THE ART NEWSPAPER
SEPTEMBER 6, 2001
Juliet Rosenberg, affectionally known as the “den mother” of the Lost & Found art movement of the early 1970s, a short-lived offshoot of postmodernism that claimed any pursuit of meaning was a capitalist distraction keeping people from connecting to one another, has died.
Rosenberg had no next of kin and was discovered in her apartment at 7 Tailor Lane by her neighbor, photographer Sophia Righetti. Rosenberg “believed anything could be admired for what it was, instead of for what it meant,” said Righetti. This philosophy would, in fact, inspire Righetti’s own work. “The human desire for meaning and story is what will ultimately destroy us because it keeps us from seeing the bare, difficult truth. Juliet changed the way all of us at 7 Tailor Lane saw the world.”
Added Righetti, “Also, she threw terrific parties.”
Rosenberg helped 7 Tailor Lane—a former Diamond Exchange building in the Financial District, once the tallest building in Manhattan and the first one to be fireproofed—earn the minor-league Chelsea Hotel reputation it currently enjoys. She was the de facto superintendent to a hands-off but benevolent landlord who allowed her to rent the spacious lofts to artists at below market cost. It is unclear what the fate of the building will be without her.
Rosenberg’s art career was launched in the early 1960s with her traveling exhibit “Rose Mountain Lethargy,” the polar opposite of what Lost & Found would come to stand for. In the performance, she strapped an old sign for Sheriff Street to her shirt and used a bullhorn to yell, “I am Sheriff Street,” as she rode a bicycle around Manhattan. Sheriff Street was where Ethel Rosenberg—the first civilian American to ever be executed for espionage, along with her husband, Julius—was born. The street had been recently demolished to make room for public housing.
“Rose Mountain Lethargy is code for Ethel Rosenberg,” said a young windswept Rosenberg into a camera documenting her performance. “Ethel backwards is Lethe, which is the river gateway to the underworld where all of us must pass when we die. Lethe means ‘forgetting’ and is the soul of the word ‘lethargy.’ So lethargy, really, is the exhaustion that comes from trying so hard to forget. Rosenberg, of course, means Rose Mountain. And roses are possessing of mystical powers, according to this delightful little book I discovered at The Strand, about a young Victorian man called Crowley who told women’s fortunes using roses. Forgetting the past to remember the future, that’s what Rose Mountain Lethargy is all about.”
Once packed to the brim with meaning, everything about Rosenberg’s art would change when she discovered beatnik author Ari Epstein’s 1959 novel “Water Water.”
In this unusual and oddly prescient book, the world is dying of drought. If there are any humans in the book, the reader is never made aware of them. The narrator is a single drop of water, alone in the world, seeking only survival. A switch flipped in Rosenberg’s creative brain.
Anytime someone new moved into 7 Tailor Lane, she would buy them a copy and leave it with a card that said Welcome! There can be no meaning in a dying world.
“She actually thought we’d find that freeing,” said one new resident.
Likewise, the ethos of Lost & Found was meant to be a modern twist on Stoicism, a movement toward connection for its own sake and living “in the moment.”
For her first Lost & Found piece in 1972, Rosenberg returned to the rubble of Sheriff Street. There, she supposedly found an unopened envelope, addressed to “Karl.” The letter formed the centerpiece of her exhibit, which was also called “Karl.” She placed the letter on a plain wooden table in her apartment, illuminated by a spotlight.
Rosenberg never opened the envelope. She herself was part of the exhibit, standing next to the table, daring and bullying viewers to see the letter as something other than pure object. “Don’t you want to open it?” she’d taunt. “Is it a Dear John letter or grocery list or suicide note? Or did I make it all up and it’s an empty envelope?” Sometimes she would scream: “Do it! Coward! Open the [expletive] letter!” A hidden camera recorded these interactions, which Juliet would play back the following day on a bedsheet tacked to her wall, while simultaneously taunting that day’s viewers, adding cacophony and confusion. No one ever dared open the letter. “I would never tell Juliet, but it didn’t create connection so much as it scared the bejeezus out of people,” her former assistant said.
“We are lonely drops of water with nowhere to escape, so we try to find solace in false meaning,” said Rosenberg at a poorly attended retrospective of her work at P.S. 1 in fall 2000. “Innovation is our god, growth our religion, and it appears nothing will keep us from searching ever outward, ever upward, as we grow lonelier and sadder.”
Alas, Rosenberg could not keep the world from seeking meaning, and Lost & Found fell out of fashion by the early 1980s, a time of polyester and unprecedented wealth and corporate war. She threw herself into ‘den mothering’ for 7 Tailor Lane, doing her best to keep her artists safe from selling their souls for money. She would post flyers all over the building, sometimes photocopying entire chapters from “Water Water,” encouraging the artists to “disengage from the machinery of evil and greed that will destroy us and our world (while still paying rent on time).”
Little is known about Rosenberg’s life. We do not even know if Juliet Rosenberg was her given name. She was likely born in the late 1930s, though there is no official record of her birth, due to one early performance piece where she broke into the Office of Vital Records and managed to burn her birth certificate.
There is speculation that she may have been the daughter of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother—David Greenglass—whose testimony led to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The family has long been presumed dead, but it is also rumored that they continue to live in New York City under assumed names.
“Ah yes, rumors,” said Righetti, “the ultimate in wishful meaning-making.”