In constructing a memoir or biography, the factual elements that define a person’s life—the people, places and events that have existed and that are retold are always present, but often they are seen through the lens of time or interpretation. Eleanor Antin creates new selves—personas, self-portraits, characters, alter-egos—in the forms of photographs, videos, and live performances. In creating these identities, Antin works like an actress to get into her character. She says, “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.” Developed from a single idea or image, Antin elaborates on her characters by asking questions about how he or she might act or think in certain situations. Eventually Antin constructs her personas in much the same way that a film producer makes a movie or a writer creates a novel.

Eleanor Antin's characters—such as the Nurse, the ballerina Antinova, and the King of Solana Beach—often contain autobiographical attributes or characteristics but also include fictional characteristics and histories reflecting particular fantasies, curiosities, or opinions made real. In contemporary art, artists often intertwine fact and fiction when integrating personal or autobiographical content into their work.

Mike Kelley’s work ranges from performance pieces to sculpture that include arrangements of stuffed-animals, to wall-sized graphic drawings, to multi-room installations re-staging institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos). Kelley’s ongoing, pseudo-autobiographical “repressed memory syndrome” project, begun in 1995, is a collection of 365 sculpture and video works (one for every day of the year) inspired by yearbook photos and an examination of the artist’s own selective amnesia about his past. A combination of real and imagined interactions, locations, and emotions, Kelley questions the idea of a 'true' history and instead proposes that memory is both personal and collective. Kelley says:

"“Day Is Done” is built around the mythos that relates to “Educational Complex” and the history of a kind of symbolist attempt at uniting all the arts.“Educational Complex” is a model of every school I ever went to, plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can’t remember left blank. They’re all combined into a new kind of structure that looks like a kind of modernist building."

Introduce students to the work of Eleanor Antin and Mike Kelley by viewing their Art21 films and/or web clips and reading their interviews on the Art21 site (see above links). After exploring Antin’s different persona’s and Kelley’s “repressed memory syndrome” project, ask students to consider how the memoir or self-portrait is a constructed image—combining real and imagined facts and fictions. To introduce a literary counterpart, select a segment from, or read the entire novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. Ask students how the relationship between the protagonist and the painting of the protagonist represent fact and fiction and how this work relates to the issues that Antin and Kelley are exploring in their work.