Strange Prosthetics: Rachel Rosenthal’s Rats and Rings

Rosenthal’s book, Tatti Wattles: A Love Story, reveals her aesthetic practice itself to be animated by the discourse of species. The drawings in this text, especially, suggest that Rosenthal’s self-identification as an artist is mediated by animality. The images also efface the human yet “en-face” the rat, de-emphasizing human power and privilege. These images are also marked by Rosenthal’s “auto-graphy” as a mover or dancer, by an alimentary tropology highlighting the body, by the concept of mediation, and by the taming of human exceptionalism. The argument follows that all of these elements in Rosenthal’s view of her artistic practice, self, and process are mediated by animality, and they challenge our received notions of art as a centrally human practice.