100 Boots

1973 - Photography (Photography)

10,16 x 17,78 cm

Eleanor Antin

location: New York, New York
year born: 1935
gender: female
nationality: American
home town: Bronx, New York

Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City. Over two-and-a-half years, Antin photographed the boots against different backdrops across the U. S., and then turned the pictures into postcards, which she then mailed to approximately 1,000 people around the world. In conjunction with the boots’ “arrival” in New York City, the postcards were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. The project speaks not only to the reproduction and dissemination of images, but also about how the material reality of the images—their settings and their existence in mailboxes—was in stark contrast to the everyday lives of the people who received the cards. As with all “mail art” which had begun with the Fluxus movement in the late 1950s and was on the rise in the late 1960s, using the postal service enabled artists to completely bypass the traditional art-world distribution system, and allowed Antin to expand or compress time as the narrative required.


Over a roughly thirty-year period, conceptual and multidisciplinary artist Eleanor Antin has been creating narrative images in photography, video, film, performance, and installation. Her practices blur fiction and history, often with humorous wit, theatrical sensibility, and allegorical impulse. During her early career, Antin was associated with a group of artists who were recognized for returning the element of narrative to contemporary art, which until the 1970s had been dominated by highly abstract, purist work.


Colors:



Related works of genres: » feminist artists, » american conceptual artists

The six grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the year 502 002
© » KADIST

Matthew Buckingham

2002

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...

!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2010

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W...

Sultana's Dream
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2018

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream ...

20 Surrogates
© » KADIST

Allan McCollum

1982

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...

Behold These Glorious Times!
© » KADIST

Trevor Paglen

2017

Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...

Rabbithole
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2010

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables...

Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1991

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...

Blood Sugar
© » KADIST

Cheryl Donegan

2013

Fashion is the focus of Blood Sugar , which consists of a video projected onto a vintage vinyl jacket set at torso height on a dressmaker’s dummy...

Strange Culture
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2007

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...

Lesbian Beds
© » KADIST

Tammy Rae Carland

2002

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...

Half Dome Hough Transform
© » KADIST

Trevor Paglen

2020

Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...

One Must
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1997

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...

Lightning
© » KADIST

Paul Kos

1976

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon...

The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments
© » KADIST

Trevor Paglen

2020

The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...

The Bedroom
© » KADIST

Barbara Bloom

1997

In the 1980’s, while browsing Parisian fleamarkets, Barbara Bloom stumbled into an anonymous watercolor (dating to around 1960) in one of Paris’ fleamarkets, probably a study made by an interior designer for a bedroom...

Sirens
© » KADIST

Paul Kos

1977

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey...