Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Who Are You?

Do you know?

Who are you and how are you defined and who defines who you are and why? 

You decide (maybe you decide and maybe someone else decides) and then you can be that.  Buy the clothes, listen to the music, drive that type of car and live...there.

If you were standing there in those boots with the others in those other boots, who would you be?
 
 
 
 
If you dressed up like this and were this way perceived - is this who you are?
 
 
Is your body your own personal sculpture?  What process do you use?  Subtractive?  Additive?
Eleanor Antin - Carving-A Traditional Sculpture (1972)
Are you your skin color? or the shape of your eyes? or your profession? or your place in time?
Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova
from "The Ballerina and the Poet"
Are you so able to be anyone that you are not any one at all?  Or are you everyone?

These are the questions Eleanor Antin's art works make me think of.

Here is a video of an interview with her (brief) and also her documentary fiction of Eleanora Antinova from the Archives of Modern Art-West Coast Video Art-MOCAtv


Published on Oct 15, 2012.  Eleanor Antin uses fictional characters, autobiography, and narrative to invent histories and explore what she calls "the slippery nature of the self." In her video works, Antin uses role-playing and artifice as conceptual devices, adopting archetypal personae—a ballerina, a king, a nurse—in her theatrical dramatizations of identity and representation. In this work of documentary fiction, an archivist attempts to put together the "lost years" of Eleanor Antinova, the once-celebrated black ballerina of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, when she returned to her native America to eke out a meager living in vaudeville and early cinema.   Interview directed and edited by Peter Kirby.  Music:  "Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 62, MWV U161: No. 6, Allegretto grazioso" by Saulis Dirvanauskas
 
I love this artist.  I think she has more imagination and humor then she knows what to do with...certainly more than the rest of the world knows what to do with. 

Hope you have enjoyed your mid-week blog today. :)

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

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