Deconstructing Ancient Allegories: Eleanor Antin’s 'Historical Takes' on Subverting Classical Motifs and Typologies

The New York-born artist Eleanor Antin erupted into the male-dominated American conceptual photography art scene in the 1960s and 70s with feminist works that reimagined the female body in terms of representation and history. In congruence with the feminist and civil rights movements, conceptual photography represented a shift in how art was utilized to criticize the social and political institutions in which it is rooted. Antin and other feminist artists engaging in conceptual photography and video played with the embodiment of characters, performance of the body, and an intrinsic “self-reflexivity” of subject, viewer, and artist. However, Antin pivoted her work in the early 2000s to reflect on deeper connections to the art historical world that she belongs to. The artist’s epic photographic series Historical Takes stages luscious scenes in the affluent hills of La Jolla, California, blending interpretations of ancient Roman allegories with 18th and 19th-century Neoclassical painting conventions. In an attempt to separate from the absurd salaciousness, excess, and effeminate nature of the 18th-century Rococo period, Neoclassical artists returned to a sense of order through historical painting and the intellectual discipline of art. However, Antin mimics this need for order in a perfectly satirical way by revising the Neoclassical differently than the Rococo; while Neoclassical motifs are flipped to be made absurd, the Rococo motifs are overtly saturated, begging for more interpretation. The visual arts have used allegories and motifs as evidence of our cultural and historical conjectures, but Antin touches on this essential idea of what happens when these conjectures break, and where we must go from there. Through Antin’s Historical Takes series, I will examine how Western artistic culture eroticizes historical narratives, and how Antin’s performance photography constructs lascivious narratives from Western art historical roots. In comparing the iconography and pictorial arrangements of two photographs from this series — A Hot Afternoon (2002) and The Death of Petronius (2001) – I will analyze how Antin’s photographs deconstruct (and thereby demystify) eroticized allegorical conventions of an invented historical trope of Roman antiquity. Moreover, I will seek to understand what happens not only when Antin appropriates visual motifs from the dominant narratives of Neoclassicism and Rococo, but also how she puts the viewer in a position to create new contemporary, allegorical narratives. I strive to further expand on the discourse around Antin by pulling apart the methodology of Antin’s photographs; how these works enact a critical yet satirical study of history by deconstructing art historical typologies; and why it is important to address this false connection to stories of antiquity in a broader cultural and global context.