ALDEN PROJECTS™: Eleanor Antin

Showing posts with label Eleanor Antin. Show all posts

Eleanor Antin 100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show

February 24 – April 9, 2017

Opening Friday, February 24: 6 - 8pm

Eleanor Antin. 100 Boots at the Checkpoint. 1972 Photo © Eleanor Antin

100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show opens on February 24^th, 2017 (6 - 8 pm) and runs through April 9^th at Alden Projects™. This exhibition presents recently discovered vintage photographs by Eleanor Antin from her personal collection, expanding our understanding of the peripatetic adventures of her most celebrated series, 100 BOOTS (1971-73).

100 BOOTS is a travelogue, along the lines of Huckleberry Finn or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, featuring the cross-country adventures of 100 stage-photographed rubber boots—Army-Navy surplus boots. They are a unitary protagonist in an allegorical narrative that a then-contemporary audience easily connected with the Nixon era and Vietnam War. The work earned its initial underground reputation as a series of 51 components that were sent through the mail over a two-and-a-half year span, to between 600-1000 recipients, bypassing the conventions of reception and distribution. All of the postcards are accompanied by plot-driving titles, dates, and shooting locations, all printed verso. Bringing the war home in such a direct manner, 100 BOOTS was celebrated for its canny circumvention of the conventions of unique artworks well before the Museum of Modern Art invited Antin to exhibit there in 1973.

What is not widely recalled are the specifics of Antin’s multi-component MoMA installation of 100 BOOTS, which included three distinct sections. The largest in the North West Gallery was Crash Pad for 100 BOOTS (1973), an installation comprising a room-within-a-room, described in the museum’s exhibition materials as “a tenement apartment for the boots”…“complete with mattresses, sleeping bags, radio, and a front door equipped with a peep-hole and a chain lock.”[1] (Crash Pad for 100 Boots is presently in LACMA’s collection). Hanging in the Far West Gallery were the better-remembered 50 postcards (the final, 51^st card captioned “100 Boots Go on Vacation,” was sent from California after the show closed). Also notably present were more than two dozen photographs of the “BOOTS adventures in New York” all of which are not otherwise pictured as postcards. The dimensions of the “photograph panels” are listed on the typewritten Checklist as “each approximately 20 x 16 in” (but also corrected by hand to read “each approximately 8 1/8 x 12 in”).

And so this exhibition sets out to clarify that the work we thought we knew so well—what the artist call’s “my fur tea cup”—extends beyond the four corners of the postcards. 100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show, curated by Alden Projects™ in collaboration with Eleanor Antin, brings to light “lost” and mostly unknown pictures of the boots in California and New York, most approximately the same range of scale as listed above. On view at Alden Projects™ are photo panels and vintage printed, gelatin silver prints, “showing the BOOTS adventures in New York”. (See below, 100 BOOTS Under the Brooklyn Bridge [1973].) Additionally, a number of arresting scenes of the boots in California, also previously unknown, are also present. Notable among them is the cabinet-sized picture, 100 BOOTS at the Checkpoint, San Onofre (1972), depicting 100 BOOTS stage-photographed at an American immigration checkpoint near the Mexican border (and requiring considerable bureaucratic effort on the part of the artist to realize). In this picture, as elsewhere, Antin’s works are uncanny allegories of discomforting times, strangely familiar to our own. Standing together, we are reminded again that when sorrows come, they come not in single spies, but in battalions.

Eleanor Antin. 100 BOOTS Under the Brooklyn Bridge. 1973. Photo © Eleanor Antin

Alden Projects™ is grateful to the artist for the opportunity to work collaboratively on this special exhibition as well as to Ronald Feldman, the artist’s legendary, long-time dealer.

Artist’s Statement for 100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show at Alden Projects™:

100 BOOTS is my fur cup. Think of the surrealist artist, Meret Oppenheim, and that strange, disorienting fur cup comes to mind. Many people react to 100 BOOTS like that. As Yvonne Rainer once said many years ago, oh, Eleanor Antin, she does boots. Happily, after half a century in the art world, most people are aware of my other works, many people even prefer some of my other works. Sometimes I do too. But I luv 100 BOOTS. He changed my life though it took me 2 1/2 years to realize fully who he was. He was becoming my female version of Kerouac's "On the Road". Two travel narratives, one bad boy literary, the other a leisurely visual odyssey from a respectable American town into a more dramatic, wilder, more dangerous place.

