Carrying Around the Weight of the World : Lecture: Performance artist, who says humans are destroying Earth, admits she has ‘reached a degree of hopelessness about our capacity to turn things around.’

Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal has begun to despair about the future of the Earth. In fact, she is so depressed about what she calls “the coming calamity” that--as she remarked Monday during her “Art Forum” series lecture at Rancho Santiago College--”I have trouble transmuting it into art.”

A striking woman who shaves her head, wears baggy, utilitarian clothes and affects high-style tortoise-shell shades, Rosenthal said that prior to 1981 she used experiences in her own life as “metaphors for larger issues” in her work. But since then, the growing ecological crisis has made her feel “almost transparent, like those jellyfish in the water . . . absorbing what’s happening in the world into my own body.”

In a 1986 piece called “L.O.W. in Gaia,” Rosenthal portrayed a conservation-minded camper in the desert who eventually wound up dragging around five huge plastic bags filled with her own trash. (“We are continually polluting,” she says. “Even someone trying to be conscientious.”)

Rosenthal, who defines her work as somewhere “between experimental theater and the more theatrical end of performance art,” usually tries to inject some humor into her pieces and leave her audiences “with a degree of hope, strength, power, a sense of the possibility of action.”

But the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster--which inspired her piece, “Was Black,” that same year--hardly lent itself to humor.

Rosenthal screened a videotape of the piece, in which she appears in a jewel-rimmed black gown and black gloves, standing next to a pedestal with a vase of lilacs. She sings in Russian with increasing urgency, assuming the terrified voices of dying radiation victims: “I hurt! I want to vomit! Where are my friends? I don’t want to go!”

Four nude performers (three women, one of them visibly pregnant, and a man) are seen reading the newspaper. They fold their papers nervously and fearfully look up into the heavens. They huddle together as sirens sound. Rosenthal’s voice suddenly sounds like a human siren. The lilacs have died.

The performers, whose faces have hardened into blank masks, dress in black garments and pour salt into four wine glasses. They dump the salt in a fine, continuous stream on Rosenthal’s head and slowly bind her body and face with strings of Christmas tree bulbs. Her body disappears into the darkness, leaving only a haunting outline of pulsing lights.

During the past six months, Rosenthal’s world view has taken a particularly apocalyptic turn. Apologizing for sounding “more and more like Cassandra every time I talk,” she said she has “reached a degree of hopelessness about our capacity to turn things around. . . . The Earth cannot set itself straight unless we become totally extinct or die off in huge numbers. . . .

“We have come to the widest chasm that separates us as a species from the rest of creation. At some point in history . . . somewhere in neolithic times, we took a wrong turn. We began seeing ourselves in a way that is such a lie, (and yet) we live as though it’s the truth.

“The lie is that we are the top of the heap, that we’ve reached the apex of evolution. That the whole solar system was created to produce us. That we are now capable of and have responsibility for setting everything in order, (since) nature (is assumed to be) chaos. . . .

“We have language and a certain amount of logic we unfortunately never use. That puts us in a position to use everything in the world for our gain. If it’s there, it’s there for us.

“We have ignored the most important law of nature: the law of limited competition. Unlike all the other species, which set themselves a limited ecological niche, we’ve adopted the whole world. Anything that doesn’t feed us, feed what we eat, or eat what we eat has to be exterminated.”

Rosenthal described her new work, which premieres in New York in a few weeks, as the story of “a neolithic Faust who made a pact with the devil.” The devil promised fame, fortune and eternal youth. “Sure enough, the devil held to his word. We have a supernova flash of civilization and we are dying in our youth.”

Doom-laden messages tend to be unpopular with audiences, Rosenthal conceded. But she said it is all too easy to enjoy life on a day-to-day basis (“One has love, companionship, art”) while ignoring or rationalizing the bigger picture.

But if the world is indeed going to hell in a handbasket, what can people do to make a difference?

“I know what has to be done,” Rosenthal said. “Simple things like stop eating animals . . . (and) going vigorously into regulating population growth. This cancer-like proliferation and breeding is suicide and total destruction. . . .

“If we could understand as a species how closely we are enmeshed with each other and everything in the world, racism and sexism would have to disappear. In a calamity these (truths) manifest themselves. The calamity is now.”

One woman asked Rosenthal how she lives her own life, in view of her ecological beliefs. She replied that she uses “cruelty-free” products (not tested on animals), doesn’t smoke or drink, is a vegetarian, has no air-conditioning or heat in her home, showers only every two or three days, recycles water and doesn’t kill animals “unless they want to kill me.” But she admitted that she owns a car and has used pesticide on a plant.

On the other hand, she remarked, when she asked herself, “ ‘Should I chuck it all and go in nature and live on the land?’ I thought, ‘I’m not good at that. I want to know the wilderness is there, but I don’t want to live in it.’ (My outlook) is totally ambiguous and fraught with a lot of chest-beating.”

The ambiguity of her situation--as an artist working in a highly evolved art form who talks about the charms of ecologically harmonious life in the rain forest--doesn’t escape her.

“Sometimes I wonder if civilization was worth it. . . . If we want civilization, do we have to pay this price? I can’t imagine that it’s absolutely so. Though there doesn’t seem any indication of anything different. Maybe we haven’t tried all the options.”

But there are some compensations, even for a self-proclaimed urban person.

Rosenthal’s two dogs--sprawled on the floor, emitting occasional howls, during her talk--accompany her “everywhere,” she says, because “people are getting further and further away from animals. Having a dog in a situation where you don’t expect a dog to be--at a church, at a university--is a total delight. It’s very important for me to have fur I can put my hands in when everything seems to go totally insane.”

BACKGROUND

* Rachel Rosenthal, performance artist and director of the Los Angeles-based Rachel Rosenthal Company.

* Born in Paris, 1926.

* Studied art (with Hans Hoffman and others) and theater (with Erwin Piscator, Jean-Louis Barrault) in Paris and New York.

* Moved to California in 1955 and founded Instant Theater, an experimental company she directed and performed in for a decade.

* Since 1975, has created and presented more than two dozen solo and group performances, at such venues as the Japan America Theatre, the Museum of Contemporary Art (both in Los Angeles), the Kitchen, and Dance Theater Workshop (both in New York).

* Art festival performances include: Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany; Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in Montreal; Festival Internacional de Teatro in Granada, Spain; the Theatre Festival in Zagreb, Yugoslavia; U.S. Time Festival in Ghent, Belgium; Serious Fun Festival in New York; and the Los Angeles Festival (1987 and 1990).

* Has taught at UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, Cal State Long Beach, Otis Parsons School of Design (Los Angeles), California Institute of the Arts (Valencia), Art Institute of Chicago and New York University.

* Awards, grants and fellowships from (partial list): National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1990); California Arts Council (1988), J. Paul Getty Foundation (1990); Art Matters (1988-90); Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, Inc. (1989); the Village Voice (Obie Award, 1989); City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Dept. (1989-91).