On June 11, 2006 the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD, inSite and Casa Familiar to present the Political Equator I Conferences: Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance. This three-day, trans-border public event took place in San Diego and Tijuana from June 9 – 11 2006.

Cao Fei and Pi Li presented at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. The moderators were Norman Bryson and Paul Pickowicz. Other participants included Eyal Weizman, Andrew Ross, Teddy Cruz, Steve Fagin, Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre, and Roberto Tejada.

Cao Fei’s film Whose Utopia? had its world premiere at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. Her film with Ou Ning, The San Yuan Yi Project, was also screened at the haudenschildGarage.

For Whose Utopia?, Cao Fei spent six months at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. Located in Guangdong Province, the Pearl River Delta has led the massive boom in China’s economy since the late 1970s. From 1980 to 2001 the region’s gross domestic product grew from eight billion USD to just over one hundred billion USD. A major manufacturing base for everyday products for Chinese and foreign markets, the region has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life.

According to Cao, “most of the workers left their hometowns in pursuit of their ideal and dream in the Pearl River Delta area.” In the piece she focuses “on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalized production chain, this giant and complex system of business, placing them at the center of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value which is often neglected during the process of creating huge business value.”

About the Participants

Cao Fei

Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1978. She earned a BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou, China (2001). Cao Fei’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Applying strategies of sampling, role play, and documentary filmmaking to capture individuals’ longings and the ways in which they imagine themselves—as hip-hop musicians, costumed characters, or digitized alter egos—Cao Fei reveals the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and disillusionment of China’s younger generation. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist. Cao Fei’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2007); Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2006); and Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006). She has participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); Yokohama Triennial (2008); and Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice Biennials (2007). Her work has appeared at the New Museum, New York (2008); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); and Asia Society, New York (2006). Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing. Click here to visit Cao Fei’s website.

Whose Utopia?

Whose Utopia? was produced as part of the Siemen’s Art Program, ‘What are they doing here?’, in which artists were invited to make work as part of a residency in a factory. Cao Fei chose the Osram lighting factory located in Foshan, near her home in southern China. Whose Utopia? documents the conditions faced by an increasing number of workers, as factories like Osram move their production to China, further integrating the country into the global economy. The repetitive work is contrasted with dreamlike episodes in which the workers act out their private dreams. The work is lyrical in its portrayal of subjective dreams within a working context, and of individual subjectivity in a rapidly mechanized world, in which individuality has traditionally been subordinate to class or other abstract and generic groupings.

Pi Li

Pi Li, born in 1974, has constantly changed his career direction in recent years. He was once the Art Director for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award sponsored by Uli Sigg. He also showed up in the Cannes International Film Festival as the producer of the Chinese movie Shanghai Dream. After over one year of operation, the U Studio (now named Boers-Li Gallery), founded in 2005 with curator Waling Boers, has also changed its direction. Now Pi Li decides to develop whole-heartedly the studio into a commercial gallery, and he has opened up a 100-square-meter affiliated exhibition area beside the main hall to promote the experimental solo exhibitions. The once mixed-orientated U Studio finally begins to transform into a professional gallery.

The gallery represents a selective group of internationally operating artists. The gallery program is not media-specific, and includes installation, sculpture, painting, works on paper, audio work, photography, video, film, performance, and digital art. Each year, approximately six major solo exhibitions are organized, along with an irregular number of smaller solo and group exhibitions. Boers-Li emphasizes its support for the production of new and experimental work, utilizing its unique position both at home and abroad to open new pathways for artistic development. The program focuses on new developments in international art, as well as on the changing contemporary positions of established or older-generation artists. In addition, Boers-Li participates in a selection of both Chinese and international art fairs. The program also includes the publication of catalogs, both to accompany major solo exhibitions and to offer retrospectives on our artists. Click here to visit Boers-Li Gallery’s website.

Political Equator

Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for “The Pentagon’s New Map,” in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.

Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US-Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow along with the embattled frontier of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad (or free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as they Pearl River Delta rapidly ascends to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of destiny and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflicts as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meets.