Somehow the images that didn't make it into the final piece were too dramatic, too overtly political, too suggestive of other meanings. So they remained photo prints, not postcards, and stored away in my studio where I forgot them for 50 years. Among them were images from their NY adventure when they moved into MOMA and which were shown at the museum in 1973 and never shown again. I vaguely remember some other MoMA prints but I never found them. Besides, after MoMA, I went on a hunger strike for my new piece "CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture". I was moving on. But when Todd Alden visited my studio in San Diego and told me how much he loved 100 BOOTS, my assistant Pam rummaged around into my deepest drawers and discovered those old photo prints sleeping way in the back. We were surprised. 50 years old and they look so contemporary and yet also suggestive of another time. Many of them have an angst that frankly looks uncomfortably like today.

—Eleanor Antin, February 24, 2017

[1] See 100 BOOTS Head East, The Museum of Modern Art Press Release No. 41, May 30, 1973 and Checklist for Projects: 100 BOOTS by Eleanor Antin (May 30 – July 8, 1973), The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition 1035 Master Checklist.

Postcard Allegories: Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Martha Rosler

Four details from 100 Boots (1971-73) by Eleanor Antin. Complete series of 51 postcards on view at Alden Projects™.

Postcard Allegories: Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Martha Rosler

June 8 – July 29, 2016

Opening reception: Wednesday, June 8, 6-8 pm

Mail both is and isn’t a personal communication. But whether welcome or unwelcome, it thrusts itself upon you, so to speak, and must be dealt with in the context of your own life. Its immediacy may allow its message to penetrate the usual bounds of your attention. A serial communication can hook you, engaging your long-term interest (intermittently, at least).

—Martha Rosler, August, 1976 [i]

Postcard Allegories consists of signal, serial works materialized by otherwise ephemeral, postcard formats by Eleanor Antin (b. 1935), Suzanne Lacy (b. 1945), and Martha Rosler (b. 1943), opening June 8^th, 2016 (6-8 pm) through July 29^th at Alden Projects™. These artists, connected through the Feminist art scene in Southern California in the 1970s, fuse performance with postcard narratives and unconventional systems of distribution and reception. Associated with conceptual strategies rather than with quotidian “mail art,” these artists set themselves apart from their counterparts by admitting what the rigid, male conceptualists eschewed: engaging literary forms, narrative structures and scripted fictions admitting fantasy: “My stuff,” Eleanor Antin recalls, “didn't look like most of the respectable conceptualists’, the boys club, as I called them at the time. I was not like them. I considered myself a conceptual artist but those guys had a very narrow idea of what conceptualism was, or could be.”[ii]

All works at Alden Projects™ deploy or transmogrify existing narratives into allegories about gender, labor, class, or war in 1970s America. They do so, however, in novel ways, transmitting them through alternative distributions, embracing the particular, transitory functions of postcards with performative modes of address. Bypassing the gallery, these works bring messages home by deploying specific, time-based utterances incorporating the “here-and-now,” and re-directing the recipient’s relationship towards both the present and towards allegorical reflection.

Eleanor Antin’s epic 100 Boots (1971-73), mustering both performance and conceptual strategies, consists of 51 mailed photographic postcards featuring a battalion of 100 black rubber, Army-Navy surplus boots stage photographed in enigmatic and dramatic mises-en-scene from California to the New York Harbor. Begun in the San Diego area in 1971, Antin abstained at that time from printing the photographs (taken by Phil Steinmetz) as gelatin silver prints to be hung in a gallery setting in favor of issuing them instead as serial postcards distributed through the mail to the 600-1000 people on the artist’s mailing list, thereby circumventing the conventions of art’s distribution and reception networks. Delivered with a differentiated, distinctly personal (but also distinctly impersonal) mode of address, the postcards were mailed slowly and in irregular intervals, ranging from 3 days to 5 weeks and spanning a duration of 2 ½ years.

All of the postcards are accompanied by plot-driving titles, captions, and specific, changing dates, all printed verso; the artist’s captions methodically announce the date the photograph was taken while another separate date stamp inks the postal service’s cancellation details. An early postcard, 100 Boots Trespass, establishes a “crime.” This is promptly followed by 100 Boots On the Road, featuring Antin’s subjects arranged on a ca. 1961 Ford Falcon, establishing the boots as allegorical stand-ins for a battalion of peripatetic protagonists, and the work as a modern travelogue along the lines of On the Road or Huckleberry Finn, as the artist herself noted. The series unfolds sequentially across changing, scenic backdrops in an ambiguous, but identifiable narrative arc: 100 Boots On the Job; 100 Boots out of a Job; 100 Boots Taking the Hill (1), 100 Boots Taking the Hill (2), and so on.

