LOS ANGELES — A king, a nurse, and two ballerinas stroll right into a bar. Or, extra precisely, they stroll into Eleanor Antin’s Seventies Persona sequence of images and drawings, presently on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, together with just a few different choices from the identical interval. In these intimately scaled conceptual works, the artist slyly takes aside the cliches and norms of recent art-making. Typically ignored within the artwork world in favor of extra theatrical (or theatrically) feminist counterparts like Cindy Sherman and Judy Chicago, Antin examines the constructs, or confines, of identification within the language of Twentieth-century pictures. The outcomes deconstruct each the self and the picture as fraught, absurd performances, with Antin staging sendups of storied inventive traditions and the tropes they depend on to supply that means. The outcomes are much less a punchline than a biting satire.
Documentary photographers of Antin’s period (she was born in 1935) usually took snapshots of frequent social varieties and quotidian landscapes, highlighting the dignity of on a regular basis life. Working with a standard movie digital camera, Antin’s photos undertake the sparse, unadulterated pretensions of photographers like Robert Frank or Walker Evans: “100 Boots Going to Church” (1971) contains a conventional white steeple on an empty street, with a palm tree within the foreground, framed in opposition to an expansive sky. At first look, the shot recollects basic photos of roadside Americana — however a better look reveals a marching line of darkish rubber boots stretching from one nook of the body to the constructing’s entrance. The plain setup rapidly and humorously subverts the scene’s Protestant patriotism: Antin’s insertion recollects each a military-style brigade — a extra disruptive corollary to quiet American life — and the falsity of documentary pictures’s supposed authenticity.
In her Persona works, Antin’s informality turns into much more of a farce, revealing the gendered subtext of self-serious societal representations. In “A Soldier’s Work is By no means Accomplished! (from The Angel of Mercy: My Tour of Obligation within the Crimea)” (1977), a combatant crouches in entrance of a military tent, darning a sock. The totally staged scene riffs on earlier Twentieth-century conflict pictures: Antin shoots in black and white movie and facilities her actor within the body whereas he completes a chore. His actions, and the artist’s selections in depicting them, highlight the contradictions constructed into the presentation of stereotypical masculinity; the stitching soldier enacts a feminized type of labor so as to proceed his acts of male-coded heroism.
One other identity-based drama seems in Antin’s Nurse Eleanor sequence. In a single eponymous work, the artist wears a nurse uniform and cradles a flimsy cardboard determine. Her exaggerated facial expressions and inventory poses satirize these of an instruction guide, turning the heralded, usually feminine-coded social kind — and the methods it’s usually represented — into an arch efficiency.
Antin makes it look straightforward; with just a few photographs, she takes aside photographic traditions by revealing the assumptions that undergird them. Some artists scream; others, like her, chuckle from the nook, simply ready for the viewers to catch on.
Eleanor Antin: Persona continues at Diane Rosenstein Gallery (831 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles) by means of February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
