LOS ANGELES – A king, a nurse and two ballerinas walk into a bar. Or, rather, they enter the seventies of Eleanor Antin Persona series photos and drawings, which can currently be seen on Diane Rosenstein GalleryTogether with a few other selections from the same period. In these intimate -scaled conceptual works, the artist cleverly makes the cliches and making modern art standards. Often overlooked in the art world in favor of more theatrical (or theatrical) feminist counterparts such as Cindy Sherman and Judy Chicago, Antin investigates the constructs or limits of identity in the language of 20th-century photography. The results deconstruct both self and the image as loaded, absurd versions, with antin -staging shipments of legendary artistic traditions and the tropics on which they trust to produce meaning. The results are less a punchline than a corrosive satire.
Documentary photographers from the age of Antin (she was born in 1935) often took snapshots of common social species and everyday landscapes, which emphasized the dignity of daily life. Working with a traditional film camera and take the images of Antin De Schaarse, genuine pretensions of photographers such as Robert Frank or Walker Evans: “100 Boots Going to Church” (1971) has a traditional white steep on an empty road, with a palm tree in the Palm tree in the foreground, framed against a vast sky. At first glance, the recording of classic images of Roadside Americana – but a further look reveals a marching line of dark rubber boots that extend from a corner from the frame to the entrance of the building. The obvious attitude quickly and humorously undermines the Protestant patriotism of the scene: Antin’s insertion remembers both a brigade in military style-a more disturbing consequence of the quiet American life and the forces of the supposed authenticity of documentary photography .
In her Persona Works, Antin’s informality becomes even more a farce and reveal the gender subtle of self-serious social representations. In “The work of a soldier is never ready! (From the Angel of Mercy: My Rour of Duty in the Crim) ”(1977), A warrior squats for an army tent, a SOK Namen. The fully staged scene riffs on earlier 20th-century war photography: Antin-shoots in black and white film and concentrates her actor in the frame as he completes a job. His actions, and the artist’s decisions to portray them, to the attention of the contradictions built into the presentation of stereotypical masculinity; The sewing soldier carries out a feminized form of work to continue his actions of male coded heroism.
Another identity -based drama appears in that of Antin Nurse Eleanor series. In one work of the same name, the artist wears a nurse uniform and rocks a thin cardboard figure. Her exaggerated facial expressions and stock poses satirize those of a manual, so that the announced, usually feminine-coded social type and the ways in which it is often displayed in an arc performance.
Antin makes it look easy; With a few photos, she takes photographic traditions apart by revealing the assumptions that underlie them. Some artists scream; Others, like them, chuckle from the corner, waiting for the audience to catch on.
Eleanor Antin: Persona Continue in Diane Rosenstein Gallery (831 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles) until 8 February. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