In a 1973 statement, Antin noted how the series’ frames of reference also shift from literary to cinematic frames of reference; quickly, she identified the staged photographs as “highlighted frames from a lengthy movie serial such as The Perils of Pauline (1914).”[iii] Antin’s 100 Boots clearly shares the serialized, homespun, anticipation-building release structure with that of the film’s.

Spinning its literary, cinematic, and allegorical yarn not in galleries, but in the everyday contexts of mailboxes and living rooms, the work became infamous through word of mouth. While still in progress, however, Antin announced the boots’ arrival in a different reception context with a different mode of address. “100 Boots Head East,” exclaimed MoMA’s press release, highlighting a dramatic turn of the screw that Antin incorporated into the developing narrative. Once a week for the duration of her exhibition, postcards continued to arrive in the mail, announcing a climax with the arrival in New York City, including a celebratory dance in the Egyptian Gardens bar, a film shoot in Central park, and a final entrance—100 Boots Enter the Museum—cleverly doubling as the series’ fitting ending.

A final coda, 100 Boots Go on Vacation, announces the denouement for this series of self-conscious work about work (and works about works). Although MoMA’s 1973 press release omits reference to any allegorical subtexts or interpretations, Antin’s literary and cinematic narrative about a battalion of boots on the ground succinctly brought home the Vietnam war—but also a complex series of time-based counter-narratives—to its original audience.

Also present at Alden Projects™ are three important early works by Martha Rosler: A Budding Gourmet (1974), McTowers Maid (1974) and Tijuana Maid (1975) with particular, contemporary relevance. Each work is comprised of 12-15 different postcards. This trilogy is well known, but almost exclusively through Rosler’s later printing and different lay-out in the very different, unitary format of an otherwise bound book, Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (1978). These genre-defying artworks-as-postcard-novels, initiated while the artist was still living in the San Diego area, were not distributed through gallery contexts, but rather through the mail and in relatively small quantities (around 325 each). Rosler returned to the subject of A Budding Gourmet in a different, eponymously titled work (also 1974 and in MoMA’s collection), but eschewing the format of the postcard novel the second time around for that of video instead.

Directly connected to her local friend, Eleanor Antin’s concerns with postcards, narrative structures, and alternative distribution and reception strategies, Rosler’s three works also address particular and unsuspecting audiences through a series of language-based postcards mailed in individual sequences on an intermittent basis over a protracted number of weeks. As Rosler noted in 1976, “But whether welcome or unwelcome, (mail) thrusts itself upon you, so to speak, and must be dealt with in the context of your own life. Its immediacy may allow its message to penetrate the usual bounds of your attention.”[iv] The third work, Tijuana Maid (about an undocumented worker) was issued in Spanish, presumably challenging the expectations of her audience, but also telling the narrative in the language of her subject. (Rosler also issued an English translation on stapled sheets). Each series incorporates a curious element: a separately mailed postcard that functions like a colophon, meticulously itemizing among other things, the precise printing, publishing, production and distribution details, all of which were subject to change over time. Incorporating also the precise printing and distribution costs for each “novel,” the artist placed the very particular production and distribution details of her own work (as artist) into direct analogy with the subjects of her work (including unpaid and underpaid cooks and maids) and with the economics of work in general.

Finally, Suzanne Lacy’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost (1974-75) is a series of four photographic postcards, drawing on, but also dissecting popular narratives about the relationship and differences between the gendered body, language, and the animal kingdom—in this particular case, the re-staging and co-mingling of (gendered) human and chicken taxonomy. Each image depicts the unclothed artist eating various chicken parts accompanied by a deadpan word or pair of words below forming a kind of discomforting, but also humorous, didactic lexicon for the recipient to ponder: “wing” / “arm”; “arm” / “wing”; “leg” / “leg”; “breast”. The invitation for reflection is explicit in the distribution technique of the postcards, which were personally handed out by the artist. The recipient is particularly invited, further, to consider possible allegorical lessons of “Chicken Coming Home to Roost,” the colloquialism commonly understood to refer to the manner in which bad deeds or words return to discomfort their perpetuator.

Combining performance with language-based messages challenging dominant narratives, forms, and conventional distribution and reception strategies, Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, and Martha Rosler’s postcards all originated (at least initially) in the local and specific context of California in the 1970s. These time-stamped works were destined to arrive beyond the white cube and in personally addressed, specific contexts of the home (and elsewhere) and in slow, well-considered, and drawn out manners, with each causing her audience to receive and to relate to these purposively transcripted, ephemeral works “in the context of their own lives.” Redefining the boundaries of art, life, and work, these extraordinary and rarely seen allegorical narratives at Alden Projects™ went places that work by their male conceptual counterparts, for the most part, did not--or would not. Newly framed, hung on a wall, and re-presented with a very different kind of reception context today, it is only the memory of the original functions of these extraordinary works that keeps them as vital as ever.

