Reviewing 1970s and 1980s Feminist Art Practices in
the 1990s:
Three Major Exhibitions on Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler
Community vs. Context in the Reception of Eleanor Antin’s Retrospective
Lucy Soutter
The Eleanor Antin retrospective curated by Howard N. Fox at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1999, was strikingly well received. The show and its catalogue were praised locally, in The Los Angeles Times, and nationally, in a string of positive reviews in publications including Art in America, Art Issues, Art Papers, Art Week and New Art Examiner. The majority of reviewers shared an enthusiasm for the exhibition's accessible installation. While some shows of work made in the 1960s and 1970s seem to offer up relics of an idealized irretrievable presence, the Antin retrospective animated the artist’s career into what Leah Ollman, writing in Art in America, called an “absorbing drama”. Reviewers were also united in their approval of feminist themes and strategies at play in Antin's work, and the sympathetic, approachable way the exhibition and catalogue foregrounded issues of gender and difference. As a culmination of this warm response, the retrospective won two awards from the International Association of Art Critics in 1998-9: second place for best exhibition (with first place going to the show Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1956-63 at Newark Museum), and second place for best catalogue (first place having gone to Kirk Varnadoe and Pepe Karmel's catalogue for the Jackson Pollock retrospective at MoMA). In this paper I will discuss the way the positive response to the Antin retrospective, particularly notable at a time of backlash against feminist art, rested on three key curatorial decisions: to make the installation and catalogue accessible, to frame Antin as a pioneering feminist artist, and above all, to foreground Antin’s biography and public persona.
I would like to begin by outlining my own investment in the way Eleanor Antin’s work is understood. I am currently engaged in writing a dissertation on the role of photography in 1960s conceptual art. While I am fueled by a deep enthusiasm for my topic, my research and writing often feel fraught. The problem originates with the rhetoric or tone of first generation conceptual work made in the late-1960s and early 1970s. In an effort to distinguish themselves from the values of expressionism, post-painterly abstraction and pop, conceptual artists took on a de-personalized, pseudo-scientific or academic presentation. Signalling seriousness and difficulty, these works were designed to privilege the intellect over the senses. It is hardly surprising then, that the literature on conceptualism (with Lucy Lippard's work being a notable exception), is highly specialized, jargon-laden and esoteric. This leads me back to my own dilemma: I would like to engage with the full complexity and rigor of conceptualism, but I also want my writing to be accessible, and to express my own opinions in some approximation of my own voice.
In this context, Eleanor Antin is a role model for me. When she entered the fray as a conceptual artist she was facing a similar bind. She wanted to be taken seriously alongside “The Boys”, as she calls them in conversation, but her interests diverged sharply from theirs. Antin’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s is particularly inspiring to me in this regard. Works such as Blood of a Poet Box, Domestic Peace, Carving and 100 Boots negotiate between markers of conceptual seriousness (pared down style, systematic working procedures, a detached authoritative “voice”), on the one hand, and a commitment to narrative, humor, and trouble-making, on the other.
The Blood of a Poet Box of 1965-8 is a good example of this balancing act. Antin collected and catalogued blood samples from 100 poets in a pre-fabricated specimen box. This piece pushes conceptual literalism into the realm of absurdity. The blood samples present a direct physical trace of each poet, scientifically preserved for posterity, but the logic of the set rests on a the romantic notion that a poet’s creative force flows through their bloodstream via the pumping of their poetic hearts. Many conceptual artworks function as thought experiments, leading a viewer through an idea that hinges on a central lack, an emptying out of expressive content or traditional form. Blood of a Poet Box fits in with this model in that it appropriates its form and working procedure from a non-art source. Yet despite its pseudo-scientific form, the box, with its title drawn from Jean Cocteau, has much in common with evocative, overdetermined surrealist objects. Using a key bodily fluid to make reference to dozens of absent bodies, the piece has a kind of expressive density. In a typical Antin move, it juxtaposes the conceptual refusal of artistic presence with the implied richness of 100 poet’s combined works.
I was unable to see the Antin exhibition myself, because I was living on the other side of the country when it happened. A friend sent me the catalogue as a birthday present, and a very nice present it made. I was delighted to have a chance to see reproductions of and read more about works that I knew only by hearsay. The book's design and format are unusual. The small size and rounded corners invite us to turn the thick pages with childlike delight. The images are interspersed within the text, encouraging us to flip and browse. Clearly it would be impossible for a book to fully document a career that includes so much video and performance. Yet it seems to me that the catalogue resists completeness deliberately. Even a relatively contained piece like 4 Transactions (1972) is only partially illustrated-the catalogue reproduces two of the piece’s four pages, perhaps implying that Antin's practice is too prolific and polymorphous to be contained in a single volume.
