I began the evening watching television, smoking and drinking beer. The other artists were preparing their pieces. People were filling the museum and my activity went almost unnoticed. After about an hour I got up and went around the room turning off…
The piece began when I took my clothes off, jeans and a t-shirt, and lay on my floor on my back. A friend hammered a star-shaped stud into my sternum. I then sat in a chair and had all my hair cut off. Finally, I dressed in some FBI clothes I had…
Dianne Blell confronted the infamous “topless” district of San Francisco and its standards of public morality with a painting of a nude torso on a billboard. It was made from a photograph which she had staged of a female in the classical…
Cup/Couch explores the difference between “telling an event” and :”doing an event,” using cups and couches to explicate this process in 20 scenes, each set up to exhibit by example, a variety of current linguistic practices for getting at this…
A multi-dimensional performance environment, it is my model for the unconscious, a triptych of simultaneous events separated by time, a metaphor built into a metaphor and then turned in on itself, predicated on the idea that the present is created…
Antin’s second major persona was her idealized female self: the Ballerina – a nameless iconic figure, the mere image of a dancer. In a sequence of photographs the Ballerina assumes the idealized positions of the classical ballet and executes…
The King came first, when I wanted to see what my male self would be like, who he would be. And I realized my bearded self was a king – a dead ringer for Charlie One – and kings must have a country, a kingdom – even if a lost one. He became my…
In The Ballerina and the Bum, 1974, a movie that Antin shot on videotape because it was more affordable than film, our romantic young waif of a heroin is, in Antin’s words, “a would-be ballerina from the sticks, who plans to walk across…