Books

“The book covers the Semiotic Street Situations which began in Rome in 1993 with sculptural objects placed in such environments as public markets, streets, and parks. This book involves not the placement of objects in an environment but the scanning of sculptural images and through computer manipulation placing them in images derived primarily from existing film stills. The author also invited artists, writers, and critics to manipulate these digital collages in their own way…All black and white full-page illustrations to delight the mind and the eye.”

“Nor did it surprise me to find the wings of semiosis in the streets and rivers, the stars and wood, the gestures and calling cards of its guests. Arms flung high to the heavens, an electric fan whirling, a latter-day Venetian mask, a bathtub gondola, signic concerts, the flying spokes and prongs of a wheel and a bottle rack, an upside down urinal, a winged poodle, a bottle with an image in it flung into the East River, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian prayer positions in a gazebo in the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, an act of cannibalism overlooking the Bay of Naples, and a gratuitous shock reaction to the “horror, the horror” of the ritual alien sexuality of the imagination.”

“Daniel Rothbart always develops relationships between individuals and between people and objects. For his artist’s book The Phoenix, Rothbart works with cinema and visual arts myths, whose protagonists animate the theater of life and culture. In the popular imagination his subjects become ever-changing signifiers that shape cultural identities and condition behavior.”