Eleanor Antin.
Markle, Leslie
San Diego Museum of Art | California
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Since she moved to Southern California in 1969, photographer and
performance artist Eleanor Antin has occupied a central place in the
local art scene, acting as a bridge between early, first-generation
feminist work and later conceptual and multidisciplinary sources.
"Historical Takes" (through November 2, 2008), curated by
SDMA's Betti-Sue Hertz, gives an overview of this artist's
work since 2001, updating her 1999 retrospective at LACMA. Comprised
chiefly of recent large-scale, neoclassical tableau vivant photographs
in the style of Thomas Couture or Oscar Rejlander, Antin's
exhibition mines nineteenth-century salon paintings of Greco-Roman myths
and allegories, digitally altering them in line with contemporary media
follies, the conceits of fallen empire, and underlying themes of
"herstory." Divided into three series of C-prints--"The
Last Days of Pompeii" (2001), "Roman Allegories" (2004),
and "Helen's Odyssey" (2007)--these deconstructed
allegories have an obvious didactic tone, but their impish humor and
phantasmagorical quality infuse them with a contemporary style of
informality.
In All for Love (2007) and Going Home (2004), for instance, the
artist manages to condense these not-so-distant narratives into
satirical commentaries on the outtakes of history. In the first, the two
sides of Helen of Troy, one blonde and the other brunette, prostrate
themselves on the floor of a Rococo-style palace, vying for Cupid's
attention while Pan plays his flute. The second shows a bunch of
apparently washed-up toga types walking into the ocean holding
Magritte-like umbrellas, the shoreline littered with broken columns and
a lone nymphet on the lamb. Throughout the "Helen's
Odyssey" series, in fact, Antin takes great liberties with
Homer's Odyssey, using quasi-Lacanian archetypes to deconstruct the
sidelining of the feminine hero in classical literature. Persephone
Welcomes Helen to Hades (2007) shows the good and evil Helen twins
dancing around the body-littered floor of some crumbling empyrean
dungeon, while Antin appears in the far corner playing a grand piano.
In the show's catalogue, Amelia Jones refers to Antin as a
"mythographer of self," a thesis that is further consolidated
by the inclusion of three earlier quasi-historical photographic
series--The King of Solana Beach (1974-75), The Angel of Mercy (1977),
and Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (1981-87). Altogether,
respectively, a shopping spree at Vons complete with cape and false
beard, a period Civil War romp, and the backstage rise and fall of a
Russian ballerina, here the artist characteristically draws on multiple
disciplines or personae, those of theater, film, and art history, rather
than keep to the straight and narrow of traditional political art.
"Refusing to 'defeat theater' [Michael Fried] or the
equally oft-maligned society of the spectacle," says Jones,
"Antin instead embraces theatricality and simulation in her
performative images as well as in her installations, which scream out
their fakeness while encouraging an engagement with history."
In "Historical Takes," Antin not only takes on the role
of a fairytale princess struggling through transparently futile tasks
and journeys, but methodically takes this tawdry destiny apart, always
rejecting the masked realities for what she describes (in a catalogue
interview) as that fleeting kernel of truth which exists "somewhere
in ... between a murderous materialism and self-congratulating
emotionalism and bullshit idealism." Given this rare candor,
it's not surprising to hear echoes of Eleanor Antin in some of
art's most challenging figures, including Cindy Sherman, The
Guerrilla Girls, and even today's online grrls.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
