Mike'sGift Shop opens on October 18, 2003 in San Francisco along
with a selection of Michael Rosenthal’s recent paintings and mixed
media works on paper. The height and shape of a small house,
‘Mike’s Gift Shop’ as the sign on the side of the little building tells
us, dominates the space. A Banner with Mike as the Virgin Mary
flies in front and the interior is stocked with Mike souvenirs and
devotional objects all of which are crafted in Mr. Rosenthal’s image.

Mike’s Gift Shop is a demonstration in wrongness.  “I got the idea for
the gift shop at my studio in Ukiah.” Rosenthal has a house and
studio in the isolated coastal foot hills above Ukiah. “I liked the
thought of putting a gift shop at the end of my one mile driveway
off a tertiary road with no signs where nothing would be for sale.”
It was clearly an absurdist impulse.

While consumer life from Starbucks to sex has been deconstructed
in art, the gift shop remains unvisited. Actual tourist gift shops
offer concrete souvenirs of experiences the purchaser may not have
had. You can buy an Elvis mug at Graceland but that doesn’t mean
you know The King. Yet there is something in having the object day
after day on the shelf that implies relationship.
Similarly a person visiting the beach at Santa Cruz must leave
the sand to purchase sea shells from one of the three sea shell
gift shops on the boardwalk.

What then is this non-experience that osenthal is memorializing in his
gift shop? “In the beginning there was a religious element.”
Rosenthal told me. It began with a collage of himself as a saint.
The collage morphed onto Saint Mike stamps then refrigerator
magnets and snow domes. “I don’t know much about the Saints when
they were alive but their stories and images are used to manipulate
and in the end, divide. So I made my own stamps and magnets,
created for the purpose of commerce.

"In this gift shop I am the Saint and my message is ‘
Be careful what you believe in.”If you can fabricate your own
universe, why not build success into it? It is ludicrous of me
to create this self anointed product line. ” So the gift shop is filled
with Mike products. There are Saint Mike Stamps and refrigerator
magnets, lawn gnomes in the image of a troll-like Michael wielding
a chainsaw are also available. You can buy Mike dolls in several
manifestations including Michael as the Madonna, Buddha,
Michelangelo’s David, a Renaissance Man in Louis XV print,
Mike as an artist,a truck driver and a memorable Mike as a soft bear.
If the Pope can Made from fabric in colors and textures from Barbie’s
Malibu Dream House, a shiny pink wrap mimics Mary’s star covered
cape from early Christian painting. A Seven-Eleven fake rose rests at
herfeet as the Virgin’s identifying attribute. The pacific face of the
Virgin should shine on us and inspire. Instead a digital photo of
Michael Rosenthal’s guileless smiling face has been sewn in.
He is a great warm lunk of a guy and the face he offers is not
cynical or condemning. Instead the warm humanity exposes the cold
indifference of the Barbie Virgin.


What is particularly nice about this work (I know that it is wrong
to speak of contemporary art in terms of ‘nice’ but that is what
I mean) what is nice about this work is the person of Mike. In all
forms he appears as warm and unassuming. It is not the face or hand
of the cynical modern artist ruthlessly tearing the veil from our eyes.
It is the caring face of humanity showing up amused as Buddha.
In the end the pieces are an exploration of self, weighed against
ideals. Rosenthal takes his picture of himself and tries it on a
series of archetypes. The face does not fit on the Virgin nor the
physical perfection of Michelangelo’s David. The works lightly
ask the question; if I am not these then what am I?
In so doing we discover that the plastic forms cast for our
adoration are not related to us and if we try to live in them
we will starve. In Mike’s Gift Shop, with no open hours
where nothing is for sale, it is a view of warm and imperfect
humanity that nourishes.

                                                           
                                                by Katina Huston   October 2003                        
 
Katina Huston writes for Artweek and Arts and Letters

page: [1] Installation view