Filed under: Art | Tags: 100 Boots, Eleanor Antin, Female Artists, Photography
Antin’s Odyssey
Photographer Eleanor Antin may be considered a rather distinguished female artist, but that doesn’t mean you’ve heard of her. Like with many female artists through the decades, Antin is one of the names incanted among scholars of the arts and those that go on an all out “women in art” witch hunt. You can find her, but the trouble is that you have to know who and what you’re looking for beforehand. See the problem here?
There should be no “secret club” of information, no “magic words” (perhaps chanting “Judy Chicago” three times fast?) that one needs to know in order to access the talents of these spectacular females. All of this information should be readily available and supported by cultural society. This is not to say that male artists gain a lavish amount of praise in our society; it’s true that artists as a collective group are under appreciated and seldom discussed in the general public. Having said that, I can bet you that for every male artist that does happen to become a household name (Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ansel Adams) there is a handful of women you will never learn of (Alice Neel, Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Eleanor Antin) that you most certainly should learn of. The only solution to this problem is, of course, to discuss these women more often and integrate them into popular art culture, and that is precisely what this blog is meant to do. Being a student of the arts, I am just one of those folks that were lucky enough to be granted a covert pass into the female artist “motherload” (was that a pun? I can’t tell). Eleanor Antin is one of the many talented women that I had the great opportunity to learn of, and she is most certainly a woman that is worth discussing.
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Eleanor Antin might be best known for her recent satirical mock-history work (Helen’s Odyssey, The Last Days of Pompeii) but it is her conceptual work of the early 70’s that leaves the greatest impression on me. Though I do admire her famous conceptual piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, it is one of those works that is so often discussed as a staple of modern feminist art that I won’t be saying much about it. It is, of course, worth the praise, but it doesn’t need the publicity. What I will be focusing on is the lesser known (yet equally groundbreaking) photo series, 100 Boots.
In 1970 Eleanor Antin thirsted to create a hero. She longed to construct her own modern day Odysseus and send him on a grand epic adventure (not through the vast treacheries of ancient Greece, but at least over the abundant California countryside). It was in her sleep that this desired protagonist materialized for the first time—Antin dreamt of 100 boots facing the sea. The very next day she got to work making her vision a reality; she traveled to her local Army Navy surplus store and purchased 100 black, empty boots, all of them blank slates ready to be filled with purpose and character.
The result? 100 identical black boots that find themselves on a wily adventure; breaking laws, scaling the organic countryside, engaging in warfare and ending up in the smoke-and-steel plains of New York City. Eleanor Antin describes the evolution of this epic visual narrative in a small introduction at the beginning of the 100 Boots book collection:
…We took 100 Boots down to the beach to look at the sea. We took him to the market, the bank, and the church. He seemed to be a good suburbanite. But sometimes he looked restless rounding a corner to nowhere. He began to champ at the bit, and, ignoring a “No Trespassing” sign, he climbed over the chain-link-fence protecting a power transformer. He had committed his first crime and had to hit the road. He caught a ride in an old Ford Falcon. Later he reappeared in a meadow, hanging out with the cows…and 100 Boots was on his way to his next adventure.
Perhaps the most inventive aspect of this piece is Antin’s method of getting her work out to the public; she sent each photograph of 100 Boots’ legacy to a random list of spectators as postcards through the mail. For three years various households across America received a visual update of 100 Boots’ progress, while an increasing number of people asked to be added to the mailing list. For many people the regular postcards began to become like the expected letters from a loved one, a welcome update and “wish you were here” from an old friend. “…the time of the mailings intersected with people’s lives,” Antin elaborates. “It spilled out of their mailboxes along with bills, letters, newspapers, Christmas cards, divorce papers. They could tape it to the fridge, tuck it away in a drawer, throw it in the trash”. Because of this imaginative method, Antin managed to create a work of art that she could integrate into the lives of others, one that could grow and evolve over time just as the individual viewers did.
The following are just a few of my favorites from the collection of 51 photos:
“100 Boots on the way to Church“
(mailed April 5, 1971)
“100 Boots on the Road“
(mailed September 7, 1971)
“100 Boots Out of a Job”
(mailed September 18, 1972)
“100 Boots on the March”
(mailed February 20, 1973)
“100 Boots Go East”
(mailed May 11, 1973)
“100 Boots Cross Herald Square”
(mailed June 6, 1973)
Unfortunately, this collection is not very easy to come by. Resources on the internet are sparse and often of low quality, and the book form of the collection has been discontinued. Unless one happens to live near MoMA (New York’s Museum of Modern Art) or was fortunate enough to be on the original mailing list, one can really only attempt to find a used copy of the book (23 copies are currently available on Amazon with prices ranging from $12.85 to a surprising $96.39).
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Section on Women Who Rock will be posted later in the week.
Filed under: Art, Music | Tags: Devics, Female Artists, Indie Rock, Janine Antoni, Music, Performance Art
Janine Touches the Horizon
Another contemporary female artist that I’ve only recently learned of is Janine Antoni. Though Antoni is often placed into the category of performance art, she considers her own work to be more about the process of creation instead of the act of performing. Antoni utilizes her body and mind to orchestrate multi-faceted pieces that exist and evolve over a period of time, often at the hands of her own insistence. This desire to organically construct and alter her work is apparent in pieces such as Gnaw and Lick and Lather. In both of these pieces Antoni begins with a solid and basic form; Gnaw begins with one healthy chunk of lard and one of chocolate, Lick and Lather‘s core consists of chocolate and soap. In Gnaw Antoni transforms the two cubes by chewing into them, using the bits that she extracted with her mouth to make a box of chocolates and tubes of lipstick. Lick and Lather also begins with two vague forms, though she sculpts these into busts of herself. Gently she licks the chocolate bust of herself, and gently she washes her body with the bust of soap. Though both of these acts come across as tentative and loving, one can eventually see that the fine features on both forms are slowly being erased– washed away down the drain or dripping down the back of the throat of the artist.
