Eleanor Antin is all sorts of exciting. She's interested in storytelling, in blurring lines between history and the present and fiction and reality; in questions of identity and gender. Which all sounds pretty hifalutin, but what I guess it all boils down to, is that her photos are never just photos, they've always got some killer hook behind them. So, for example, my favourite ever Antin photos, 100 Boots: she takes 100 pairs of wellies and photos them in different parts of Southern California. In front of churches, in military formation standing one in front of another over mountain tops, crowding round dance floors googling at an exotically-clad dancer. But that's not hooky enough, so she makes the photos into postcards and sends them off to the great and good: artistes, dancers, libraries, wherever(ok, not wherever, exactly, not Domino's Pizzas or anything, but you get the picture), now and again over a two year or so period, then (then!) the boots, having taken Southern California, storm New York, becoming the stars of the show at MOMA for a few months where they hide in a crash pad and you can only see them through a peephole.
I love this. I used to live in Barcelona, right near MACBA (which is their modern art gallery). I'm a bit weak at the knees for MACBA. I should come clean: I wasn't always. The first time I saw it the building made me feel a bit headachey. It's designed by Richard Meier and it looks like an enormous cartoon laboratory from 2000 lightyears into the future. But it works, somehow. When you get in there you feel very tranquil and spacey and light, so it got so as whenever I needed cheering up I'd swing by. I guess what I find sort of endearing about MACBA is that it doesn't feel the need to change the art a lot. I had a year long membership there and there were maybe three, four different exhibitions tops. But it's sort of nice, because you get to feel pretty affectionate towards art in a way you probably wouldn't in some slick London gallery. Like familiar faces on the street. Yeah, okay, enough lyricising.
So, obviously, as you might have guessed, some of the shots from 100 Boots were there. And they were my favourite, I suppose, because you've got this huge idea of the epic journey, of these boots taking two years to go from Southern California to New York, and getting posted all over the country, like less ambitious latter-day Odysseuses, but at the same time the boots, often as not, look either forlorn or absurd, like a gaggle of women at a hen party. Also, I know this isn't a particularly intellectual judgement to make upon them, but I mean, it's so fucking cute, somehow. I'm not sure how Antin's managed to make inanimate objects adorable, but she definitely does. So that for me, is the immediate appeal. I'm less knowledgeable about this second set of photos I should talk about. I'm not entirely sure whether her Helen of Troy ones were part of her Last Days of Pompeii exhibition, but I'm going to group them together, because what she does the same sort of thing in both sets of photos (which I'm afraid will be posted separately, above, because blogger hates me ramming huge numbers of photos down its throat at once) , which is reconstructing the ancient world in a chintzy nineteen century salon painting style, while popping in a few surprising modern elements. So the Helen of Troy ones are great. She styles Helen of Troy out like she's some bubblegum popping Valley Girl, and puts her beside all these muscled hunks who look authentically classical and are just splayed across this harsh rocky landscape, contorted in pain. What's brilliant is she's got Helen with a friend looking at all these men in complete disgust, as if (to paraphrase Antin) she finds all their idealistic would-be hero violence just absurd. And, with the Pompeii ones, better to just quote Antin, as she's far more eloquent than I could ever be on the subject:
"Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and its flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, where the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Now in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation."
Obviously, this isn't the A-Z of Antin's photos. She does some very interesting stuff where she assumes the identity of a nurse, Eleanor Nightingale and takes sepia-tinged photos of her in the Crimean War, mopping the soldiers' wounds and so on. And there's also this amazing set of photos she takes of her naked body over a 36 day period where she's on a diet, about the way her body grows closer and closer to classical sculpture. But I mean, if I went into that, where would I ever end? Eleanor Antin is ridiculously prolific, and ridiculously interesting, and it just never ends. So, that's it for today!
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