Tuesday Is Bright Anew With This Eleanor Antin Interview
Oh happy day: the legendary Eleanor Antin is interviewed at the Paris Review Daily! Erik Morse talked to Antin about her autumnal rise in London—this fall sees "the first major London showcase of Antin’s oeuvre, including seminal series like '100 Boots' (1971–1973)—often considered the defining entry of the mail-art genre—'The Last Days of Pompeii' (2001), and 'Helen’s Odyssey' (2007), part of her larger tableaux vivants collection, 'Historical Takes,' as well as a reading from her ten-year cycle of performances, films, photos, and writings as the fictitious Ballets Russes ballerina Eleanora Antinova, which was collected in a book titled An Artist’s Life last year." An excerpt from their conversation is below:
INTERVIEWER
In much of your work there is a kind of poetry of placeness—an interesting pull between the “vertical” histories of Europe and the “horizontal” landscapes of California. In retrospect, how significant was the move to San Diego in 1968 for you in rethinking your place within the art world?
ANTIN
Our arrival on June 5, 1968, after a ten-day car ride from New York to San Diego, began with a bang that never ended. I still can’t think of two places more divergent than Southern California and New York, where I was born and brought up. As the crow flies, I live about a quarter of a mile from the Pacific Ocean. Even our ocean is different from New York’s ocean. Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of overbuilding and so-called development here where the U.S. ends, just about thirty miles from Mexico. Though I live in a rural area, it is still, more or less, that same brilliant, sun-lit California we arrived in. But the bang I spoke of is literal. The night before we arrived, Robert Kennedy had just won the Democratic presidential primary in Los Angeles and was then killed an hour later. And twenty-four hours before, Andy Warhol had been shot. It made the front pages of a tacky little newspaper in the small city where we stopped overnight before tackling the early morning trek through the desert. These were the days when there was no air-conditioning in cars nor cell phones. Our one-year-old son developed a high fever the moment we arrived, and we cured him within a few hours with the sweet juice from the orange trees in our garden.
INTERVIEWER
In a series like “The King of Solana Beach,” which was featured as part of this year’s Frieze Masters, there is a strong sense of the Baroque in the way you reinvent the sleepy and remote beaches of San Diego as a sort of quixotic, medieval kingdom of imaginary subjects. Did Southern California represent a new stage set for you to develop a form of theater?
ANTIN
Yes and yes and yes. I had arrived in the theater of the new world, though I’m glad I wasn’t born here. My culture and my education was sophisticated European, with leftist immigrant parents and some great public schools thrown in. I would always remain something of an outsider in my new world. Indeed, in my life. So, I peopled this new land with the theatrical characters who had always lived in my head. Now they would live in this world. A Hollywood of my own making—funny, absurd, sad, and always, deep down, deadly serious.
INTERVIEWER
Feminist autofiction has become a very important genre in the millennial era of social media, fan fiction, third-wave feminism, and I Love Dick. Your various writing projects and performances as Eleanora Antinova appeared to have a profound influence in the art world but less so in the literary world, despite their appearances at the height of second-wave feminism. As someone who had focused as much on the discipline of writing as on the arts, did you hope that your experiments in literature would gain as much recognition as the performance?
ANTIN
I had a growing reputation as an artist. I invented my own ways of working, but they were related enough to the going thing to be acceptable, more or less. Within the next few years, everybody was working similarly to how I had been working, but I had already moved on to my next interest. These were never arbitrary—my new methods were usually related to the narrative and discourse of what I had been working on earlier. But “narrative” wasn’t, until recently, a respectable word in the postmodern art world. Neither, of course, was it in the modern literary world, which was the home of my husband, David Antin, who died last year. His literary works were built out of his performances, his improvised talking before an audience...
Feast your eyes on the rest of this interview, plus images, here.