With my academic background and academic investment in Antin’s work, I cannot help but ask myself what is given up when diverging from the standard retrospective catalogue format. While this book is clearly intended to reflect the playful spirit of Antin’s work, and in many ways does so successfully, it makes certain sacrifices in the process. Would audiences encountering the work for the first time through this book find it edgy, challenging and important? Or cozy and user-friendly? While the rounded corners may make the book appealing, they convey the message that the artwork inside is going to be comfortable and easy to take-which anyone familiar with Antin’s mischievous social manipulations, and gender and race-bending performances will know is not at all the case. The catalogue is very well-documented – as well as a checklist, it includes Antin's exhibition, performance, film and video history, as well as an extensive bibliography – but these materials are squeezed into small print at the back of the book. In terms of my own work, I was most disappointed that the catalogue did not provide new historical or theoretical material to consider Antin's relationship to conceptualism or narrative.
Eleanor Antin has persisted throughout her career in discussing her work in relation to successful male artists such as Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Gilbert and George, Michael Heizer and Robert Morris, as well as in relation to feminist peers. The catalogue touches on some of these connections but does not extend them. While Lisa Bloom's essay, ‘Rewriting the Script: Eleanor Antin’s Feminist Art’ provides a historical perspective on the role of gender and Jewish identity in Antin’s work, Howard Fox's monographic essay, ‘Waiting in the Wings: Desire and Destiny’ emphasizes Antin’s artistic development. Fox traces a chronological evolution from work to work. In doing so, he mentions a variety of possible frames of reference, but chooses to describe the works primarily in terms of the artist’s personal interests and motivations.
By including a long interview with the artist in the catalogue, Fox encourages readers to view Antin’s career in terms of her biography and public persona. This strategy is very effective at providing immediate access to Antin’s art, but has troubling implications for the long-term reception and historicization of the work. As art historian Anna Chave has described, biography has often played a problematic role in the reception of work by women artists, particularly since the valorization of a de-personalized aesthetic in the minimalism of the early 1960s. While male artists such as Robert Morris or Carl Andre provide strategic fragments of biographical information to direct particular interpretations of their work, female counterparts such as Eva Hesse often suffer from overly biographical readings in which their bodies and lives are equated with their artistic production. Eleanor Antin is a fantastically charismatic person (I would characterize myself as one of her biggest fans). In the critical response to the show, however, it seemed that colorful descriptions of the artist and her public persona risked overshadowing the work. Jan Estep, for example, writing for the New Art Examiner article opens her article with the question, “What kind of person takes as his or her hero 100 pairs of plain, black rubber boots…” The reviewer goes on to talk about the artist’s “spunk” in the way she “cantankerously but generously shares her observations about her work” in the exhibition catalogue. Julie Joyce in Art Issues writes about Antin’s “at times obsessively eccentric point of view” and calls her work “refreshingly wacky”. The one negative review, by Anne Wagner in Artforum, appears to condemn the work on the grounds that it cannot be effectively separated from the artist's own “(melo)dramatic flair.”
Wagner’s disapproval of Antin’s work is in large part a matter of taste. Using the terms “pantomime” and “haberdashery” to evoke what she perceives as a self-indulgent, overblown style, Wagner reveals a personal preference for work with a cleaner, more self-sufficient mode of address. I raise this point to remind you that this is exactly the climate of taste in which Antin launched her career, in the heyday of an austere pared-down conceptual aesthetic. In my view, Antin’s decision to exploit, and then leave behind this masculine-coded aesthetic is a crucial aspect of her career, and one which cannot be understood without reference to the context in which she was working.
This observation leads me back to Anna Chave’s methodology in her writing on Hesse, as a possible model for approaching Antin’s work. Chave pinpoints a bias in the historicization of minimalism, and at the same time establishes a place for Hesse beside her male minimalist peers. Furthermore, her comparison between the rhetoric used to describe Hesse and the male artists offers a new way of reading minimalism. Rather than merely accepting the masculinist authority of certain minimal works, we are encouraged to explore the aesthetic and historical ramifications of the movement's repression of biographical, subjective and expressive elements.
