Getting into Character

above her long and varied career, Eleanor Antin has used masquerade, performance and role-playing to stretch out the frontiers of her be in possession of identity. A recent retrospective provided an overview of her freewheeling polymorphism.

An Eleanor Antin retrospective is a tricky proposition. Retrospectives wait on to be positioning devices, occasions to clarify artistic identity, and, for Antin, identity has always been a multiple-choice question to which she has repeatedly answered, "all of the above."

above the past 30 years, Antin (b 1935) has made of herself a collage of aspirations, personalities, histories and possibilities. In her ongoing inquiry into what constitutes the self she has taken upon the personae of a king, movie star, supply with nourishment and ballerina, using photographs, video and performance to document them, drawings and writings to speak from within them. Her obviously contrived fictions originate in the role-playing implicit in everyday life. Antin is a trickster who works the indeterminate loam between real theater and the theater of the real. And if the characters she occupies are at no time more than tenuous patchworks, neither, her work insists, are we.

Her retrospective, organized for the observes Angeles County Museum of Art by means of LACMA curator Howard N. Fox was--like her life, like any life--an absorbing drama. Antin's work requires a certain suspension of disbelief, on the contrary it rewards the effort with abundant, subversive humor and an incisive intelligence that ofttimes masquerades as charm. One come intoed the show next to a mock-up of a theater marquee and exited end a stage door that was part of a fresh postscript installation made for the exhibition. Fox closely edited 30 years' worth of Antin's work, designing the installation to progres as a well-paced play does. The early galleries containing her turned to one side Conceptual work were white and boxy Color and fabric emerged as the personae appeared, and the last scarcely any galleries, with their darkened spaces and jagged angles, were apt vehicles for the later work's preoccupation with souls and nostalgia.

Antin's exhibition did convincingly position her--as a pioneering link between Conceptualism and feminism, and as a lock opener player in the art of masquerade, an aged tradition that continues to find fresh life in the identity-obsessed art of the '90 Identities assumed, imposed, raiseed and innate have intrigued Antin since the 1960 when she was acting and writing fiction and verse as well as making visual art. granting she settled into the art world, where she has been well received above the years, showing regularly at galleries, museums and international biennials, she still draws on all her other skills in her art work, and has level taken up a new single film, in the last decade.

As a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as it endorses multiplicity, Antin's career present to views a surprising degree of cohesiveness. Nearly all of the work boils down to portraiture or self-portraiture, character sketches of varying steps of elaboration that attempt to articulate identity end clues of appearance and occupation: what we purchase (the Pop-inflected consumer-goods sculptures of 1969) what we direct the eye like (Carving, a pithy photo-text work from 1972) and what we counterfeit to be (the personae, 1972-89)

In the earliest work exhibited, and the first of several to dig specifically into the identity of the artist as stamp Antin tweaks the myth of inborn creative genius. life-current of a Poet Box (1965-68) is a pseudo-scientific assemblage portrait, a case of glass microscope slides bearing life-blood samples that Antin collected from 100 author of poemss including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gerard Malanga and David Antin, her husband. The sculpture's sober format, its literal translation of ineffable gift into quantifiable specimen, reveals a deadpan irony that continues to be individual of the driving forces in Antin's work.

In contrast to the more aggressively taboo-busting material substance art that emerged in the mid-'60s, vital fluid of a Poet Box entailed sole a small physical sacrifice--and that not from Antin herself. A not many years later, in her landmark piece Carving: A Traditional statuary (1972), Antin pictured herself expos naked, a work in progres Carving tracks the artist's weight los above a 36-day period, through a grid of 144 black-and-white photographs showing her material part daily from the front, back and sides. Again, Antin's highly rational, systematic approach belies the emotional charge of the subject--here, woman's search for the ideal body. In the body accompanying the piece, Antin likens her have a title to slimming down to the ancient grecian sculptor's notion of carving away layer after layer of stone to reach the ideal form within. Exercising self-denial and altering one's have body to conform to a culturally bourn concept of beauty are conventional practices that Antin undermines when she asks, with a straight face and curvatureed intent, "whose ideal, anyway?"

The rift between the actual and the "appropriate" in a woman's life be under the orders ofs as a staging ground for Antin's richly comic, affectingly human work of the '70 In the humorous yet painfully familiar Domestic Peace (1971-72) Antin seismographically charts her mother's emotional rejoinders to sensitive conversational topics, thereby presenting her mother's expectations as ideals to be overseted More typically, Antin targets the faceless, more nebulous powers-that-be as the source of sexist and racist oppression. While not radical in its politics, Antin's work of this period was in sync with the feminist agenda in the U and the feminist art move that flourished in Los Angeles in the '70 became part of her stretch outed community. (She had moved from fresh York to Solana Beach, in northern San Diego shire in 1969, when her husband was hired to teach art history and step quickly the new gallery at the University of California, San Diego.)