On June 11, 2006 the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD, inSite and Casa Familiar to present the Political Equator I Conferences: Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance. This three-day, trans-border event took place in San Diego and Tijuana from June 9 – 11 2006.

Cao Fei and Pi Li presented at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. The moderators were Norman Bryson and Paul Pickowicz. Other participants included Eyal Weizman, Andrew Ross, Teddy Cruz, Steve Fagin, Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre, and Roberto Tejada.

Cao Fei’s film Whose Utopia? had its world premiere at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. Her film with Ou Ning, The San Yuan Yi Project, was also screened at the haudenschildGarage.

For Whose Utopia?, Cao Fei spent six months at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. Located in Guangdong Province, the Pearl River Delta has led the massive boom in China’s economy since the late 1970s. From 1980 to 2001 the region’s gross domestic product grew from eight billion USD to just over one hundred billion USD. A major manufacturing base for everyday products for Chinese and foreign markets, the region has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life.

According to Cao, “most of the workers left their hometowns in pursuit of their ideal and dream in the Pearl River Delta area.” In the piece she focuses “on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalized production chain, this giant and complex system of business, placing them at the center of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value which is often neglected during the process of creating huge business value.”

About Cao Fei

Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1978. She earned a BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou, China (2001). Cao Fei’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Applying strategies of sampling, role play, and documentary filmmaking to capture individuals’ longings and the ways in which they imagine themselves—as hip-hop musicians, costumed characters, or digitized alter egos—Cao Fei reveals the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and disillusionment of China’s younger generation. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist. Cao Fei’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2007); Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2006); and Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006). She has participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); Yokohama Triennial (2008); and Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice Biennials (2007). Her work has appeared at the New Museum, New York (2008); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); and Asia Society, New York (2006). Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing. Click here to visit Cao Fei’s website.

About Whose Utopia?

Whose Utopia? was produced as part of the Siemen’s Art Program, ‘What are they doing here?’, in which artists were invited to make work as part of a residency in a factory. Cao Fei chose the Osram lighting factory located in Foshan, near her home in southern China. Whose Utopia? documents the conditions faced by an increasing number of workers, as factories like Osram move their production to China, further integrating the country into the global economy. The repetitive work is contrasted with dreamlike episodes in which the workers act out their private dreams. The work is lyrical in its portrayal of subjective dreams within a working context, and of individual subjectivity in a rapidly mechanized world, in which individuality has traditionally been subordinate to class or other abstract and generic groupings.

About Pi Li

Pi Li, born in 1974, has constantly changed his career direction in recent years. He was once the Art Director for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award sponsored by Uli Sigg. He also showed up in the Cannes International Film Festival as the producer of the Chinese movie Shanghai Dream. After over one year of operation, the U Studio (now named Boers-Li Gallery), founded in 2005 with curator Waling Boers, has also changed its direction. Now Pi Li decides to develop whole-heartedly the studio into a commercial gallery, and he has opened up a 100-square-meter affiliated exhibition area beside the main hall to promote the experimental solo exhibitions. The once mixed-orientated U Studio finally begins to transform into a professional gallery.

The gallery represents a selective group of internationally operating artists. The gallery program is not media-specific, and includes installation, sculpture, painting, works on paper, audio work, photography, video, film, performance, and digital art. Each year, approximately six major solo exhibitions are organized, along with an irregular number of smaller solo and group exhibitions. Boers-Li emphasizes its support for the production of new and experimental work, utilizing its unique position both at home and abroad to open new pathways for artistic development. The program focuses on new developments in international art, as well as on the changing contemporary positions of established or older-generation artists. In addition, Boers-Li participates in a selection of both Chinese and international art fairs. The program also includes the publication of catalogs, both to accompany major solo exhibitions and to offer retrospectives on our artists. Click here to visit Boers-Li Gallery’s website.

About Political Equator

Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for “The Pentagon’s New Map,” in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.

Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US-Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow along with the embattled frontier of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad (or free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as they Pearl River Delta rapidly ascends to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of destiny and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflicts as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meets.

