Art Papers Magazine, 1999

Eleanor Antin

In her work, Eleanor Antin (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 23-August 23) creates personas and explores their various characteristics and actions. Whether that persona is represented as a series of old black rubber boots, as a Russian ballerina or as an exhausted theatre performer, Antin fleshes out her characters in the fullest detail. She fabricates the scene and then fills in the missing information using other actors, friends, cut-outs and most often, herself.

Beginning in the 1960s, Antin investigated the relationship of art to feminism as well as to everyday life. She created image/text pieces such as her “Movie Boxes” (1969-70), in which she juxtaposed appropriated images and words, creating fictitious narratives about imaginary motion pictures. For Antin, an art project was akin to a research project; more often than not, other artists, writers and poets were involved. Blood of a Poet Box was one such early work. Here, 100 poets donated a drop of blood that was stored on a glass slide in a battered green box, an homage to both Marcel Duchamp and to Jean Cocteau.

Antin’s early pieces shared concerns with the conceptual artists working at the time who used image and text to describe states of mind. In the 1970s Antin moved away from purely textual description to video pieces and photo essays in which she used herself as subject. In Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) she photographed her naked body from the front, back and both sides every day for over a month so as to record the changes in hr body through dieting, to 10 pounds less than when she began.

In addition to works of self-exploration, Antin also crated external characters or situations through which she could document everyday interactions. Her best known early work was the “100 Boots” project (1971-73), a series of 51 photographs printed as postcards that recorded the forays of 100 black rubber boots traveling throughout the United States. The work was a serial mail art project, but the cards have now been collected as a narrative photographic work.

The installation at LACMA, carefully laid out by Antin with curator Howard Fox, moves chronologically from Antin’s early conceptual pieces to her later installations. As viewers move from room to room, they witness Antin’s transformations. The rooms are designed to complement the work; in the room where The Angel of Mercy, The Nightingale Album (1977) is presented, the walls have been painted a light green, white wainscoting encircles the room, a chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and an ornate bench is centered on the floor. These props suggest the time period depicted in the sepia toned photographs in which Antin became Eleanor Nightingale, a 19th century nurse who tended to soldiers on a Crimean war battlefield. To create these images Antin and her friends dressed in period costumes and playacted the struggles of the nurse with doctors, soldiers and other male superiors.

Antin’s work involves role playing with a purpose. When she became the King of Solana Beach in 1974 it was to explore strangers’ reactions to seeing a so-called King from another time period wandering the streets of southern California. She became the black ballerina, Eleanora Antinova, and the nurse, Eleanor Antin, RN, to explore social, racial, feminist as well as cultural stereotyping. Antin interacted both with art and non-art audiences during these explorations. In the late 1980s she began to create site-specific installations – architectural settings into which she placed objects, video tapes and images. Vilna Nights (1993) recreated a bombed out Jewish ghetto in Lithuania. In alcoves and windows amongst the ruins, silent characters in continuous video loops would go about their rituals – an old tailor mends clothes, two orphaned children share a crust of bread, a woman throws letters into a fire.

As Antin has been making artworks since the 1960s, a retrospective such as this makes it quite obvious that she was way ahead of her time. Antin was making set-up and staged photographs that explored different moments in history before artists such as Cindy Sherman who is now well known for this kind of work. Throughout her long career, Antin has shared affinities with conceptualists, feminists, and fluxus artists, yet the work she makes is uniquely her own.

Memory, time and history are the larger themes in Antin’s works. She is a performer, aware that she is creating on a stage. Whether that stage is photographed, videotaped, filmed, or described, it succeeds in transporting viewers out of their element and into Antin’s world. One becomes a careful listener and watcher. One learns about history, about racism, about sexism and about struggle by identifying with the characters Antin presents. We become a witness to events, past or present and are invited to learn from that experience and apply it to our lives.

JODY ZELLEN