| Eleanore Antin
Born in New York. She lives and works in San Diego.
The Artist's Studio from "The Last Days of Pompeii", 2001
chromogenic print
117 x 147 cm
edition of 6
Courtesy Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milano
Pompeii, with its grand murals, flourishing gardens, excavated relics of everyday life and ash covered corpses has haunted western culture since its discovery over 300 years ago.
The image of the flourishing town living the good life on the brink of annihilation has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with the contemporary world, where the sunlit life turns out to have dark shadows in which cruelty, pain and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Its easy to see the connection to the affluent beach towns hugging the turbulent earth and slippery coast of my own Southern California. And part of the disturbing fascination is Rome itself, the great empire that owned and then lost the world. Every century has re-invented her in the light of its own desires, fears and lies.
Seeing it through a scrim of 19th century salon painting (Alma-Taddema, Lord Leighton, Puvis de Chavannes, Jacques-Louis David, Poussin) that I am
recreating as a set of large color photographs of my own images, I am excavating a Pompeii of my own invention in which
beautiful, affluent people live the good life, innocent of the disasters waiting just around the corner.
E.A.