The organizers were Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres.  Participants included Gerardo Estrada (UNAM & former Minister of Fine Arts, Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Art Critic & Curator, Tate London), Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Artist), Yoshua Okon (Artist), Monica Manzutto (Co-Director, Kurimanzutto Gallery), and Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive. Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit? The goal of this conference is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness – and its politics.

Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.  Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge – and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.” – Steve Fagin

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian who lives and works in Mexico City. PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, UK. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. He is also a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics and anthropologists based in Mexico City. He has just curated the Francis Alÿs exhibition Walking Distance from The Studio at the Colegio de San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and is currently preparing an exhibition of British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith titled Ciudad Espiral/Spiral City. Among his recent publications is When Faith Moves Mountains, coauthored with artist Francis Alÿs, documenting the action produced in Lima in 2002, released by Turner in Madrid.

Gerardo Estrada

Dr. Estrada is Coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a full-time Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM and President of its Association of Graduate Students since 1991. His career has provided him with a vast experience in the cultural sector. Since the beginning, he has occupied important positions such as Director of the House of Mexico in Paris, Director General of the Mexican Radio Institute, Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. From 1992 to 2000 he was Director General of the National Institute of Fine Arts, a position which he held for 8 years, and before assuming his current position at the UNAM, he was Director General of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003. Estrada received his BA degree in Sociology from the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM in Mexico City. From the École d’Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales of the University of Paris he later received his MA and PhD degrees in Sociology.

Monica Manzutto

Manzutto is the co-director and co-owner of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City.

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, “National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and “Celia Alvarez Muñoz” (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs, among them “Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” (New York: Aperture, 1996); and “Mexico/New York, Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans” (New York: DAP, 2003). Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is, as well, the author of several poetry collections, including “Mirrors for Gold” (Krupskaya, 2006) and “Exposition Park” (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded and continues to co-edit the journal “Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas”. Tejada’s research and teaching methods interrogate modern and contemporary image environments from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: a critical art history whose visual knowledge can locate objects and actors in the global-culture context. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); and at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Yoshua Okon

Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panaderia which was a key arts crossroads space in Mexico City. Since the late 1990s Mexican artist Yoshua Okon has been developing his own variation on these themes. Okon considers himself a performance artist, even though most of his work takes the form of videos that document invented scenarios set up in collaboration with invited participants. Among his best-known projects is Orillese a la Orilla (1999–2000 – the title, a command meaning ‘move to the curb’, is a grammatically incorrect phrase that, to the local ear, suggests both poor education and low social status), in which Okon asked Mexico City policemen to act out the threatening techniques they employ in everyday life.

On November 4, 2004 the haudenschildGarage presented a Garage Talk with Eleanor and David Antin in collaboration with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD as a celebration of the more than thirty years of artistic creativity the Antins have given to the San Diego art community. The moderators were Adriene Jenik and Roberto Tejada. This talk was organized by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin.

About the Antins

Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin was born in New York City in 1935. An influential performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist, Antin delves into history—whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture—as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves. Her most famous persona is that of Eleanora Antinova, the tragically overlooked black ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Appearing as Antinova in scripted and non-scripted performances for over a decade, Antin has blurred the distinction between her identity and that of her character. In the process, she has created a rich body of work detailing the multiple facets of her beloved Antinova, including a fictitious memoir and numerous films, photographs, installations, performances, and drawings. In her 2001 series “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Antin lingers behind the camera to stage the final, catastrophic days of Pompeii in the affluent hills of La Jolla, California. In “The Golden Death” from this series, the imagined citizens of Pompeii drown in the excess of their own wealth—an ironic parable of American culture in the throes of over-consumption. Eleanor Antin received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and a Media Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 1998. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including an award-winning retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999. Antin is a highly respected artist and teacher, and has been a professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1975. She lives with her husband and son in Southern California.

David Antin

David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is a United States poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising “talk poems” at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, the writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and much longer as a professor there. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. Antin lives in San Diego with his wife.