Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin
Born Eleanor Fineman
(1935-02-27) February 27, 1935
Bronx, New York
Nationality American
Spouse(s) David Antin
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Award (1998), International Association of Art Critics award for best gallery show for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (2003)

Eleanor Antin (born Eleanor Fineman, February 27, 1935) is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist and feminist artist.[1]

Early life and education

Eleanor Fineman was born in the Bronx on February 27, 1935.[2] Her parents, Sol Fineman and Jeanette Efron, were Polish Jews who had recently immigrated to the United States.[1] She attended Music and Art High School in the Bronx, New School for Social Research, and then City College of New York, graduating in 1958. There she met the poet David Antin, who would become her husband in 1961.[3][4] She studied acting and had some roles, including performing in a staged reading with Ossie Davis at the first NAACP convention.[4] She and her husband moved to San Diego in 1969.[5] She taught at the University of California at Irvine from 1974 to 1979, and from 1979 was professor of visual arts at the University of California at San Diego.[6]

Work

When she began her artistic career in New York, Antin 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,[5] and is in the collection of the Tate Modern.[4]

100 Boots is Antin's best-known conceptual work.[7] 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 to 1973.[8] It 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.[9] 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.[9] 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 and 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.[5]

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.[10]

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.[11] 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.[12] Antin's work is largely concerned with issues of identity and the role of women in society.[9] "I was determined to present women without pathos or helplessness," she wrote in a feminist artist statement for the Brooklyn Museum.[11]

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."[4] Antin is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

In 2013, Antin published an autobiographical novel called Conversations with Stalin (published by Green Integer). The book is 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."[13]

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

References

  1. 1 2 Meeker, Carlene (1 March 2009). "Eleanor Antin". Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  2. ↑ "Eleanor Antin", Jewish Women's Archive, Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  3. ↑ Handy, Amy (1989). "Artist's Biographies - Eleanor Antin". In Randy Rosen; Catherine C. Brower. Making Their Mark. Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-1985. Abbeville Press. p. 238. ISBN 0-89659-959-0.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Antin, Eleanor (8–9 May 2009). "Oral history interview with Eleanor Antin, 2009 May 8-9". Archives of American Art (Interview). Interview with Judith Olch Richards. Smithsonian.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Knight, Christopher (16 May 1999). "Picture the Concept... Eleanor Antin, the subject of a 30-year LACMA retrospective, has made a mark playing with ideas in myriad personae. But who is she really?". Los Angeles Times.
  6. ↑ Spivey, Virginia B. (1997). "Antin, Eleanor". In Delia Gaze. Dictionary of Women Artists, Volume 1. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. pp. 193–195. ISBN 978-1-884964-21-3.
  7. ↑ "Eleanor Antin". Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  8. ↑ "100 Boots". Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  9. 1 2 3 Stein, Judith E.; Ann-Sargent Wooster (1989). "Making Their Mark - Art with an Agenda". In Randy Rosen; Catherine C. Brower. Making Their Mark. Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-1985. Abbeville Press. pp. 136–138. ISBN 0-89659-959-0.
  10. ↑ "Eleanor Antin". Art in the Twenty First Century. Art21, Inc. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  11. 1 2 "Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Eleanor Antin". Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  12. ↑ "Eleanor Antin". University of California at San Diego. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  13. ↑ Hoberman, J. (2014). "Eleanor Antin's Conversations with Stalin". Bookforum. 20 (4): 46.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Eleanor Antin" (PDF). Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  15. ↑ Artforum 1979, page 10
  16. ↑ Rosenberg, Karen (5 September 2013). "She Creates Herself in Multitudes: Eleanor Antin's Selves at Columbia University". The New York Times.
  17. ↑ "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution". The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  18. ↑ Deimling, Kate (13 June 2013). "The California "State of Mind": A Q&A With Curator Karen Moss". Blouin ArtInfo. Retrieved 13 May 2014.

External links

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