Moira RothResource Website for Moira Roth – Articles, books, interviews, past & recent works.

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BIO/ BACKGROUND/INTERESTS OF MOIRA ROTH
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I was born in 1933 in England, and grew up there. I attended first Vienna
University and then the London School of Economics before moving to
live in the U.S. where I received my B.A. from New York University (1959)
and M.A. (a thesis on Francis Bacon, 1966) and Ph.D. (“Duchamp and
America”) from the University of California, Berkeley (1974).
After teaching at the University of California (Irvine, 1970-1972, Santa
Cruz 1973-1974, and then U.C. San Diego, 1974-1985), I came to Mills in
1985, and hold an endowed chair here—the Trefethen Professorship of Art
History. I have traveled extensively around Europe (am currently
especially interested in Prague, Germany and Spain), and to Cuba, the
Soviet Union, and Asia (Burma, Cambodia, China, Japan and
Thailand)?and this has greatly influenced my writing and thinking,
especially in the last ten years or so.
In addition to many articles in journals, catalogues and books on Marcel
Duchamp, performance art, feminist art practice, photography,
multiculturalism, etc., I’ve edited several books including The Amazing
Decade: Women & Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (1983), Connecting
Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists (1988 ), We Flew
Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (1995), Abraham’s Daughter:
The Life and Times of Rose Hacker (1996), and Rachel Rosenthal (1997).
Since the early 1970s I have been involved in feminism, and from the early
1980s onward I have worked increasingly cross-culturally, including an
intense involvement in Asian-American art history. In 1994, Yolanda
Lopez and I contributed an essay, “Social Protest: Racism and Sexism, ”to
The Power of Feminist Art anthology and in 1998 I wrote “Afterword, Parts
of a Puzzle” for Phoebe Farris’s Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical
Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas.
In 1998, my first volume of collected essays appeared, accompanied by
commentary by Jonathan D Katz: Difference/Indifference: Musings on
Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
That year I began a series of new essays that shortly acquired the collective
title of Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds. There are thirteen of these
texts so far (all but one published), my responses to a wide range of
individual artists and writers (from Linda Nochlin and Faith Ringgold to
Flo Oy Wong and Sutapa Biswas) and geographic locations (from the U.S.
to England, Ireland and Cambodia). The most recent Traveling Companions
text was on art and the Vietnam War: “Remnants & Reverberations:
Drawing(s) in Time & Space,” in Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the
American-Vietnam War, Drawing Center, NY, 2006 catalogue.
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Another current art history project, in collaboration with Naomi Sawelson-
Gorse, is Beyond Duchamp, a selection of my interviews concerning Marcel
Duchamp that I conducted with some 36 artists in the late 1960s-early
1970s. Sawelson has retranscribed several of these, together with extensive
footnotes. So far re-published are the interviews with Robert Smithson
(MOCA Smithson catalogue, 2004) and John Cage (Etant Donnes, the Parisbased
journal, 2005), and, published for the first time, is my interview with
John Baldessari (in X-tra, Vol. 8, No. 2, Winter 2005).
Among my other current projects are fictional narratives, a series of plays,
and poem cycles, including:
1.“Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker ”
Begun in 2001, this is a fragmented narrative about a fictional Czech Jew, a
poet and playwright, who lives through the 20th century. After the 1924
death of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, Rachel Marker writes to him daily
about her own writings, experiences and thoughts, and describes to him
events in current European history, especially the rise of fascism. In the fall
of 1939, she flees to Paris after the German invasion of Prague, and finally
turns up in Berlin after World War II, where she takes photographs every
day of the city’s shadows. While in Spain in the winter of 2008, I began to
sketch out a new episode of this narrative, one in which Rachel Marker
visits the country at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
(See texts in Art Journal, Fall 2003, n. paradoxa, Vol. 17, 2006 and
Camerawork; A Journal of Photographic Arts, Spring/Summer 2006.)
I have also written several plays about Rachel Marker: “Rachel Marker,
Franz Kafka and Alice Sommer” (University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2005),
“Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker” (Berkeley, CA and Potsdam,
Germany, 2005-2006), and in May 2008 directed and performed in
“Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker: a three-part presentation” (Right
Window Gallery, San Francisco, CA).
2. “The Library of Maps”
Begun in 2001, these texts (forty-one so far), about a fictional library, its
map collections, inhabitants and spaces, can be found on
http://www.picture projects.com/between/essay.html. (Note: some of
the links here are now out of date).
Among the Maps’ characters are the Chief Librarian, the Hermit, the
Cartographer, the Thread Collectors, the Mute Woman, the Blind Child,
the Twins, the Sound Maker, the Singer, the Star Dwellers, the
Astronomer, the Children, the Stone-Collectors, the Stone-Readers and the
Gazers.
The time frames of the Maps range from a single night to a span of many
centuries, and they are set in a variety of different spaces. In addition to
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the Library’s rooms, courtyards, and garden, these spaces include the
Sandstorm Desert, the Lake of the Heart, the Valley of Songs, the Village
of Handmaps, the City of Maps, the Island of Tenderness, the Library of
Alexandria, the Land of the Star Dwellers, and the Observatory. Some of
them are based poetically in actual locations, notably in Japan,
Czechoslovakia and Greece.
Since 2001, Pauline Oliveros and I have been involved in an ongoing
project entitled “The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts “ (sections
of which have performed in Berlin, Oakland and Troy, NY).
In the spring of 2009, Slobodan Dan Paich and I collaborated on an
exhibition, “The Library of Maps,” at the Bonnafont Gallery in San
Francisco. The exhibition consisted of large broadsheets of three of my
Library of Maps texts, some 90 small drawings by Paich, a group of
Dennis Letbetter’s photographs, plus a collection of stones and a weaving.
We also gave out at the openings a printout of the three poems
“illustrated” by a selection of Paich’s drawings.
Note: this “Library of Maps” exhibition will be reinstalled at the Porter
College Faculty Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, January 20-
March 5, 2010.
3. Plays & Multimedia Theater.
In the Fall of 2002 I began to work in theater: “The Cyber Theater of
Mneme (Memory) and Melete (Meditation),” 2002-2003; “From Vietnam to
Hollywood,” a collaboration with Dinh Q. Lê, San Francisco, 2003; and two
dance-dramas with Mary Sano, “Dancing/Dreaming, Izanami and
Amaterasu” (San Francisco and Tokyo, Fall 2003), and “Amaterasu, The
Blind Woman and Hiroshima” (Concert Hall, Kyoto, Summer 2004).
4. “From Far Away”
Begun in 2003, this is an ongoing series of texts (now numbering fiftyeight)
that started as my response to the Iraq War. I have written them
sporadically ever since then on a wide range of subjects (from AIDS in
Africa, and the Burmese 2007 monks uprising, to the life and death of my
101-year old adopted mother in early 2008). In the fall of 2008, a selection
of these texts were presented in a large illustrated book in an installation,
“An Atlas of War & Peace,” a collaboration with Ginger Wolfe-Suarez and
Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, in the “Bay Area Now” exhibition at the Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts.
5. Exchanges with Slobodan Dan Paich
For the last 12 months, I have been involved in a daily email exchange of
images and texts with Slobodan Dan Paich–a Serbian theater director and
artist, now based in San Francisco–that have covered a wide range of
subjects, ideas and moods.