magnificent obsessions
by Douglas MesserliEleanor Antin An Artist’s Life by Eleanora Antinova (read in manuscript)
Few, however, have attempted to explore
such generalized “types”—in Antin’s case, the King, the Nurse, the Stewardess,
and, most notably, the Ballerina—in the depths which Antin manifests variations
of these typologies. The Nurse, for example, might appear as a Florence
Nightingale-like figure in her photographic reenactments of the Crimean War in The Angel
of Mercy: My Tour of Duty in the Crimea of 1977; or in a performance such The Angel of Mercy in which in the drama
of 1977 and a later video of that performance (1981), Antin played out
situations of her life as a nurse; or even as a hijacked modern-day nurse in a
child-like encounter with created cardboard figures and sets in The Nurse and the Hijackers (1977),
intersecting with her Stewardess’ world.
The Ballerina, the most complex of all of
Antin’s personae, was not only represented in films and videos such as The Ballerina and the Bum (1974) and The Little Match Girl Ballet (1975);
in photographs such as Caught in the Act:
Backstage Moments—Torn Ribbon; and—particularly encapsulated within the
figure of Eleanor Antinova—in grand performances such as Before the Revolution (1979, performed live with actors in 2012)
and Help! I’m In Seattle (1986)
(works collected in book form as Eleanora
Antinova Plays [1994]*), but in numerous writings such as Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (published
in journals and chapbook) and Being
Antinova, a recounting of her experiences as an artist portraying an aged
Eleanora Antinova discussing her life in New York. Along with her Antinova
works, the artist has also created a rather large body of drawings, paintings,
photographs, costumes, sets, and sculptures to accompany her performances and
publications. So labyrinthine is her fiction surrounding Antinova that, at
times, the Black ballerina encounters other Antin personas, such as the
forgotten Russian-Yiddish film director, Antinov (one of whose two film-scripts
has also been published**) and other ancillary characters. So complex are the
various artistic manifestations of Antinova alone that, even if one were to
ignore all the other fictional characters and other kinds of art she was
created during these years, it seems hard to believe that it left Antin, the
human being, any time to exist in her own life. Yet, of course, I knew her
through all these years as a funny, very real and involved human being, raising
a family, teaching, and enjoying intense friendships—so say nothing of being
wife to one of the major poets and critics of the United States.
Throughout her art, but particularly with
regard to her Ballerina, Antin has sought to establish her (both her creations’
and her own) “credibility”—to insist that her audience give “credit” to her
fantasies.*** But, if one thinks about it, from a larger perspective, which
Antin’s art nearly always demands, we can see this as not just a personal
issue, as arising from a need for the artist to be accepted for her fantastical
creations, but rather as a search for art, in general, to have meaning upon and to transform life.
Eleanor Antin’s entire oeuvre, in
fact, insists that art is as important as any other activity in having a
practical and very real impact upon our lives. And strangely, as her boots
(represented in her famed postcard fictions 100
Boots [1971-73]) have gone marching through galleries and museums
throughout the world, and her various ballerinas have danced their way to the
hearts of hundreds of museum-goers and readers, Antin’s art has indeed proven
her argument. The artist’s creations have grown in proportion to her
exploration of them; just as she has meticulously created and related their
life-long activities, so have they, in turn, become more and more real to U.S.
and international audiences.
This time around, taking on a trope
common in 18th and 19th century autobiographical fictions
(one thinks of Poe, Melville, even the 20th century Stein), Antin
describes the work before us as having been left behind in a restaurant—where,
as a young student, Antin worked—by the elderly, little known Antinova—a red
leather notebook, later carried by Antin and husband David to Solana Beach and
their house near San Diego. At first, the book seemed “unreadable.” Like a
character in the Hollywood film, The
Bishop’s Wife—wherein an elderly scholar who cannot make sense of the
passages on which he is supposed to be commenting until an angel blesses him
with a sudden insight—so too does Antin suddenly find herself able to read
“that tiny flourishing hand” with great pleasure, and so, joyfully passes it on
to us as the final expression of the failed artist (although we all know, those
of us attentive to Antin’s career, that she has succeeded nonetheless).
Nearly all of these somewhat shadowy
figures have great moments onstage or backstage, including Eleanora,
particularly when she is chosen to dance a lead role (again after a rather
comical series of events when the dancer Sergei Pavlovitch first choses falls
into a faint, “her head on the barre”
knocking her unconscious”). Eleanora even travels, when the White Russians of
the company cannot (since it is now the Soviet Union) to Russia, in preparation
for which each of the Russian members send trinkets, communications, and gifts
to friends they left behind/ There the Ballerina encounters numerous “spies,”
including her own personal “protective” friend and the now-forgotten Russian
filmmaker Antinov, who asks her to perform in one of his movies.
