February 24 – April 9, 2017
Opening Friday, February 24: 6 - 8pm
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| Eleanor Antin. 100 Boots at the Checkpoint. 1972 Photo © Eleanor Antin |
100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show opens on February 24th, 2017 (6 - 8 pm) and runs through April 9th at Alden Projects™. This exhibition presents recently discovered vintage photographs by Eleanor Antin from her personal collection, expanding our understanding of the peripatetic adventures of her most celebrated series, 100 BOOTS (1971-73).
100 BOOTS is a
travelogue, along the lines of Huckleberry
Finn or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,
featuring the cross-country adventures of 100 stage-photographed rubber
boots—Army-Navy surplus boots. They are a unitary protagonist in an allegorical
narrative that a then-contemporary audience easily connected with the Nixon era and
Vietnam War. The work earned its initial underground reputation as a series of
51 components that were sent through the mail over a two-and-a-half year span,
to between 600-1000 recipients, bypassing the conventions of reception and
distribution. All of the postcards are accompanied by plot-driving titles, dates, and shooting locations, all printed verso. Bringing the war
home in such a direct manner, 100 BOOTS
was celebrated for its canny circumvention of the conventions of unique
artworks well before the Museum of Modern Art invited Antin to exhibit there in
1973.
What is not widely recalled are the specifics
of Antin’s multi-component MoMA installation of 100 BOOTS, which included three distinct sections. The largest in
the North West Gallery was Crash Pad for
100 BOOTS (1973), an installation comprising a room-within-a-room,
described in the museum’s exhibition materials as “a tenement apartment for the
boots”…“complete with mattresses, sleeping bags, radio, and a front door
equipped with a peep-hole and a chain lock.”[1] (Crash Pad for 100 Boots is presently in
LACMA’s collection). Hanging in the Far West Gallery were the better-remembered
50 postcards (the final, 51st card captioned “100 Boots Go on
Vacation,” was sent from California after
the show closed). Also notably present were more than two dozen photographs of
the “BOOTS adventures in New York” all of which are not otherwise pictured as postcards. The dimensions of the
“photograph panels” are listed on the typewritten Checklist as “each
approximately 20 x 16 in” (but also corrected by hand to read “each
approximately 8 1/8 x 12 in”).
And so this exhibition sets out to clarify
that the work we thought we knew so well—what the artist call’s “my fur tea
cup”—extends beyond the four corners of the postcards. 100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show, curated by Alden Projects™ in
collaboration with Eleanor Antin, brings to light “lost” and mostly unknown
pictures of the boots in California and New York, most approximately the same
range of scale as listed above. On view at Alden Projects™ are photo panels and
vintage printed, gelatin silver prints, “showing the BOOTS adventures in New
York”. (See below, 100 BOOTS Under the
Brooklyn Bridge [1973].) Additionally, a number of arresting scenes of the
boots in California, also previously unknown, are also present. Notable among
them is the cabinet-sized picture, 100 BOOTS at the Checkpoint,
San Onofre (1972), depicting 100 BOOTS stage-photographed at an
American immigration checkpoint near the Mexican border (and requiring considerable
bureaucratic effort on the part of the artist to realize). In this picture, as
elsewhere, Antin’s works are uncanny allegories of discomforting times, strangely
familiar to our own. Standing together, we are reminded
again that when sorrows come, they come not in single spies, but in battalions.
© Todd Alden 2017
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| Eleanor Antin. 100 BOOTS Under the Brooklyn Bridge. 1973. Photo © Eleanor Antin |
Alden Projects™ is grateful to the artist for
the opportunity to work collaboratively on this special exhibition as well as
to Ronald Feldman, the artist’s legendary, long-time dealer.
**
Artist’s Statement for 100 BOOTS: The Lost Picture Show at Alden Projects™:
100 BOOTS is
my fur cup. Think of the surrealist artist, Meret Oppenheim, and that strange,
disorienting fur cup comes to mind. Many people react to 100 BOOTS like that.
As Yvonne Rainer once said many years ago, oh, Eleanor Antin, she does boots.
Happily, after half a century in the art world, most people are aware of my
other works, many people even prefer some of my other works. Sometimes I do
too. But I luv 100 BOOTS. He changed my life though it took me 2 1/2 years to
realize fully who he was. He was becoming my female version of Kerouac's
"On the Road". Two travel narratives, one bad boy literary, the other
a leisurely visual odyssey from a respectable American town into a more
dramatic, wilder, more dangerous place.
Somehow the
images that didn't make it into the final piece were too dramatic, too overtly
political, too suggestive of other meanings. So they remained photo prints, not
postcards, and stored away in my studio where I forgot them for 50 years. Among
them were images from their NY adventure when they moved into MOMA and which
were shown at the museum in 1973 and never shown again. I vaguely remember some
other MoMA prints but I never found them. Besides, after MoMA, I went on a
hunger strike for my new piece "CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture". I
was moving on. But when Todd Alden visited my studio in San Diego and told me
how much he loved 100 BOOTS, my assistant Pam rummaged around into my deepest
drawers and discovered those old photo prints sleeping way in the back. We were
surprised. 50 years old and they look so contemporary and yet also suggestive
of another time. Many of them have an angst that frankly looks uncomfortably
like today.
—Eleanor Antin, February 24, 2017
[1] See 100
BOOTS Head East,
The Museum of Modern Art Press Release No. 41, May 30, 1973 and Checklist for Projects: 100 BOOTS by Eleanor Antin (May
30 – July 8, 1973), The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition 1035 Master Checklist.