Reviving the Romans

Sight

 












 

IN ELEANOR ANTIN’S PHOTOGRAPH The Death of Petronius, characters in Roman garb are stationed around a slender reflecting pool, its white stone deck decorated with golden goblets and baskets spilling ripe fruit. Women in languorous positions press against each other; one dangles a cluster of grapes seductively above her lips. History tells us Petronius advised Emperor Nero in matters of luxury before he committed suicide, and there he is near the center of the photo, his head cradled by a young man as blood oozes from his wrists. The image is reminiscent of ancient Pompeii, just before Vesuvius erupted, yet the landscape seems familiar. That’s because it’s the Salk Institute in La Jolla, one of many San Diego locales featured in “Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes,” continuing through November 2 at the San Diego Museum of Art. The Salk, Antin says, with its rolling hills and setting sun, struck her as “sensuous, yet melancholy.

“I looked all around different places in San Diego because there was a particular mood I had in my mind,” says Antin, a conceptual artist, filmmaker and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. “Some scenes can be pregnant with meaning, but it was not the meaning I wanted.”

More than 50 works make up the exhibit, but the show’s focus is on her recent large-scale Greco-Roman photographs, presented in three series: “Last Days of Pompeii,” “Roman Allegories” and “Helen’s Odyssey.” The rolling hills and verdant gardens of La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe were meticulously selected as backdrops for the storied scenes from mythology. Antin was just as relentless about finding the colorful subjects for her historic portrayals, choosing from artist-models and even some strangers, such as the voluptuous red-headed salesgirl who agreed to appear nude immediately after her shift ended.

“In film, there is time for the character to be expressed,” says Antin, who lives in Carmel Valley with husband David. “But with this, I had to get the look, the form and the way I wanted things in a split-second.”

Born in New York in 1935, Antin is considered one of the more innovative artists from the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Her wry take on the way the female form is perceived is evident in works such as “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture,” a series of stark photographs of Antin’s naked body, shot at successive stages during a month of dieting. Solo exhibitions include “100 Boots,” shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1973), “Selections from the Angel of Mercy” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (1997) and a 30-year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999).

Her recent photographs are reminiscent of the richly colored salon paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, with themes that imply an unsettling correlation between history and the future. The realistic characters in the images from “Last Days of Pompeii,” destined to be smothered by volcanic ash, suggest the complacency we might have toward our own inevitable demise.

“A variety of art forms converge and they themselves become something of characters within Antin’s work,” writes SDMA curator Betti-Sue Hertz in the pictorial book that accompanies the exhibit. “One can sympathize with Antin’s attraction to academic painting and her affinity for their style, composition and prominent use of the figure. They represent the integration of the arts, while relying on character and their roles to communicate a complex psychological situation.”

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