by Richard Gleaves





The Last Day (2001)

Eleanor Antin's show at the San Diego Museum of Art is currently the best in town, and maybe the best in the country.

Her large-scale staged photographs thoroughly master the vocabulary of classical painting — symbolism, allegory, posture, eye gaze — then redeploy it to address contemporary social and conceptual issues.

For instance, The Tragic Performance uses posture and gaze — and crucially the line of a shadow — to systematically enumerate the roles defined by the nexus of artwork, artist, and audience. How does one respond to Angels in America when HIV-positive? Or in love with someone who is? Or a connoisseur of theatre? Or a Kushner fan? Or a critic? The answers are all here, carefully encoded in a single image.

A curious omission in the show is its failure to include the image The Last Day in the photo series The Last Days of Pompeii. This series is Antin's historical remapping of the classic cautionary tale onto the carefree lifestyle of Southern California wealth, with the image in question depicting the apocalyptic aftermath.

The Last Days of Pompeii was shot at a home in the wealthy San Diego community of Rancho Santa Fe. Six years later wildfires burned through San Diego, destroying hundreds of homes in the region, including many in Rancho Santa Fe.