Ellen Cantor

Critical text

Ellen Cantor (Detroit 1961–2013 New York) combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. In her drawings, Cantor lifted characters and sequences from iconic films, reorienting the ideological transmissions of the source material. Fictional figures from Disney cartoons, cult horror films, New Wave cinema, and family movies provide a visual foil to Cantor’s intimate disclosures. Magnetised by the doleful naivety of characters such as Snow White and Bambi, Cantor would extend their narrative horizons to include vivid sexual encounters and crisis-ridden relationships. She was also personifying actual people, who grapple with all sorts of preconceptions and behavioural patterns. Cantor was convinced that in current ‘reality’, popular culture stands in for personal experience and vice versa. In the ‘Mickie & Minnie Suck’ drawings from 1996, the cartoon lovers Mickie and Minnie are engaged in a fierce struggle. It is a love story gone awry. Considered as figures that have a lasting effect on a child's soul life, they become mirrors of that infantile stage in which Cantor locates the root cause of heteronormative (self-)submission.

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge