Eleanor Antins

Eleanor Antins is conceptual artist that uses her body as a means of both subject and material. Through various media including photography, video, installation, performance and film she creates her self in multitudes of identities. From the 1970s, she produced filmed and photographed performances to critique the representation of the female body, through which she explores the notion of the self-portrait and studies the construction of identity.  Similarily to women artists such as Marina Abramovic and VALIE EXPORT, Eleanor works with her own appearance to create scripted and performative conceptual works.

Specifically interested in relation to my own practice is her concerns and conceptual ideas of the physical manifestation of the pressures put on women in western society. Derived from how physical standard for women are continuously designed and re-designed according to the perception of society.

Carving: A Traditional Sculpture  (1972), a documentation that took place over a course of 36 days, which she documented 4 angles of her body everyday. Standing naked everyday in the four same stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss, accumulating 148 black and white photographs. The photographs are installed vertically from each day, which the entire process can be read horizontally, like a filmstrip.

Conceptually and technically she both becomes the sculptor and the sculpted as she carves away at herself, removing fat. The photographs, which act as an anthropometric measurement, that is to convey objectivity to measure the human body.  Her method of carving her own body was a performance purposely toyed with reference to the male- sculptor as he carves out the ideal female shape in classical art, and then puts that particular representation in society.