Eleanor Antin works on her photographic series “The Last Days of Pompeii” | Art21

ELEANOR ANTIN:
—Yeah. Lean comfortably.

How you would do normally.

Yeah, that’s better.

Legs up.

Oh yes.

Steady, steady.

That’s perfect.

That’s so cool.

OK. That is great.

The Last Days of Pompeii.

It’s certainly a photographic sequence.

It’s directing a whole host of actors.

It’s placed in another historical period.

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

what I think is about our present day situation.

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

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

I looked at La Jolla.

The town was laid out on this incredible bay,

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

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

on the brink of annihilation.

And of course California… we are anyway.

The relationship between America,

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

Rome, was extremely clear to me.

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

and their looks and the 
way they handle themselves,

and the way they speak.

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

I’m kind of a dictator.

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

I have to have good consultation on this.

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

But do it like this.

Hold this hand like this.

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

Down with your thumb now. Don’t look.

Go. Ok. Go for it.

Go.

Go.

Go.

Go.

Perfect!

I like that, I really like that.

It was staged at my friend’s villa.

In Rancho Santa Fe, California.

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

then I suppose it must be Rancho Santa Fe.

Lately called the richest 
community in the United States.

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

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

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

I was fascinated with Greek mythology.

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

You know, I’m from New York originally…

the Metropolitan Museum; all 
those pathetic broken people.

It was sort of like a mausoleum of cripples.

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

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

and sometimes the guard would catch me,

and he’d say, “Don’t do that!”

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

I continued these long, complicated stories,

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

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

And on the days when I was very depressed,

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

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

It was, like, humiliating.

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

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

that kind of make-believe.

Which guess is why I returned to them.

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

One of my major passions 
has always been narrative.

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

Constantly explaining ourselves and communicating

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

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

I used to have this fantasy when I was a kid

that I would be this invisible person,

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

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

All of these things would be happening

and I would be there, invisible,

nd I would know everything.

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

I don’t know where I got it.

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

I seemed to identify with the self which was mine,

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

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

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

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

which were of interest to me

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 and discovered I was a king,

and, whatever, he became my political self.

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

in those days, a ballerina, Antinova.

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 
my studio in front of a mirror.

I always tend to see the funny sides of things.

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

and it’s the tears, together.

And I know that sounds very Jewish,

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

The kind of humor I was brought up with.

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

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

There! Black boots! Big black boots.

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

and over the course of, it turned out,

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

to about a thousand people around the world.

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

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

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

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

‘One Hundred Boots Facing the Sea.’

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

was ‘One hundred Boots Go To Church.’

And an artist friend Allan 
Sekula told me recently that

one of the reasons he loves this piece so much

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

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

Solana Beach has become condo heaven.

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

There’s some sot of angst going on.

They were doing suburban, happy things.

Then now, something’s happening:

‘One Hundred Boots Trespass.’ First crime.

There they are.

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

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

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

This is around the middle of the piece:

‘One Hundred Boots On The Job.’

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

near, in LA, in Long Beach.

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

And the place where I shot this,

with all these awful smokestacks and everything

is a place in Long Beach called Terminal Island.

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

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

and they said, ‘fine.’

And I shot the boots in New York as well.

This is one of the New York pictures.

You can see the World Trade Center over there.

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

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

And there you see their soles.

It’s a bad joke.

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

But in place, 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.

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

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

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

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

and very mournful in a way.

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

and there’s a ballerina there,

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

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

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

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

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