Inquire

[i] Martha Rosler, “A Note on One Aspect of Form,” the artist’s introduction printed in Service: A Trilogy on Colonization, New York: Printed Matter, 1978, p. 5.

[ii] Eleanor Antin in “Interview with Eleanor Antin Conducted by Judith Olch Richards,” Del Mar, California, May 8, 2009 (n.p.).

[iii] Eleanor Antin, as cited in “100 Boots Head East,” The Museum of Modern Art Press Release No. 41, May 30, 1973.

[iv] Rosler, op. cit.

Paper Will Blow Through The Streets

Paper Will Blow Through the Streets—the subject of Alden Projects™’ booth at NADA New York 2014—focuses on signal works from the 1960s-90s for which ephemerality is both subject and object. Artists include: Eleanor Antin, Linda Benglas, Marcel Broodthaers, James Lee Byars, Marcel Duchamp, Öyvind Fahlström, General Idea, Robert Indiana, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Sam Hsieh, Yves Klein, Barbara Kruger, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool and more.

Paper Will Blow Through the Streets borrows its title from an early, furtive performance by James Lee Byars who printed the words “A WHITE PAPER WILL BLOW THROUGH THE STREETS” onto a large disc of Japanese paper, one example of which is also said to have been released onto the ancient streets of Kyoto in 1967. What remains of this ephemeral work are printed sheets of white paper commemorating the artist’s celebration of art in the floating world. Not conceived for display or sale in a gallery, these performance relics were distributed freely instead, neatly conflating the ephemeral subject and object in a nearly perfect articulation of art as an eternally ephemeral subject.

Most of the artists included in Paper Will Blow Through the Streets respond to the fugitive legacy of Marcel Duchamp who is represented. Highlights include the only print attributed to Warhol that is known to have been silkscreened by Warhol himself (1963); a complete, signed collection of the photographic books by Ed Ruscha (1963-78) accompanied by rarely seen ephemera; post-card works by Eleanor Antin (1971-73); a subway drawing and other works by Keith Haring; important street posters by Jenny Holzer (1979-82) and Barbara Kruger (ca. 1983), including an unpublished, variant by the latter.

Alden Projects™ Booth 204

Enquire

NADA NEW YORK 2014
Alden Projects™ Booth 204

Friday, May 9 - Sunday, May 11

Opening Preview:
Friday May 9: 10am - 2pm

Open to the Public:
Friday, May 9: 2pm - 7pm
Saturday, May 10: 11am - 7pm
Sunday, May 11: 11am - 5pm

Pier 36 at Basketball CIty

299 South Street on the East River

New York, NY 10002

L.A. Air: Still Breathing? at Alden Projects™ (Mezzanine, Gallery U)

L.A. Air: Still Breathing?

Alden Projects™, a project-based enterprise from New York presents L.A. Air: Still Breathing?: a special installation at Printed Matter’s L.A. Book Fair from January 31st- February 3^rd at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles (Mezzanine, Gallery U). This project collects together signal Los Angeles-centric editions, artist’s ephemera, drawings, and important documentation from the city’s golden era of smog (1959-1973). In addition to a significant collection of rare Ferus and Irving Blum Gallery posters (e.g. Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Craig Kaufman, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein and many others), this project unpacks other early touchstones of Los Angeles’ luminous art and publicity apparatus including Claes Oldenburg’s first ever Mickey Mouse at Dwan Gallery (1963), John Baldessari’s palm trees, red balls, and blue skies (1973), and Bruce Nauman’s re-duplicative invocation of soot-filled skies in his monochrome-heavy publication, L.A. Air (1970).

No show about printed matter and Los Angeles air from the 1960s – early 1970s would be sufficiently perplexing without Ed Ruscha. In addition to a complete collection of Ruscha’s signed photographic books (1963-1978), this installation also includes a rare accordion-folded prospectus from the publicity apparatus of Ruscha’s own publishing enterprise--Heavy Industry Publications; it announces the serial gambit of the artist’s peculiar enterprise in addition to the books’ very small prices. That was then. This is now.

This presentation also features important ephemera for example, by John Altoon, Larry Bell, Chris Burden, John McCracken, and many others as well as John Baldessari’s early and important artist’s books.

Because Los Angeles air also flows north and south, this installation also features seminal California ephemera, including the only known, extant example of the poster of Wiliam T. Wiley’s legendary Slant Step show in Berkeley, 1966. Ranging to the south, L.A. Air: Still Breathing? also features a collection of rare photographic postcards by San Diego-based artist, Eleanor Antin from her 100 Boots series (1971-73). These ephemeral works defied the conventions of art’s support and distribution: they picture battalions of Viet Nam-era Army Navy surplus boots marching and luxuriating California mises-en-scenes and found their audience in mailboxes across America instead of in galleries and museums.

