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Indepth Arts News:
"Eleanor Antin's
The Little Match Girl Ballet"
1999-11-13 until 2000-01-06
Contemporary Arts Center
Cincinnati, OH,
USA United States of America
Over the course of her nearly 40-year
career, Eleanor Antin has changed art
forms and characters like a chameleon
changes its colors.
She has practiced creative writing, painting, acting, performance art, video and film.
She has clothed herself in the guise of a King, a Ballerina, a nurse called Eleanor
Nightingale and a Russian ballerina called Eleanora Antinova. Through these
characters, Antin was able to shed the self, or the limitations of the self, and to
transcend the confines of the present and what is already known, writes Howard
N. Fox, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Little Match Girl Ballet (1975) is Antin's adaptation of Jean Renoir's silent film
from 1928, La Petite Marchande d'allumettes, in which a little girl sells matches to
support herself. In Antin's version, the little girl, played by the artist in a tutu,
dreams of a life as a famous ballerina. The CAC is showing this historic video in
honor of its 25th anniversary.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently presented a retrospective of
Antin's work. She has also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago,
among others.
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