Perhaps my most favorite piece of Antoni’s is not one that is about the evolution of forms, but it is about process. In 2002 Janine Antoni performed Touch, a piece that she diligently prepared for by learning to tightrope. Once she finally felt comfortable with her balance (or lack thereof) she took her portable tightrope home with her to the Bahamas and proceeded to tread the familiar horizon of her childhood. When Antoni’s foot meets the sea line it certainly doesn’t feel like all that lies below her is a string of rope and air; one can almost feel the absolute concreteness and shaking certainty that she has touched down on what is undeniably real and fathomable. One is almost envious, for Antoni surely seems to have made sense of the intangible, made use of the impossible. For those few moments she is boundlessly free.
View Touch here.
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Women Who Rock
As with most people, I’ve been through quite a few musical evolutions in the course of my short life. I’ve grown out of music in a matter of years, months, and on some strange occasions even weeks or days. There are really only a few bands that have managed to snag a back seat and progress with me, and one of the few that I can readily remember is the band Devics.
I don’t really even remember how I first came across this band, I just know that I was lucky enough to find them when I was in a quite depressing musical phase (literally — Switchblade Symphony, Theater of Tragedy, Dead Can Dance). Though Devics isn’t really a good choice if you need a cheering up either, they still had the versatility to filter into each and every genre that I obsessively dug my nails into for years to come. Their sound has changed a bit since I first came across them; the CD that they released in 2006 feels a bit more polished than some of the songs off of The Stars at Saint Andrea and My Beautiful Sinking Ship. Still, to this day I sit back and listen to songs like “Connected by a String” and “My Beautiful Sinking Ship” and am transferred to a tarnished land of brass and velvet where the women wear their their hair in tight curls and swoon onto ornamental chaises in the most dramatic and elegant of poses. In the curling sound waves of these songs there are people strolling along muddied and barnacle-clad wharfs on fantastically gray days, parasols and walking canes on the ready. There are old cities, buildings with many windows that look out to the dark romantic streets of Europe, used up carnivals and the faded gray crime scene-like Polaroids of your previous generations. Yes, it’s a bit of an over-the-top and theatrical description, but this is a band that evokes and encourages the dramatic and theatrical.
Give them a listen!
Devics- My Beautiful Sinking Ship
Devics- Connected by a String
Devics- Heaven Please
Filed under: Art, Music | Tags: Female Artists, Marina Abramovic, Music, Performance Art, Post-Punk, Punk
Who Creates the Limits?
Marina Abramovic is one grossly underrated performance artist. This is a statement that I can now make, having just learned of her recently myself. She is perhaps best known for her collaborative work with fellow performance artist Ulay, but it is her own personal pieces that have the strongest effect on this art geek. Whether her piece is a matter of seconds, minutes, or hours, Abramovic never seems to fail to kick the very core of me with her frank sexuality and personal destruction. The woman can appear before you as the most alluring of figures, only to degrade you and herself to nothing more than a mere joke. She can figuratively cut you as she nicks her own flesh, bruise you exhaustively as she drudges herself down to nothing on her pristine white stage. She is comedy and tragedy rolled into one, a farcical disaster, a fabulous calamity. The woman will show no mercy for herself or anyone else, and you are by no means an exception.
In case you aren’t familiar with her collaborative work with Ulay, here is a slight recap. Marina Abramovic and Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) met in 1976 in Amsterdam, where they both discovered that they were born on the same day. Marina says that for her there was an instant attraction. For a span of about 15 years they continued to create pieces that dealt with human interaction in various forms; many of their pieces involved the exchange (and destruction) of energy from one person to another. Other themes included reliance, trust, and testing the limits of a strong bond that two people may share. Here is a link to one of their more famous pieces, “Expansion in Space”.
Marina’s own pieces often speak much more about isolation, desperation, and internal conflict. She will switch from a seemingly high sense of self to an apparent self-loathing in one breath, sometimes stroking her skin sensually and sometimes tearing at it with knives and other menacing items. One can never know if she is just that remarkably comfortable with herself, or if she simply never has been.
Below is a link to her video piece The Star (1999), which illustrates a remarkable range of the different humors, agonies, and absurdities that she expresses in her performances. Though this seems to cover a wide range of her work, it is not really even a scratch on the surface. She has created so many effective pieces over the course of her life that one cannot sit down and discuss them all without putting aside a good amount of time. This is especially the case when considering her newer works, which of course are not mentioned in the video due to the date of production.
Lastly I would like to post a link to a wonderful question-answer session with Marina Abramovic, conducted by the Tate Channel. It’s hard to not be at least slightly inspired by her answer to the question, “how far is too far?”.
Tate Channel interview with Marina Abramovic
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Women Who Rock
Instead of discussing one single band this time around, I think that it’s time for more of a ‘themed’ music post. Here are a few songs from various (highly obscure) female-fronted punk bands that are all about women’s traditional domestic obligations and how they feel about them. Enjoy!
Vital Disorders- Let’s Talk About Prams
The Petticoats- Normal
Androids of Mu- Bored Housewives
