“The slippery nature of the self”: Gender, Masquerade, Counterfactual History, and Jewish Women Artists

In Eleanor Antin’s 1987 video, From the Archives of Modern Art, a fictional archivist attempts to reconstruct the "lost years" of Eleanor Antinova, a once-celebrated, black ballerina of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, after her return to America “to eke out a meager living in vaudeville and early cinema.” The archival fragments consist of prior works Antin made about this fictional alter ego, one of many works in which the artist adopts personae and constructs counterfactual histories that expose "the slippery nature of the self." Antin—who will celebrate her 90^th birthday in February (the very month of the conference)—is neither the first nor the last Jewish woman artist to play with invented histories and alternative identities, gender, racial, and ethnic masquerade. From Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore to Danielle Abrams, Jewish women artists—among them Antin, Zoe Beloff, Lynn Hersman Leeson, Candice Breitz, and others—have used multiple media, and performativity of various kinds to create and inhabit alternate identities and worlds, usually with political and critical implications. Such practices are by no means limited by gender, race, or ethnicity. However, there seems to be a throughline in the history of modern art and media wherein traditional barriers around identities are penetrated and dismantled in the personae, performance, and play undertaken by Jewish women artists. Proposals for papers, presentations, or performances that explore instances of such constructions, or theorize, historicize, or complicate the paradigm are encouraged.