Eleanor Antin
Exhibition Projects:
The Last Night of Rasputin, 1989
(film, 37 minutes, accompanied by live introduction)
Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 1980
(sepia photographs and text from portfolio, excerpts)
Dressed in flowing gown, Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova, acclaimed as "the only black ballerina to dance with Diaghilev's
legendary Ballets Russes," took the stage of the Yellow Springs Cultural Center, regaling the audience with memories of her
difficult years in the post-Revolutionary Soviet Union of the 1920's: her relationship with Yevgeni Antinov (another Antin alter ego),
who directed the film The Last Night of Rasputin; the shortages of food and film stock they suffered; and how she, a dancer,
came to star in Antinov's film. The silent film that followed portrayed a hollow-eyed Rasputin, a group of debauched aristocrats,
and an innocent ballerina kidnapped to perform at their party. Antinov's directorial style combines fast-paced narrative invention
with modernist techniques. In the Studio galleries, photographs pictured Antinova in some of her most significant roles in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
in such otherwise-forgotten works as "Pocohantes," "L'Esclave" and "The Prisoner of Persia," and accompanying texts described
her memories of how those ballets were created.
Eleanor Antin is recognized as a formative figure in the evolution of women's performance art, beginning in the early 1970's.
Through diverse media spanning film, video, performance, photography and writing, she has created a body of work that
playfully questions history, art-history and gender, through the adventures of such invented personae as the King, the Nurse
(inspired by Florence Nightingale), and Eleanora Antinova, the Black ballerina who "danced" with Diaghilev.
Among the places her work has been exhibited or performed are the Museum of Modern Art (1973, the destination of her mail-art work 100 Boots Move On),
The Kitchen, the Whitney Museum, and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. In 1999 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of Antin's work,
including photographs, drawings, text works, videos, installations and a performance by Eleanora Antinova.