Download PDF scan of original article

Because they must rely upon the camera to document their ephemeral works, performance artists in Southern California and elsewhere have taken great interest in photography and video. Incidentally, but quite decidedly, performance artists have had an impact on those media as well.

The crossover between video and performance logically follows from the irrespective contexts and histories. Much so-called “video” today is, in fact, recorded performance, while performance art is often tailored to the video camera. The interaction between the static photograph and performance has been less easy.

Eleanor Antin, who earned a place among the founding mothers of performance art in the early seventies with her adopted personas of ballerina, nurse and king, is among the most adept users of the photograph as a performance supplement. She set up elaborate, period-dress situations in which she would insert herself into history as a female presence. Documenting these actions in black and white photographs lent an air of historical accuracy and legitimacy that the live performance, no matter how well conceived, could never recover.

Unlike most of Antin’s projects, which were presented as public performances apart from the photographs, 100 BOOTS, 1971-1973, was a sort of performance-by-mail. Produced as a series of fifty-one postcards sent to art professionals, colleagues and friends over a two-year period, the work recounts the adventures of a troop of disembodied heroes.

100 BOOTS is an essentially photographic work, in its reliance on the documentary authority of photography, in its reference to the reporting function of the postcard photo and in its canny use of segmented time—the still photograph’s primary distinction from film or video.