Eleanor Antin

Critical text

Eleanor Antin (b. 1935, New York) is an artist whose work has been at the forefront of feminist discourse. Since the early 1960s, Antin has developed a multimedia practice in painting, sculpture, performance, and costume design. In 1969, she moved to San Diego from New York where she became heavily involved in the local feminist movement and participated in the activities of the Woman’s Building, an arts and education centre in Los Angeles. Antin is known for works that use a variety of narrative devices to challenge historical gender, racial, and social roles. For example, Antin’s 100 Boots (1971–73) is a conceptually rich work exploring narrative, materiality, and the dissemination of images, and consisting of fifty-one postcards featuring photographic images of fifty pairs of boots in various locations. The artist constructed a narrative about a heroic figure who “walked” the reverse of Antin’s journey: from California, the boots “arrived” in New York and the images were exhibited at MoMA. Also included in the presentation at Back to the Future is the radically challenging work Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (1977–80), exploring the life of a (fictional) black ballerina in Diaghilev’s famed 1920s Ballets Russes. The King of Solana Beach (1974–75) features Antin dressed as a bearded monarch by turns powerful and vulnerable. The Shakespearean quality of Antin’s monarch demonstrates her capacity to engender a vast emotional register in works that are at once absurd and poignant.

Text by Anna Gritz