"...For me the richest experience is when it’s
laughter and tears together. And I know that sounds very
Jewish, and perhaps that’s part of the Jewish kind
of humor I was brought up with."
"I used to think that I didn’t have a self. I
didn’t have a self that was mine and I literally decided
on being an actor when I decided if I don’t have a
self of my own I can borrow other people’s, and so
I’ll be an actor."
"Role playing was about feeling that I didn’t
have a self. And I didn’t miss it."
"...I took on the King, who was my male self. As a
young feminist I was interested in what would be my male
self."
"I had a marvelous art-making machine—my personas.
I never knew where it would go."
How do you view the different
kinds of humor you've used over the years?
ANTIN:
Well, I don’t know about
different kinds, but I know that I always tend to see the
funny sides of things.
Even when my grandmother died. She died when I was a teenager
and my sister and I went to the funeral and after the funeral
we went to where the graves were. And I didn't know much about
cemeteries but I knew what they looked like. We started walking,
following the people who were going to my grandmother's grave.
And then as we were standing there and they were doing whatever
they were doing, I nearly fell over this little white marble
stone and it said 'Mother.' And I burst into hysterics. [LAUGHS]
I was laughing in the midst of this event which was quite
tragic for my father who loved his mother very much. I was
in a state of total hysteria and I was aware fully that I
was laughing. There were dead people and it was somebody's
mother. I remember my father coming and holding me tight and
saying "I didn't know you loved mother so much."
And I said, "Oh yeah." I made believe I was crying.
Here I was laughing and I made believe I was crying.
Another time is when I got married at this Justice of the
Peace. I'm not into weddings, never was, never will be, but
we went there and we thought it would be fast, short and sweet,
and over. And the guy, he came in and said suddenly, "Hello,
Hello, Do you Eleanor take this man!" I took one look
at him and what he was saying and I cracked up. I started
laughing hysterically and my sister, who was one of the witnesses,
started laughing hysterically and David, my husband, was holding
onto my hand. And I suddenly had this realization, "Oh
my God, if I don’t stop laughing they'll say I'm too
immature to get married and they'll send me home." I
thought that was what they were going to do. So I just said,
"Boo Hoo," and I made believe I was crying. I figured
you were aloud to cry at a wedding. So I was crying "Boo
Hoo hoo hoo," but meanwhile I was laughing.
To make this long story short—for me the richest experience
is when it’s laughter and tears together. And I know
that sounds very Jewish, and perhaps that’s part of the
Jewish kind of humor I was brought up with. It’s like
endless humor and at the same time it’s “Oy!”—like
that. I like it when it has those layers, that depth of richness,
human experience, and suffering that it goes along with. And
I think all my work—I mean, some of it—is just downright
outrageous and funny obviously. But it plays, even that stuff
that looks like the most obviously ridiculous. There is I
think a relation to human experience that gives it more of
a rich layer than humor on its own. I think any person who
works with humor, any really self-respecting comic, is going
to feel the same way.
ART:21:
Is your family an influence on
the work you do today? Like your mother.
ANTIN:
Well, my mother, yes, that was
the first great love of my life. Until I was able to free
myself from the enormous pull of her influence, I suppose
she was the only love of my life. She was a very interesting,
very multi-layered women. She had been an actress on the Yiddish
stage in Poland and she came here to an immigrant's situation
and became enormously depressed. She eventually pulled everything
together. She had enormous strength. Instead of going into
the Yiddish theater, which was actually quite interesting
at the time, she found most of it very vulgar, which she called
'Shunt,' and she didn't want to deal with that. Instead she
worked a lot and then went into business and owned hotels.
And her hotels were artworks. They were rather incredible.
She went bankrupt on each one of them, which was unfortunate,
but at the same time my mother cared more about the entertainment
that happened on Cabaret night than how many people were registered.
So unfortunately she went bankrupt, but at the same time the
places were marvelous. They attracted a leftist Russian Polish
German Jewish intelligentsia, with a great love for Yiddish
culture.
Those kind of hotels. As the people were getting older and
as they started dying off, then she got less clients. She
was a very creative, very interesting person...
ART:21:
What was it like seeing performances
with your mother when you were a child?
ANTIN:
Well, my mother didn’t always
know where our next meal would come from. In those days she
would cash a check on Friday and then it wouldn't go through
until Monday when the banks opened. And then we would have
no money over the weekend. But we would go to a concert at
Carnegie Hall on Sunday Afternoon. It was like a dollar and
a quarter and then afterwards we'd go to an Italian restaurant.
Often there was one right down on 57th street that wasn't
entirely inexpensive. And then, rather than leave a bad tip,
she'd leave a good tip and then she'd say, "Alright,
now we have to walk back and forth and find someone we know
so we can get money for a cab to go home." And we would.
She knew so many people because of the hotels and she was
a famous person within this small group of people. They were
all so cultivated, so at some point we would see somebody
or else we'd walk home—all the way to 109th street.
