Eleanora Antin's Life

Antin’s first twenty years were full of changes in the United States, including The Great Depression, World War II, the Harlem Renaissance, Second Wave Feminism, The Vietnam War, and Third Wave Feminism.
Antin was a first generation American born in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrants during the Great Depression. She attended high school in Harlem post-Harlem renaissance, (the cultural, social, artistic movement in late 1930s Harlem, NYC). As a result, Antin grew up surrounded by different types of art that were produced during her childhood. When Antin was two, Wartime broke out in the United States, and it did not end until she was ten. As a result of the time period in which she was born, Antin’s life was always full of war. Less
than ten years after World War II ended, the Vietnam War started and Antin was in her second year at the City College of New York (CCNY) studying art.
She was in college during this very turbulent period of social unrest. Many college students protested the Vietnam War and were very left wing.
Antin grew up Jewish during World War II when the Jewish people were the victims of the Holocaust. Even though she was safe from the war, there was still a stigma against Jewish people in the United States. One example of the unjust, the United States refused to admit a boat called St. Louis for having Jewish refugees on it.
During wartimes, conducts tend to be stringent, and there is little room for error and Antin grew up during one of the biggest wars, World War II. Her childhood was affected by patriotic images and wartime propaganda. Similar to the Dadaists in World War I, Antin responded to this with frivolousness in her art. Once World War II ended, Antin was not safe from wartime for long.
When Antin was in college, America was split into two groups: people who wanted America to fight in the Vietnam War and people who did not want America to fight in the Vietnam War. However, the opposite of World War II happened, it was a time of great social upheaval where people challenged traditional roles in society.
Woman no longer felt they were limited to being subservient, which caused second wave feminism.
Second wave feminism is a movement where woman fought for having more to life than the few roles they could be without societal judgment being a: homemaker, secretary, school teacher, or nurse. Women were breaking free from lifestyle ideals that most did not want to
fit.
Antin was also influenced by spending her early childhood during the Harlem renaissance and going to high school in Harlem shortly after it ended.
Her art was influenced by Francophone art forms, such as ballet in her persona, Eleanora Antinova. Many people moved from Francophone areas in the Southern United States to Harlem, bringing Francophone ideas with them such as ballet.
Antin’s art is considered Feminist art over everything else. She was in her 20s during Second Wave Feminism and produced her art piece The Triumph of Pan (After Poussin) in 2004 during Third Wave Feminism. An important part of Third Wave Feminism was abolishing gender stereotypes and gender role expectations.
Truly, Antin was a third wave feminist during the time of second wave feminism, and she shows it in her work Carvings, 1972, but also shows it in her triumph of Pan. She replaces half of the men with woman, without changing the outfits or poses. Her goal was to show that woman can be the same as men. In Carvings, she follows gender stereotypes and ideals of how woman’s bodies should look. She loses 10 pounds in 37 days, documenting her body from the front and profile with pictures every day. Her goal is to show how ridiculous body standards are, but also to make the female body seem impersonal instead of
sexualized. Antin is also responding to growing up during the Harlem Renaissance and Post Harlem Renaissance in Harlem. She makes an alter ego, Eleanor Antinova, a black ballerina. She dresses up and performs as her, similar to the Dadaists during World War I. During World War I and World War II, people tended to be more rigid. What the Dadaists and Antin have in common is that they wanted to be absurd and foolish instead of rigid and stringent. Dadaists also took on personas that had nothing in common with them.
In response to the deaths during the Vietnam War, Antin created 100 Boots in 1999. The boots were to symbolize the boots of the soldiers that would not be able to return home. She took pictures of these boots in different places, showing what these Americans could have done if their lives were not robbed from them.