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Career

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When she began her artistic career in New York, she started off as a painter and later turned to making assemblages, but starting in the 1960s she began to do the conceptual projects that would become her focus. The first was Blood of a Poet Box (1965-1968), in which she took blood samples from poets and put them on slides. The work, which was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet, eventually held 100 samples, including blood from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti,[1] and is in the collection of the Tate Modern.[2]

In 1969 she created a portrait, Molly Barnes, out of "a lush lavender bath rug, a noisy electric Lady Schick razor, a patch of spilled talcum powder and a scattering of pink and yellow pills."[3] Molly Barnes was just one of a series of "semantic portraits of people, sometimes real, some-times fictional, [made] out of configurations of brand-new consumer goods" that Antin created.[3]

100 Boots is Antin's best-known conceptual work.[4] In this project, she set up 100 boots in various configurations and settings, photographed them, and created 51 postcards of the images that were mailed to hundreds of recipients around the world from 1971-73.[5] 100 Boots relied on the recipients to remember and construct the boots' adventures, as the postcards were mailed out at intervals ranging from 3 days to 5 weeks "depending upon what [Antin] took to be the 'internal necessities' of the narrative."[3]

100 Boots documents the boots in a mock picaresque photo diary, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and ending in New York City, where their journey was presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In a famous performance work of 1972, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, Antin photographed her naked body at 148 successive stages during a month of crash-dieting.[6] The somber, almost classical work is a staple of early feminist art, according to the New York Times.[7]

In The Eight Temptations, 1972, Antin poses in mock histrionic gestures, resisting the temptation to eat snack foods that would violate her diet. In the 1970s/80s, she created several videos in which she played invented personae, including an Elizabethan-style king, a Romantic-era ballerina, a contemporary black movie star called Eleanora Antinova, and Eleanor Nightingale, a character that is a combination of Florence Nightingale and the artist herself.[1]

In 1974, Antin described these impersonations as part of her overarching interest in the transformational nature of the self: "I was interested in defining the limits of myself. I consider the usual aids to self-definition—sex, age, talent, time and space—as tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice."[3]

More recently, Antin completed two large scale photographic series inspired by Roman history and mythology: The Last Days of Pompeii, 2002, and Roman Allegories, 2005. Her work was profiled in Season Two of the PBS series Art:21.[8]

She has had dozens of solo exhibitions and has been represented in countless group exhibitions, including at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Wien, and documenta 12 in Kassel.[9] Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.[10]

Her work is largely concerned with issues of identity and the role of women in society.[6] "I was determined to present women without pathos or helplessness," she wrote in a feminist artist statement for the Brooklyn Museum.[9]

In a 2009 interview, Antin described her path to becoming an artist: "When I was a kid, I didn't know what kind of artist I was. I knew I was an artist, I just didn't know if I was an actor, I didn't know if I was a writer, I didn't even know if I was a painter. I was fortunate that I grew up as an artist in a time when all the barriers were falling down. It was a time of invention and discovery. I was lucky."[2]

In 2013, Antin published an autobiographical novel, Conversations with Stalin, about "a young girl's struggle to find her way from her crazy dysfunctional family of first generation Jewish Stalinist immigrants", and "her desperate, endearing, often hilarious quest for art, self, revolution and sex, abetted by a kindly avuncular Stalin dispensing bizarre advice."[11]

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Knight1999 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference aaa.si.edu was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ a b c d Stiles, Kristine (2012). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: Sourcebook of Artist Writings (Second Edition). Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 892–894. ISBN 9780520257184.
  4. ^ "Eleanor Antin profile". Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  5. ^ "100 Boots". Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  6. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Stein1989 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ "Eleanor Antin". Art in the Twenty First Century. Art21, Inc. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  9. ^ a b "Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Eleanor Antin". Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  10. ^ "Eleanor Antin profile". University of California at San Diego. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hoberman2014 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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