lives and portraits
by Douglas Messerli
Eleanor
Antin “Eleanor Antin: What time is it?” / Los Angeles, Diane Rosenstein / Howard Fox
and I attended the May 14, 2016 opening
Catherine
Opie Portraits / Los Angeles, Hammer
Museum / Howard Fox and I visited this show on May 18, 2016
In
1969, having recently moved from New York to Southern California, Eleanor Antin
began a series of California Lives,
assemblages of new consumer goods and household objects that were meant, in
some vague way, to define the lives of iconic characters, some real and others
fictional, that she had begun to encounter and imagined in California. Although Antin also
included “texts” that briefly described the figures, elliptical narratives that
describe the activities and lives of this figures, as Howard Fox has suggested,
these commentaries do not so much “explain” the visual assemblages as they
serve as the kind of dramatic character sketches appearing before some plays.
Indeed, some of these figures such as “Molly
Barnes”-- a real individual with whom I am acquainted--are characterized through a
rather puzzling gathering of materials that I might never have imagined for
them, in this case a pinkish bath mat, electric razor, pills, powder, and powder
puff—although I might certainly have imagined she once owned each of these
objects.
A figure out of a newspaper article is
described accordingly:
KNX reported that Robert Olmstead
of Del Mar, California, was shot by the
highway patrol while hitching near
Sacramento. According to the news report
when the officers stopped to
question him he opened fire on them at point
blank range with a sub-machine gun and
they were forced to kill him.
The accompanying
assemblage, titled “Merrit” is represented only by a gasoline can, a hat with a
fabric-piece patch, and a comb. Presumably this represents a wanderer who at any moment might explode.
A single mother, “Jeannie” is described as
working nights and worrying about her daughter, having sex occasionally with a
mustached lifeguard. Jeannie eventually becomes a masseuse, while her daughter, given a red Camaro by grandmother, a car which she crashes on the freeway, remains, after the crash,
"unhurt." “Jeannie” is represented by a TV tray, Melmac coffee cup and saucer,
curlers, matchbook, and cigarette.
In short, the 1970 show at Gain Ground
Gallery surely puzzled many of its attendees. Who were these people? And why
were they being represented in this manner?
In one sense, of course, Antin was
attempting to get to know her new environment through these clearly pop-cultural
tableaux; and today we can also easily see that these are apiece with her
numerous fictional representations of herself and others; and we can recognize
a strong feminist approach to her abstraction, wherein conceptual reality is
not represented in grids or metal plates (as in the work of Carl Andre or Donald
Judd) but is generated by the personal encounter with the American dollar,
through everyday objects readily available in nearby stores and catalogues.
To New Yorkers, perhaps, her following
show, representing similar assemblages of 8 New York women (Portraits of Eight New York Women)—very
real friends of the artist, gallery owner Naomi Dash; painter and critic Amy
Goldin; anthropologist Margaret Mead; dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer; painter
and performance artist Carolee
Schneemann; museum publicist Lynn Traiger; poet Hannah Weiner; and poet and
playwright Rochelle Owens—might have been a bit more comprehensible.
Yet, even here, the four women I
personally know in this 1970 gathering, originally shown in a rented space at
the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, seem somewhat oddly represented. I might
well imagine the easel, mirror, red velvet, and jar of honey for the luxurious
bodily whorls and rolls of Schneemann’s art, and even the umbrella, chair,
binoculars with case, and thermos of the ever-alert, always observing
anthropologist Mead, but the decorative table, heart-framed chairs, plates,
plastic utensils, napkins, tumblers, hammer, teapot for Hannah Weiner, who
spent most of her later years seeing words on people’s foreheads and traveling
across the bands of her television set, came as a surprise. Although, as Antin suggested: "I knew her when she was much younger."
Antin herself describes Lyn Traiger’s
reaction to her own “depiction”:
Only one woman wanted her
portrait which I gave her gladly. A year later,
she called to say the piece was
making her nervous and her therapist
suggested she give it back. The portrait
consisted of a standard black
city apartment door with several
locks, an eye hole through which
she could spy on who was outside
the door, a welcome mat, a bottle of
skimmed milk and fat free cottage
cheese with an envelope (morning
delivery) and the apartment keys
left "accidentally" in the lock, probably
the night before. Surely, a
portrait of vulnerability and distress. It was
courting danger in then crime-riddled
NY. So the model finally got it but
didn’t want to look at it anymore
In short, perhaps Antin’s second of body
of work, also displayed in the Rosenstein show, was not so better received.
Which is perhaps, given these works were later replicated for a renowned show
at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, and have become legendary as early
feminist visions, why Antin has chosen to ask “What time is it?” It suggests
that she is questioning the perception of her work over time, almost pleading
with her audience to rethink what at first they couldn’t quite comprehend:
It’s now almost a half century later. These
are the original sculptures.
Have people changed so much? Has
the art world? "What time is it?"
Is it still 1969 and 1970 or is
it 2016? Does it matter?
Yes, I would argue, it does very much matter. Although we can now better assimilate and accept these marvelous somewhat Dadaist-linked “portraits” or sculptured “lives,” they came out of a period where they seemed so original that their audiences were literally stymied by their conceptual originality, and were forced to rethink—as Antin made us do also in her later Carving, a Traditional Sculpture—what precisely is sculpture, what even is art?
Yes, I would argue, it does very much matter. Although we can now better assimilate and accept these marvelous somewhat Dadaist-linked “portraits” or sculptured “lives,” they came out of a period where they seemed so original that their audiences were literally stymied by their conceptual originality, and were forced to rethink—as Antin made us do also in her later Carving, a Traditional Sculpture—what precisely is sculpture, what even is art?
Some of the same
tensions exist in Catherine Opie’s new show, Portraits. Once again, Opie has taken photographs of contemporary
friends, such as the Los Angeles artists John Baldessari and Mary Kelly, New
York-based artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, novelist Jonathan Franzen
(reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace) and
performance artist Ron Athey, representing them—through nuanced lighting,
careful posing, and positioning them against totally black backgrounds, while
framing these images within rectangular and oval frames—almost as 18th
and 19th century figures who might be at home in the National
Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
As curator Connie Butler states:
"Fundamental to understand Opie’s
portraits is the
element of time. …There is a slowness to these pictures
that extracts from the viewer and extended pause.
Emerging from the rich, velvety blackness of the back-
grounds, these individuals have a stillness and composure
that, in some cases, is contrary to how each person
actually is in life. Opie’s light draws them out but
enshrines them in something mute and other-worldly."
element of time. …There is a slowness to these pictures
that extracts from the viewer and extended pause.
Emerging from the rich, velvety blackness of the back-
grounds, these individuals have a stillness and composure
that, in some cases, is contrary to how each person
actually is in life. Opie’s light draws them out but
enshrines them in something mute and other-worldly."
Somewhat like Antin’s “portraits,” Opie’s
more literal photographic portraits create a kind of gap in time within the art
itself—not so very different perhaps from Antin’s more recent photographic
Roman landscapes. And the question in Opie’s small but lovely show at the
Hammer might also be “What time is it?”
Los Angeles, May
19, 2016
