Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Who Are You?
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?
 |
| Eleanor Antin - Carving-A Traditional Sculpture (1972) |
 |
| Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova from "The Ballerina and the Poet" |
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
Hope you have enjoyed your mid-week blog today. :)
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)