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ELEANOR ANTIN:
—Yeah. Lean comfortably.

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How you would do normally.

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Yeah, that’s better.

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Legs up.

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Oh yes.

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Steady, steady.

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That’s perfect.

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That’s so cool.

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OK. That is great.

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The Last Days of Pompeii.

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It’s certainly a photographic sequence.

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It’s directing a whole host of actors.

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It’s placed in another historical period.

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It deals with art, theatricality, 
and essentially it deals with

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what I think is about our present day situation.

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—Stand, let’s see you stand, ok. Lean on him.

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Oh, it’s so perfect don’t move yet 
guys, we’re getting another one.

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I looked at La Jolla.

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The town was laid out on this incredible bay,

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and I looked at it and I 
thought: “Oh, it’s like Pompeii.”

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It’s filled with these beautiful, 
affluent people living the good life

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on the brink of annihilation.

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And of course California… we are anyway.

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The relationship between America,

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as this great colonial power, and one 
of the early great colonial powers,

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Rome, was extremely clear to me.

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I always work with people, and of 
course I make use of people’s creativity

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and their looks and the 
way they handle themselves,

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and the way they speak.

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But, I’m really very definitive 
about what it is that I want.

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I’m kind of a dictator.

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—You want to put the helmet on one more time?

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I have to have good consultation on this.

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I like it both ways, I’m 
going to shoot it both ways.

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But do it like this.

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Hold this hand like this.

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Ok, now Mike, look, don’t forget your thumb.

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Down with your thumb now. Don’t look.

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Go. Ok. Go for it.

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Go.

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Go.

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Go.

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Go.

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Perfect!

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I like that, I really like that.

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It was staged at my friend’s villa.

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In Rancho Santa Fe, California.

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And if anyone, I guess, is dancing on 
the edge of the brink of destruction,

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then I suppose it must be Rancho Santa Fe.

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Lately called the richest 
community in the United States.

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I’ve got this sort of, I guess, 
love affair with the past.

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When I was a kid, I wanted to 
have been an Ancient Greek.

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And we’re talking like five 
years old, six years old,

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I was fascinated with Greek mythology.

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Oh, and I was passionately 
in love with the sculptures.

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You know, I’m from New York originally…

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the Metropolitan Museum; all 
those pathetic broken people.

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It was sort of like a mausoleum of cripples.

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When I was in high school, I used to 
play hooky and go to the Metropolitan.

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Feel up, you know, Perseus 
and all those poor fellows,

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and sometimes the guard would catch me,

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and he’d say, “Don’t do that!”

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I used to play with paper 
dolls all through my childhood.

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I continued these long, complicated stories,

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and I must say that even much 
later, when I was in high school,

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and I no longer played with 
these, I still had them.

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And on the days when I was very depressed,

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I’d come home, and I’d play with my paper dolls.

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It was almost like… I would call 
it masturbating, or something.

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It was, like, humiliating.

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But it was so important… it 
let out so much, you know.

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There’s a richness in that, that it can do that,

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that kind of make-believe.

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Which guess is why I returned to them.

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And even my big figures are, in a 
sense, cut-out, only they’re bigger.

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One of my major passions 
has always been narrative.

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And I’ve always felt that narrative 
is as much a human need as breathing.

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Constantly explaining ourselves and communicating

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in terms of putting material together 
that in some way has aspects of story.

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I would define what I do, 
essentially, as invent histories.

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I used to have this fantasy when I was a kid

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that I would be this invisible person,

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who would be there when Keats was 
dying, when Marlowe got killed,

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when Caravaggio was screwing 
with whoever he was screwing...

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All of these things would be happening

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and I would be there, invisible,

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nd I would know everything.

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It’s a very Faustian image, especially for a kid.

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I don’t know where I got it.

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But it was this passion, 
and it was always the past.

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I seemed to identify with the self which was mine,

92
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and I literally decided on being 
an actor when I decided that

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if I didn’t have this stuff of my 
own, I could borrow other people’s.