It is this complete immersion in her
characters’ lives, particularly with regard to the Ballerina, that
differentiates Antin’s personae from other artists’ performance art. There is
almost a kind of madness in the intensity of exploring all avenues of possible
creative actions in which her fictional figure might have engaged, and her need
to document these becomes something close to obsession—one is tempted, in
melodramatic empathy, to describe it as a “magnificent obsession.”
As we know, however, all things have a
limited existence, and it is clear, just as Antin has long ago abandoned her
presentations of the King, the Nurse, and the Stewardess, that perhaps the day
would come to bring her beautiful Ballerina’s life to a close. Fortunately,
Antin has determined to announce this sad event by publishing one last volume
of Antinova’s memoirs, An Artist’s Life
by Eleanora Antinova.
Some of these works have appeared in
journals over the years, at least as early as 1978-1980 in Howard Fox’s and my
journal Sun & Moon: A Journal of
Literature & Art; but most of chapters appear as new revelations,
written (or perhaps, to maintain the fiction, I should say “reproduced”) more
recently by Antin.
All of these pieces represent Antinova
living out a life, as a somewhat begrudged member of Diaghilev’s unforgettable
Ballets Russes, with a sense of great wonderment and excitement, along with the
suffering and tortures that all romantically-conceived artists must endure. In
chapter after chapter we encounter the backroom intrigues of company members
who live in near starvation, feeding upon petty jealousies, envy,
argumentation, and even rage, alternating with intense pleasures, particularly
when they encounter wealthy men who might pay for their meals at Cocteau’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit or lovers who buy
them furs and jewels or, as in Antinova’s always somewhat comically sad lot,
provide the entire company with factory-made sweaters.
Returning to France and England, Antinova
is finally awarded an opportunity to choreograph a new work, performing in the
disastrously conceived Pocahontas—inexplicably
performed in an English tavern—images of which Antin had previously provided in
her documentary photographs.
But, in the end, we all know the story, so
tragically recalled in Antinova’s previous performance, Help! I’m in Seattle, wherein Antiova’s balletic career ends in the
seedy backstreets and small towns where Vaudeville and carney-like venues
continued to exist long after they had disappeared from the larger cities. In
the end, tragically, the metaphorical ups-and-downs of artistic life are
transformed into a nightmarish dream of the rise and fall of a hotel elevator
wherein Antinova loses her way, somehow getting off on a floor that no longer
contains any remnants of the present or living beings, a kind of “third act”
exit in which, alas, no flowers fall after the curtain drops—except perhaps in
memory.
If An
Artist’s Life at times reads a bit like a “fractured” fairy-tale, we
recognize that it is inevitable for the character that has embodied it. If the
real living artist has finally received her
long deserved
due for having created Antinova and the other embodiments of her art, the
character is necessarily a figure in deflatus,
something which ultimately, like the backdrops and tattered curtains, both
authors and actors must leave behind after taking their bows.
I cried a few tears over Antin’s often
witty, light-hearted and eventually sorrowful tales, and I’ll miss Eleanora,
while looking forward, nonetheless, to other developments in Antin’s future
work. Yet I know, even as Antin leaves the stage, her impishly determined
little Ballerina might, when no one’s even looking, get up to do another quick
pirouette en pointe, a little
unsteady and shaking perhaps, but still standing as high as she might, maybe
even shedding a tear behind a coy smile. If there’s anything Antin has proven
is that, even if “art is not kind to her children,” they cannot be so easily
killed off, for they live in the imaginations of all who encountered and
embraced them. We want to believe, and Antin has ably given us, over all these
years, something to believe in.
Los Angeles,
January 30, 2015
Reprinted
from Art Là-bas (February 2015).
*Eleanora Antinvova Plays was published
by my own Sun & Moon Press.
**
My Green Integer Press published Yevgeny Antinov’s The Man Without a World in 2002
***See
my essay on the performance of Antinova’s Before
the Revolution, “On Credit” in My
Year 2012: Center’s Collapse. See also my writings about Antin, “Experiment
and Traditional Forms in Contemporary Literature,” My Year 2000: Leaving Something Behind and “Reclaiming the Past,”
in My Year 2008: In the Gap.
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