Finally—and putting the air into despair—this project ends with an out-of-time banner by Mike Kelley featuring an enlarged skull on a leprechaun-rasta back ground; it is a coda for the viewer to pause and to again breathe in the ephemeral character of a place and a time out of joint. Inevitably, the dark ink of these ephemeral registrations transforms in the clear light of today’s artistic air: all works for sale.

Alden Projects™ installation can be found in the Mezzanine in Gallery U.

© Todd Alden 2013 Enquire

California Dreaming (Is Still for Sale) at Alden Projects™ (Booth P11)

CALIFORNIA DREAMING (IS STILL FOR SALE)...
AT ALDEN PROJECTS™

Alden Projects™ announces its participation at NADA Miami Beach 2012 (Booth P11 in the Napoleon Ballroom). This year’s project: California Dreaming (Is Still For Sale), an installation including signal works by, or residual reveries of, California artists John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Eleanor Antin (1963-1973) among others. These West Coast artists all re-imagined photography--and re-oriented photographic practice--in the service of a conceptual dream: art that traveled beyond the confines of the gallery frame/walls and art that was widely available, inexpensive or even freely transmitted.

Baldessari’s seminal photographic portfolio, Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of 36 Attempts)(1973) explores the roll of photographic chance and choosing, but also marks the given limits of the photographic frame itself (Kodak’s 36 exposures per roll) in the form of a (then) inexpensive, widely available portfolio of loose photographic plates—but which has become otherwise uncommon (and let’s be honest: less democratically priced). Today, we see it reproduced again and again in catalogues and on museum banners announcing it as a Greatest Hit of Conceptual art and as an instantly recognizable flag for California conceptualism, branding Los Angeles as a dreamy art capital with history.

Eleanor Antin’s series of photographic postal works, 100 Boots (1971-73) consists of a traveling battalion of 100 Army & Navy surplus black rubber boots stage-photographed literally “on the road,” mostly in California, but also in New York, printed as postcards, and sent to a changing mailing list over the span of more than two years to select, art world participants with each card announcing a new alternative reception event/context. Antin’s 100 Boots landed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973—in one of only a handful of one-person exhibitions by female artists there that decade. 100 Boots is on view at MoMA again today (now hanging in the permanent collection) and also at the Brooklyn Museum in the Materializing "Six Years" exhibition. Antin’s 100 Boots have come full circle from surplus to center stage and as avatars of the era’s Dematerialized Art.

At a time when many artists preferred to allow their gallery to conceive their exhibition publicity, Ed Ruscha—a former printer’s devil--released a series of graphics that are arguably as compelling in design and concept as were the artist’s unique works. Widely unseen, Alden Projects™ is pleased to present a complete collection of Ruscha’s 1960s posters created for one-person exhibitions at the Ferus Gallery and Irving Blum Gallery. These graphics, distributed freely, arguably functioned in a manner analogous to his other contemporaneous, perplexing publications (e.g. his books), which the artist describes “as wolves in sheep’s clothing”. In other words, Ruscha snuck his powerful art—and artistic message—into mechanically reproducible, and distinctly non-art vehicles. (Like Warhol, only more so). Like his books, Ruscha’s early exhibition posters traffic in the stealthy business of announcing his (extra-) artistic events with surprise, wonder, and “a kind of huh?” Widely unseen, and mostly under accounted for in the artist’s literature, Ruscha’s graphic and dead-pan California dreaming from the 1960s is reconsidered…on a winter’s day.

Pursuing other dreams, Alden Projects™ also presents early and important 1960s ephemera, including rare posters by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono and George Maciunas. From the darker 1980s, we have unearthed a seldom seen print by Robert Longo related to his Men in the Cities series (and including a hand-written menu on the verso for a 1987 Aids benefit). Also: rare ephemera by or about Jean-Michel Basquiat, including Basquiat’s first poster from 1982, a screenprint. One of 35 examples printed. Circling back to Los Angeles, we are obliged to mention our inclusion of Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Dwan Gallery poster, incorporating an image of Mickey Mouse for the first time in the artist’s oeuvre, together with a red heart. We are left wondering if this Los Angeles commemoration--this California dreaming--signals a black romance, a red menace, or a cartoonish future?

California Dreaming (Is Still For Sale)…an installation at Alden Projects™ in the Napoleon Ballroom (Booth P11) at Nada Miami Beach 2012.