Eleanor Antin

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Eleanor Antin (née Fineman; February 27, 1935) is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist and feminist artist.

Early life and education

Eleanor Fineman was born in the Bronx on February 27, 1935. Her parents, Sol Fineman and Jeanette Efron, were Polish Jews who had recently immigrated to the United States.

She attended the Music and Art High School in New York, New School for Social Research, and then the City College of New York, graduating in 1958.

There she met David Antin, a poet who would become her husband in 1961. She studied acting and had some roles, including performing in a staged reading with Ossie Davis at the first NAACP convention. She and her husband moved to San Diego in 1968.

She taught at the University of California at Irvine from 1974–79, and from 1979 was professor of visual arts at the University of California at San Diego.

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Career

She began her artistic career in New York as a painter and later moved to making assemblages, but it wasn't until the 1960s that she began to do the conceptual projects that would be her focus. Blood of a Poet Box (1965-1968) was the first in which she took blood samples from poets and displayed them on slides. The piece, which was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet, eventually contained 100 samples, including blood from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and is part of the Tate Modern collection.

Molly Barnes, a purple bath mat, a tumescent electric Lady Schick razor, a patch of spilled talcum powder, and a scattering of pink and yellow pills was created in 1969. Molly Barnes was the first in a series of "semantic portraits of people" that were often real or some times fictional [made] out of Antin's designs of brand-new consumer products.

Antin's best-known experimental work, 100 Boots, is Antin's best-known conceptual work. She designed 100 boots in various sizes and settings, photographed them, and created 51 postcards of the images that were sent to hundreds of recipients around the world from 1971-73. As the postcards were sent out at intervals ranging from 3 days to 5 weeks, 100 Boots depended on the recipients to recall and plan the boots' adventures. It chronicles the boots in a mock picaresque photo diary, beginning in the Pacific Ocean and ending in New York City, where their journey was displayed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Antin's 1972 performance work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, Unveiled, Photographs her naked body at 148 separate locations during a month of crash-dieting. According to Karen Rosenberg of the New York Times, the somber, almost classical work is a staple of early feminist art.

Antin appears in The Eight Temptations, 1972, denying the temptation to consume snack foods that would violate her diet. Eleanor Nightingale is a character that is a blend of Florence Nightingale and the artist herself.

Antin expressed these impersonations in 1974 as part of her overarching concern with the self's changeable properties: "I was interested in defining the boundaries of myself." I like the common tools to self-determination: gender, age, fitness, time, and space, as well as tyrannical limitations on my freedom of choice.

Antin embodied many alter egos in a project that she titled "Selves" that was executed in a variety of art styles from the 1970s to the 1990s. Four videos were included in this series: The King (1972), The Ballerina and the Bum (1974), The Adventures of a Nurse (1976), and The Archives of Modern Art (1987).

Antin has produced two major photographic series influenced by Roman history and mythology: The Last Days of Pompeii, 2002, and Roman Allegories, 2005. In Season Two of the PBS series Art:21, her work was chronicled.

She has had scores of solo exhibitions and has been featured in dozens of group shows, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Wien, and documenta 12 in Kassel. Her work appears 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 other things.

Her research is mainly concerned with issues of identity and the role of women in society. In a feminist artist talk for the Brooklyn Museum, she wrote, "I was determined to see women without pathos or helplessness."

Antin described her aspirations to be an artist in a 2009 interview: "I didn't know what kind of artist I was when I was a kid." I knew I was a painter, but I didn't know if I was an actor. I didn't know if I was a writer, but I didn't know if I was a painter. I was lucky that I grew up as an artist in a time when all the barriers were crumbling down. It was a time of invention and discovery. I was lucky."

"A young girl's struggle to escape from her first-generation Jewish Stalinist immigrants' chaotic family" and "her tragic, endearing, often amusing quest for art, self, revolution, and sex were interrupted by a kindly avuncular Stalin dispensing bizarre advice."

Her image is included in Mary Beth Edelson's 1972 film Any Living American Women Artists.

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Awards

• 1997: Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1998: National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Award
• 2003: International Association of Art Critics, Best Gallery Show for "The Last Days of Pompeii"