Along the same lines of investigation, I would offer a few brief, suggestive comparisons. What happens, for example, when one reads a work like Antin’s Domestic Peace (1972) in relation to a conceptual “classic” like Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1969)? Antin’s piece (the title is a pun) is a staged social intervention, taking place in the domestic sphere. The artist scripted a series of potentially upsetting conversational gambits, and then documented their effect on her mother, producing a pseudo-objective graph of the resulting emotional distress. Here we see a diagram resulting from a conversation about Ted Kennedy. Barry’s Closed Gallery is an earlier work, with an illustrious place in a history of avant-garde gestures. While Malevich had emptied the canvas, and Yves Klein had filled the gallery with ineffable essence, Barry closed up shop, claiming the idea of the closed gallery as conceptual art. Barry’s intervention is social in that it has a potential physical and intellectual impact on audience members who either try to go to the gallery or work their way through the thought experiment that the gallery is not available to them. But Barry’s piece is directed primarily at the institution of art-it changes our conception of what art can be. When the two works are examined side by side, Barry’s elegantly simple gesture makes Domestic Peace seem imprecise and manipulative. On the flip side, by moving art into the domestic sphere, and even into the relationship between mother and daughter, Antin’s piece makes Barry’s work seem very dry and self-reflexive. Antin, too, questions the role of art in our lives, implying that the avant-garde blurring of art and life has the power to subvert the most fundamental human relationships.
Or to take another example, what happens if we look at Antin’s 1972 piece, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, her 36-day documented diet, in relation to Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed, of the same year, in which he masturbated under the floor of the Sonnabend Gallery every other day for three weeks, bombarding his audience with suggestive amplified messages? Antin inserts her body into the modernist grid, while Acconci entombs himself in the white box of the gallery. Both pieces foreground endurance, and the authenticity of the artist's body as material and subject matter. Both pieces perform gender in an aggressive manner that forces viewers to confront their own attitudes and assumptions. Yet the impact of the pieces is very different. In attempting to “carve” her body into the societal “ideal”, Antin offers a very different space for identification and audience response than Acconci does, with the piece in which, as he describes it, “You walk across room, over ramp/under ramp, all day, I hear you, build up fantasies, talk to you/masturbate because of you-for you-with you”. Most critics read a degree of irony-or room for irony-in Carving. Seed Bed, in contrast, relies for its disturbing effect on its deadpan sincerity.
To offer a final example, what happens if we juxtapose, as I do in my dissertation, the picaresque narrative of 100 Boots (1971-3) with the thwarted narratives of Douglas Huebler’s Variable pieces? Antin used the timing of her serial postcard piece to heighten the narrative tension as the boots set out from home to seek their fortune, find a job, lose it, join the circus, arrive in NYC, and engage in dozens of other loaded scenarios. Huebler, too, made many series of photographs, but used several techniques to keep the images from being visually rich, or adding up to a story. In Variable Piece #4, New York City of 1968, for example, the artist took photographs at a busy New York intersection, but kept his eyes closed, and photographed only when a pause in the traffic noises indicated that the light might be red, allowing pedestrians to cross the road. These images are connected by their conceptual system and by a fixed camera position. Yet Huebler’s resistance to narrative fullness or visual interest is so extreme as to be almost perverse-it gives us a sense of why Antin felt such a strong urge to make a narrative work at this moment, and reminds us that she was going out on a limb in doing so. Using the mail as a distribution system, 100 Boots enabled Antin to bypass the gallery system and proceed directly to the Museum of Modern Art. Along the way, however, the accessible “story” of the piece, as well as its cuteness jeopardized her seriousness in the eyes of her conceptual peers at a time when narrative was a dirty word.
In suggesting these comparisons, I do not mean to imply that Eleanor Antin’s work cannot stand alone, or that it is only useful or important insofar as it illuminates the work of other artists. Rather, I want to make sure that in the midst of celebrating Antin as a feminist artist, we continue to appreciate her achievements in the context in which they occurred, giving the work credit for its complexity, seriousness, and intertextual engagement with the art of the time. In an interview last year, Eleanor described to me her frustration with the ways that interdisciplinary, intermedia artists have been simultaneously celebrated and undermined by a certain kind of institutional treatment. Fluxus artists, for example, she described as being treated like “little pet puppies”. I feel very strongly that Eleanor Antin, the artist, should not suffer a similar fate. The critical success of the Antin retrospective demonstrates that biography can be an effective tool to make feminist art accessible to both new and old audiences. It is important to the evolving reception and historicization of feminist work to continue to examine and reexamine even strategies with such desirable ends. Eleanor Antin’s work has much to teach us in this regard. Even at its most personal, it offers a model for dialogue between accessibility and seriousness, community and context.
These papers were presented at the 89th College Art Association conference in Chicago, February 28-March 3 2001.
Copyright © : Lucy Soutter, February 2001
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 14, 2001