This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Eleanor Antin.
Born: 27 February 1935, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Eleanor Fineman
Eleanor Antin’s work questions the role of women and artists in society, the different identities everyone maintains, and the histories and legacies of contrasting artistic traditions. Her practice prefigures the most important feminist debates of the 21st century and is some of the most arresting and poetic Performance art of the 20th.
Maturing as an artist whilst hanging out with poets, experimental theatre makers and Fluxus artists in the bohemian subcultures of New York in the 1960s, Antin then moved across the country to California in the 1970s. From there she became central in the burgeoning feminist movement of the West Coast, and the vibrant artistic expressions that came out of its activism and deep processes of reflection on the position of women in America. For more than 50 years she has made work with her own body and as different alter-egos, and created installations, paintings, and writing that continue to mark her as one of the foremost feminist artists in the world.
Childhood
The artist now known as Eleanor Antin was born Eleanor Fineman to parents Sol Fineman and Jeanette Efron in 1935. Sol and Jeanette were Polish Jews from the village of Rosch (which was later destroyed by the Nazis) who emigrated to New York shortly before Eleanor’s birth. Both parents were Marxists and atheists. Jeanette, who was a communist with a strong affinity for all things Russian, had been an actress in the Yiddish theatre in Poland, and later became a creative businesswoman and entrepreneur in the United States, eventually owning several hotels and resorts. Sol worked in the garment industry.
Eleanor had one sister, Marcia, who was five years younger. After Marcia’s birth, their mother suffered from severe postpartum depression and was institutionalized, resulting in the girls being sent to an orphanage, which euphemistically branded itself as a ‘charity institution’ to avoid the negative connotations of that label. Eleanor struggled so much with the regimented environment that after two weeks her father brought her home. She then went to stay with an aunt for several months until her mother was well enough to come back to the family.
As a child, Antin and her sister took piano lessons, though Eleanor lacked her sister’s talent and soon quit. She spent much of her childhood riding her bicycle around the Bronx, reading books, and making and playing with paper dolls. Antin was a good student and was placed in the gifted program at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts on the Upper West Side of New York. Her mother took her and her sister on frequent visits to museums and galleries, and to concerts at Carnegie Hall.
Antin says that “When I was a kid, I didn’t know what kind of artist I was. I knew I was an artist, I just didn’t know if I was an actor, I didn’t know if I was a writer, I didn’t even know if I was a painter. I was fortunate that I grew up as an artist in a time when all the barriers were falling down. It was a time of invention and discovery. I was lucky.” She notes that her mother “thought that being an artist was the greatest because she had been an actor and always missed it. They were the best days of her life”. Her parents divorced when she was in high school and she moved with her mother and sister to 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, in what she called “drug city”.
Education and Early Training
From 1954 to 1956, Antin attended the New School for Social Research, where she studied philosophy, also studying acting at the Tamara Daykarhonova School for the Stage. During this time she was registered in the actors’ union Equity and worked as an actress under the stage name Eleanor Barrett for director Ossie Davis. She also modelled for painters Isabel Bishop, Moses Soyer, Jack Levine, and Ruth Gikow. In 1957 she decided to quit school and spent a year working as an actress with a traveling company in the play Bus Stop by American playwright William Inge.
Antin then attended City College of New York, where she majored in writing and minored in art, graduating in 1958. It was there that she met poet David Antin, whom she would marry in 1961. It was also around this time that Antin first made contact with the artists of the Fluxus group. Though she did not wish to become a member, she attended their events and exhibitions. The group was a significant influence upon Antin’s move to explore Conceptual art, from around 1965. Up to this point she had primarily been working as a painter and assemblage artist.
Antin and her husband lived on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, across the street from Caffe Cino, a popular spot for poetry readings and a center for the burgeoning artistic scene in the area at the time. They also frequented poetry readings and experimental theatre events at other venues in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, including the Five Spot Café jazz club, the Tenth Street Coffeehouse, Les Deux Mégots, Café Le Metro and the Poetry Project founded by Paul Blackburn at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Antin was deeply immersed in this bohemian environment, making friends and engaging with the innovations in music, theatre, poetry and visual art that were all around her.
Antin’s own work from the mid-1960s reflected this diversity. It included performances (including durational performances), performative photography, film/video, multimedia installations and assemblages, paintings, and novels. She held her first exhibition in 1968 at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Center. It was titled Flower Power: Eleanor Antin: Collages and Constructions.