It wasn't bad for us. We'd have fun looking in the store windows,
laughing, telling jokes. And she sent me to art lessons at
MoMA, at the Museum of Modern Art. I had ballet lessons. My
sister was a wunderkind pianist. She was always at the best
conservatories. She used to get scholarships but still, there
was a certain amount of having to drag us. Those were the
things that were important.
ART:21:
So a rich cultural life is part
of growing up in New York City?
ANTIN:
Growing up in New York is really
fabulous. I know everyone thinks, "Oh God, you know,
dangerous place," but in those days you could certainly
go on the subway. Kids could do everything. We could do everything
on our own and there is an enormous amount of activity that
one can take part in that is just plain interesting, including
theater and museums.
ART:21:
You started out working as an
actor. Can you describe the trajectory between theater and
visual art?
ANTIN:
I used to think that I didn’t
have a self. I didn’t have a self that was mine and I
literally decided on being an actor when I decided if I don’t
have a self of my own I can borrow other people’s, and
so I’ll be an actor. Which I liked doing anyway. I liked
hamming it up and everything. So I became an actor and I got
some roles and things and I was in Actor's Equity. But I found
the kind of stuff I was called on to do the few times I was
called on to do them was just stupid. I went back to my first
love which was writing, and then I left that. I was moving
through all these different art forms. And it wasn’t
until conceptual
art started coming in with its possibility for mixed media,
for not being stuck with particular genres,
that I could make use of all these talents of mine. Not because
they were talents but because I liked them. I enjoyed playing
with them. And so when that happened, that's when I started
doing the kind of early conceptual work that was the start
of my art career.
ART:21:
That when you were participating
in art happenings?
ANTIN:
Yes. Fluxus
and Pop opened up all sorts of possibilities with collage,
with borrowed imagery, with whatever. So I was just picking
up from all over, like a scavenger, and transforming possibilities
on my own. Sure, wonderful stuff is being done now, and wonderful
stuff will always be done. But there was something about those
years, the sixties and seventies, that were so alive. There
was so much excitement in literature, in art, in pop music.
I don’t think anything can compare to the pop music of
the ’60s and early ’70s. I think I was being fed
by my milieu and, yes, I was in from the beginning.
ART:21:
What did you first enjoy about
role playing?
ANTIN:
Role playing was about feeling
that I didn’t have a self. And I didn’t miss it.
It’s not as if I suddenly was this pathetic person without
a self; it was just fine. I just borrowed other people’s,
or made them up. And it’s something that continued when
I started working with personas
because it was a very good way of dealing with a lot of the
political and social issues that were of interest to me. And
also particular intellectual interests that I had, like theatre
and self-representation.
So I took on the King, who was my male self. As a young feminist
I was interested in what would be my male self. So I figured,
"Oh, I'll put hair on my face." The other possibility
was a little bit difficult, so I put a beard on. He became
my political self. And then, my most glamorous, wonderful
woman self in those days was the Ballerina. And I had taken
some ballet lessons a number of years before, but I really
essentially taught myself from a book, standing still with
a chair in front a mirror. And I was a very good dancer standing
still.
I found that these characters had this marvelous quality of
being like an onion. You know, you peel an onion and then
there’s more skin and you keep peeling and then you peel
and you peel. Of course that’s a romantic image because
you’re crying all the time you’re peeling, you know,
and I was sort of laughing most of the time.
But they did tend to ‘unpack’, and what happened
is that they became richer and richer and more complex, especially
Antinova. She became the black ballerina and danced with Diaghelev.
I did all this studying about Diaghelev and the ballet and
I made my own ballets where I could deal with other issues
that interested me.
You know, in some ways if you look at Lichtenstein—he
put everything into the Ben-Day dots. That was a great art-making
machine he had, a marvelous art-making machine. And I had
a marvelous art-making machine—my personas.
I never knew where it would go. I could always open up into
something else, until I decided I didn’t want to make
art as somebody else. Until I decided I really was me.
ART:21:
Who's being interviewed right
now? Are you really yourself these days?
ANTIN:
As a matter of fact, I no longer
make my persona works. I stopped when my mother was dying
of Alzheimer's and was losing her memory and I started remembering
all that wonderful Yiddish culture
that she used to tell me about. And then I did my Yiddish
silent film, "The Man Without A World," as Eleanor
Antin. Though of course the film is done by this supposedly
imaginary Yiddish Russian film maker in the twenties named
Yevgeny Antinov. So in a sense, I did do it through another
persona, but somehow it always felt like it was me even though
it was him. I mean, I'm not insane, I knew it was me.
I wanted to do all of Anotinov's oeuvre. But I couldn't get
the money to do it so. I wanted to do his complete oeuvre,
until his final film in the ’50s, a sort of grade Z sci-fi
flick. I only did a few films of his. And after that I started
doing other works. "The Last Days Of Pompeii" is
an Eleanor Antin work. There's no personas involved. And there
are some people who actually find that distressing. They expect
me to be in all of my pieces. And I say I am in all my pieces,
even if you don't see me.
