Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective

September 8 - November 12, 2000

Over the past 30 years, the renowned artist and filmmaker Eleanor Antin has created a powerful body of work that draws equally from the poetic and the political. Along with contemporaries like Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneermann, Antin played a formative role in the development of performance and feminist art, pioneering the use of autobiography, nontraditional narrative forms and fictive personae (the nurse, the ballerina, the king etc.) Yet, whether installation, performance, video or feature-length film, Antin's diverse projects are linked by their subversive humor, searching intelligence and common concern with issues of identity.

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective. A similar version of this exhibition - which was organized by Howard N. Fox, curator of contemporary art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) - debuted at LACMA last year.

The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8, and remains on view through Nov. 12. The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is located in Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekends. Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 935-4523.

"Antin's work is very important and very challenging but also very accessible," said Sabine Eckmann, curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, who arranged to bring the show to St. Louis after herself coming to Washington University from LACMA in 1999. "She uses a lot of humor and is very interested in telling stories through fictional identities and narratives."

It is the preoccupation with identity, Eckmann added, which differentiates Antin's work from that of her male contemporaries. "Her use of autobiography was very much a reaction to male-dominated forms like Pop and Minimal art. Antin was very consciously thematizing the body and identity issues in order to examine the role of the female artist and, by extension, of women in society."

Born in 1935, Antin first trained as an actress but, by the start of the 1960s, had become active in the New York art world. Early works like Blood of a Poet Box (1965-68), which collected blood samples from 100 poets, including Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, established her reputation as an influential member of the conceptual art movement. Antin moved to southern California in 1968 and continued to create such groundbreaking works as 100 Boots (1971-73), an installation/mail art piece that featured 50 pairs of boots photographed in a variety of settings (perched in trees, visiting a market, arriving on a boat in New York). That piece would earn her a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1973.

The early 1970s also mark the beginning of Antin's career as a video artist. Works like Portrait of the King (1972), in which she plays the bearded King of Solana Beach, and The Adventures of a Nurse (1976), featuring her alter-ego Eleanor Nightingale, prefigure the politically charged gender and identity inquiries of artists like Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman. Yet for Antin, such as characters also provided a means to explore the "frontiers of myself," as she put it, and were instilled with a heady mixture of masquerade and autobiography. The growth of her ballerina Eleanora Antinova, for example, who appeared in numerous works between 1973 and 1989, would mirror the artist's own graduation from low-tech video to fully produced films like It Ain't the Ballet Russes (1986) and The Last Night of Rasputin (1989).

Today Antin continues to explore the issues of identity and loss through film and large-scale installations. Her feature film The Man Without a World (1991), directed under the pseudonym Yevgeny Antinov, is an ode (of sorts) to the Soviet silent-film directors of the 1920s. Her most recent film, Music Lessons (1997), a collaboration with her husband, the poet David Antin, tells the story of the anorexic violinist Jeannie and her struggles to overcome a dysfunctional family.

The exhibition is made possible by the Missouri Arts Council, a state regency, the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, the Hortense Lewin Art Fund of Washington University and the St. Louis PRINTMARKET.