Mature Period
In 1967, Antin gave birth to her son, Blaise, named after modernist French poet, novelist, and art critic Blaise Cendrars. The following year, the family moved to San Diego, as her husband David had been offered a faculty position in the Critical Studies department at the University of California at San Diego. From 1974 to 1975, Eleanor taught at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), before becoming a faculty member in the Visual Arts department of the University of California at San Diego from 1975 to 2002.
In California, Antin became very active in the Feminist movement, and frequently participated in the activities of the Woman’s Building, an arts education center in Los Angeles. Much of her work in the 1970s and 80s included alter-egos or characters of different experiences, races, and professions, who she would explore across the different mediums she worked in. In doing so she argued that the identity categories which govern the roles of people within society are unstable and fluid. This helped establish the principles of performativity that continue to shape and influence Feminist art practices today.
Antin was recognized by her peers as a leading figure in the development of these ideas. Her image was included in Mary Beth Edelson’s 1972 collaged poster Some Living American Women Artists, for example, which presented the images of several contemporary female artists, like Alma Thomas, Yoko Ono, Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, and Alice Neel, as characters in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
Late Period
Antin’s work grew in profile and popularity throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, appearing in a wide range of group exhibitions and major festivals and biennales. In 1997, Antin received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the following year she won a Media Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In common with many performance artists of her generation, it was not until the early 2000s that museums began to seriously consider the unique position of performance work like Antin’s in their collections, a process which has seen her work be acquired for the permanent collections of the Whitney, MoMA and other major American and international institutions.
Antin continues to advocate for the position of female artists and the role of women in society, contributing statements about the discrimination and marginalisation that still exists today to publications, catalogues, and books. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association in 2006 for her activism and commitment to pursuing feminist ideals through her art. In 2019 she revisited one of her most famous pieces CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, recreating a piece originally performed in her thirties as an octogenarian artist. Since the early 2000s her work has also begun to engage with urgent questions of climate catastrophe and war, often drawing on classical and art history to develop large scale photographic works that stage classical scenes as an allegory for events like the Iraq War.
Antin’s husband David passed away in 2016. She currently lives in Southern California with her son Blaise, his wife, Cindy Laskin Antin, and their son Zachary.
The Legacy of Eleanor Antin
Antin’s work from the 1960s to the present has been pioneering, particularly in relation to feminist discourses, Performance and Conceptual art. As artist and curator Carlene Meeker writes, Antin is a “seminal figure in the history of performance art”, and “one of the most prolific artists of the last several decades, moving freely in many forms of media, including live and Installation art, independent film, photography, video, drawing, painting, and writing”. Her earliest works, like Blood of a Poet Box (1965-68), explore the ways in which Conceptual art can be used to explore the idea of identity in new, immaterial ways. Her 1972 work CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, and her 1971-73 series 100 Boots represent some of the earliest examples of durational performance and long-term conceptual projects.
Antin’s numerous works that experiment with her different alter-egos or “Selves”, which began in the 1970s, represent some of the earliest examples of the use of performative photography in feminist explorations of identity. This use of performative photography heavily influenced a generation of later feminist artists, such as Cindy Sherman. Meanwhile, the physical modification and documentation of the artist’s own body in Carving: A Traditional Sculpture directly influenced the French artist ORLAN, who has used plastic surgery in and as her own Performance art, as well as Canadian-American artist Cassils, whose durational performance Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2011-13) chronicled the artist’s bodybuilding journey over several months and borrowed from Antin’s title.
At a conceptual level, these pieces together build a philosophy of identity as performative. This was an idea that wouldn’t be fully elaborated in academia by feminist theorist Judith Butler until the late 1990s, and so was prefigured by Antin’s artistic practice. This early expression of a concept later fleshed out extensively by feminist scholars is also apparent in the connections between Antin’s work and an understanding of intersectionality. This concept suggests that different identity positions interact and influence the treatment that people both receive from others and perceive around them (such as suggesting that a white woman will experience misogyny in a different way to a black woman, for example). This idea is implicit throughout much of Antin’s work in the 1970s and 80s, and yet the theory of intersectionality was not fully articulated until the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s. Antin’s work therefore embodied these concepts well before they were popularized and is as a result often used as an example to illustrate these theories in higher education contexts.