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It’s something which continued when 
I started working with persona,

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it was a very good way of dealing with 
a lot of political and social issues

96
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which were of interest to me

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As a young feminist, I was interested 
in what would be my male self,

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so I figured, Oh, I’ll put hair on my face.

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The other possibility was a little bit difficult.

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So, I put a beard on and discovered I was a king,

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and, whatever, he became my political self.

102
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And then my most glamorous, wonderful, woman-self,

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in those days, a ballerina, Antinova.

104
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And I had taken some ballet 
lessons a number of years before,

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but I really essentially 
taught myself from a book,

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standing still with a chair, in 
my studio in front of a mirror.

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I always tend to see the funny sides of things.

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That’s the richest experience, 
is when it’s the laughter,

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and it’s the tears, together.

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And I know that sounds very Jewish,

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and perhaps that’s part of 
my Jewish, it probably is.

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The kind of humor I was brought up with.

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This, like, endless humor in my 
family life, and at the same time, oy…

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100 Boots… somehow, it came to me in a dream.

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There! Black boots! Big black boots.

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Got them at the Army-Navy Surplus, 
then I printed them up on postcards,

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and over the course of, it turned out,

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finally two-and-a-half years, 
fifty-one cards were mailed out

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to about a thousand people around the world.

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Now it is a piece that I saw 
as a kind of pictorial novel,

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that was sent through the mails, 
came unannounced, unasked for,

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that it came in the middle of people’s lives.

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So, this was the first one, 
that sort of set the stage:

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‘One Hundred Boots Facing the Sea.’

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The next one, I think we 
sent about three weeks later,

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was ‘One hundred Boots Go To Church.’

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And an artist friend Allan 
Sekula told me recently that

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one of the reasons he loves this piece so much

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is that it’s old California 
that doesn’t exist anymore.

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The church is gone, some condo’s there; whatever.

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Solana Beach has become condo heaven.

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And then, ‘One Hundred Boots Turn The Corner.”

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There’s some sot of angst going on.

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They were doing suburban, happy things.

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Then now, something’s happening:

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‘One Hundred Boots Trespass.’ First crime.

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There they are.

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I climbed into the electric company 
pumps and stuck my boots there,

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and the sign, as you see, says “trespassing, 
littering, tampering forbidden by law.

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Three days later, I sent the 
‘One Hundred Boots On the Lamb.’

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This is around the middle of the piece:

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‘One Hundred Boots On The Job.’

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And that’s at Signal Hill, 
with the little oil derricks,

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near, in LA, in Long Beach.

145
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And then, a few weeks later, 
‘One Hundred Boots Out of a Job.’

146
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And the place where I shot this,

147
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with all these awful smokestacks and everything

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is a place in Long Beach called Terminal Island.

149
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And then eventually, The Museum of 
Modern Art asked me to do a show there,

150
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and I said, ‘well, I have to 
finish the, you know, the series,’

151
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and they said, ‘fine.’

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And I shot the boots in New York as well.

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This is one of the New York pictures.

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You can see the World Trade Center over there.

155
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And then, after it was over, the last 
day of their show, back in California,

156
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I mailed this one: ‘One 
Hundred Boots Go On Vacation.’

157
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And there you see their soles.

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It’s a bad joke.

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Some of my work is just downright 
outrageous and funny, obviously.

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But in place, even that stuff that looks 
like the most obviously ridiculous,

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there is, I think, a relation to human 
experience that gives it more of a rich layer.

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I adore the ballet in some ways, but 
it is a totally ridiculous art form.

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I mean it is so stupid. I 
love it because it’s pathetic

164
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and set in its ways and it’s ridiculous 
for people to walk around on stilts.

165
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It’s foolish and there’s something 
beautiful and sad about it

166
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and very mournful in a way.

167
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I forgot which one of the male dancers 
was explaining ballet on television,

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and there’s a ballerina there,

169
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and he takes her by the crotch like this,
and holds her hand like this, and he says,

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“Some people, I don’t know what some 
people would call this, but I call it art.”

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And, sexual- this sort of 
sex and ballet are actually,

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you know, very close, also in a 
way that romanticism and sex are.

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So, I’m obviously poking fun at that aspect of it.