might appear if Daniel Libeskind's drawings were to be realized as actual buildings. We're looking down, toward a green open space encircled by the famous spiral of skyscrapers. Though the rendering is crude, it nonetheless captures the crystalline quality of Mr. Libeskind's formal vocabulary, and his design's indebtedness to German Expressionist architecture of the 1910's and early 1920's.
The chamfered tops of the glass towers, the diagonal patterns of their window mullions, convey the impression that these are the shattered remnants of much larger buildings: the twin towers, by implication. The spiral configuration replicates what the Expressionists called the Stadtkrone, or city crown. Designed for mass spectacle and social ritual, these fruits of the Weimar Republic remained fantasies on paper Though possibly unaware of this historical precedent and its complex cultural associations, the Museum Planning Committee obviously envisions the Sadtkrone as a worthy model for this site.
The open space is dominated by a large object of faceted glass that resembles an immense diamond solitaire. Since none of the structures shown in the rendering are identified, it's not clear whether this form is intended to represent a building or a sculpture. To judge from its central placement, however, the jewel-like shape could be a place-holder for the memorial now being planned.
Lower structures, partly formed from the bases of the skyscrapers, enclose two sides of the green open space. Also rendered to suggest faceted glass, these structures are tinted in blue and red: patriotic colors, perhaps, or hints of sapphires and rubies. Indeed, with the white diamond glow of the towers and the emerald grass of the open space (itself shown as a tapestry of light refracted through crystal), the entire rendering evokes a gigantic parure of precious stones. Students of Expressionism will have no difficulty recognizing a precedent for this image in Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture, one of the best-known examples of the Stadtkrone genre.
A second rendering moves in for a closer view of the site. It's still an aerial perspective — figures on the ground register as dots — but the angle of vision has shifted, and the focus is on the lower crystalline structures. Perhaps these are meant to indicate the Museum of Freedom's location and scale. The palette has changed, from precious stones to harlequin colors, red and green, composed in the traditional diamond-shaped motley of commedia dell'arte costumes.
Kunhardt Productions, makers of a PBS documentary series, "Freedom: A History of US," is credited with developing the design and content of the museum. The brochure describes the project as integral to Mr. Libeskind's "unifying concept" of the master plan: "the `assault' on freedom." Like the word "campaign" and the fragmented forms of the towers, the content proposed for the museum is consistent with this martial motif.
The content is programmed in four educational "modules" that recount, in concentric rings, mankind's struggle for emancipation from mental and physical enslavement. Ground zero, the site of the terrorists' assault, is the subject of the first module. As we proceed outward through the rings, the narrative encompasses more and more territory, like an advancing army: New York ("the world's second home"). America ("the story of its ever-widening circle of freedom"). Last, but not least, the World ("will shine a spotlight on places that lack basic human freedoms").
The brochure is seasoned with quotes from Abraham Lincoln, George Bush, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Emma Lazarus and even Mr. Libeskind. It is adorned with archive photographs (the Berlin Wall) and comes complete with budget estimate ($250 million) and a note on financing: "The Museum of Freedom will be a public-private partnership that will rely on funding from government sources as well as the private sector."
Save your money. I have a much simpler and cheaper idea in mind. Consistent with the values of historic preservation, not to mention the theme of freedom, I propose reconstructing a project that stood not far from ground zero for a brief time in the summer of 1984.
Entitled Freedom of Expression National Monument, this collaborative project was designed by the New York artist-architect team of Laurie Hawkinson, John Malpede and Erika Rothenberg. It was produced by Creative Time's Art on the Beach program, which occupied the landfill created by excavations for the World Trade Center, and is now the site of Battery Park City. Anita Contini, who now heads the memorial design committee for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, was at that time Creative Time's director.
Inspired by early Soviet agit-prop art, the monument consisted of a large red megaphone mounted atop a flight of stairs and pointed toward the twin towers. Visitors were invited to climb the stairs and, in effect, talk back to those massive symbols of state authority and economic power. As the team put it, using the megaphone made people feel "both powerful and powerless at the same time."
To my knowledge, there exists no record of the statements made by visitors to the monument: the curtain had yet to rise on the brave new world of ceaseless digital documentation. This omission could be easily rectified were the monument to be rebuilt today, however, and the need for such a public platform has never been greater than it is now.
Throughout the ground zero design process, many New Yorkers have felt "powerful and powerless at the same time." They have spoken, but with little conviction that they are being heard. Should I have a turn at such a mouthpiece, this is what I would say: Not everyone saw the twin towers as symbols of freedom. For some, they represented the Kafkaesque mental enslavement of government bureaucracy and dull office routine. For others, they stood for Rockefeller power: for oil, that is to say, and the bizarre things we do to satisfy our need for it.
NOT everyone thinks that the United States is ideally poised at this moment to point fingers at "places that lack basic human freedoms." I note, with approval, that the Freedom Museum will be linked to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. But I see scant evidence of conscience in the brochure. Us good, others bad: where's the conscience in that? Ideally, I would like to voice such opinions without being branded a traitor, a pro-terrorist, or a person opposed to freedom. But I see no indication that your museum will be much help in this regard. I see only one underlying assumption expressed in your brochure: freedom has been assaulted, therefore retaliation is legitimate — even more, is part of the heroic struggle that includes the cause of civil rights.
On the basis of this assumption, the victims of Sept. 11 have been posthumously enlisted as martyrs to a cause they may or may not have supported. But we will never know. And it is not our decision to make. At what point does a cultural use like your educational modules become indistinguishable from a strategy room for territorial expansion? Will your museum encourage honest debate on issues like this? Martial rhetoric is seldom a sure-fire sign of tolerance for dissent.
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