LOS ANGELES — A king, a nurse, and two ballerinas walk into a bar. Or, more accurately, they walk into Eleanor Antin’s 1970s Persona series of photographs and drawings, currently on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, along with a few other selections from the same period. In these intimately scaled conceptual works, the artist slyly takes apart the cliches and norms of modern art-making. Often overlooked in the art world in favor of more theatrical (or theatrically) feminist counterparts like Cindy Sherman and Judy Chicago, Antin examines the constructs, or confines, of identity in the language of 20th-century photography. The results deconstruct both the self and the image as fraught, absurd performances, with Antin staging sendups of storied artistic traditions and the tropes they rely on to produce meaning. The results are less a punchline than a biting satire.
Documentary photographers of Antin’s era (she was born in 1935) often took snapshots of common social types and quotidian landscapes, highlighting the dignity of everyday life. Working with a traditional film camera, Antin’s images adopt the sparse, unadulterated pretensions of photographers like Robert Frank or Walker Evans: “100 Boots Going to Church” (1971) features a traditional white steeple on an empty road, with a palm tree in the foreground, framed against an expansive sky. At first glance, the shot recalls classic images of roadside Americana — but a closer look reveals a marching line of dark rubber boots stretching from one corner of the frame to the building’s entrance. The obvious setup quickly and humorously subverts the scene’s Protestant patriotism: Antin’s insertion recalls both a military-style brigade — a more disruptive corollary to quiet American life — and the falsity of documentary photography’s supposed authenticity.
In her Persona works, Antin’s informality becomes even more of a farce, revealing the gendered subtext of self-serious societal representations. In “A Soldier’s Work is Never Done! (from The Angel of Mercy: My Tour of Duty in the Crimea)” (1977), a combatant crouches in front of an army tent, darning a sock. The entirely staged scene riffs on earlier 20th-century war photography: Antin shoots in black and white film and centers her actor in the frame while he completes a chore. His actions, and the artist’s decisions in depicting them, spotlight the contradictions built into the presentation of stereotypical masculinity; the sewing soldier enacts a feminized form of labor in order to continue his acts of male-coded heroism.
Another identity-based drama appears in Antin’s Nurse Eleanor series. In one eponymous work, the artist wears a nurse uniform and cradles a flimsy cardboard figure. Her exaggerated facial expressions and stock poses satirize those of an instruction manual, turning the heralded, typically feminine-coded social type — and the ways it’s often represented — into an arch performance.
Antin makes it look easy; with a few shots, she takes apart photographic traditions by revealing the assumptions that undergird them. Some artists scream; others, like her, chuckle from the corner, just waiting for the audience to catch on.
Eleanor Antin: Persona continues at Diane Rosenstein Gallery (831 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
