The Pseudo-Autobiographical Persona

Eleanor Antin has been visiting Boulder this week. In a PBS interview on artists into the 21st Century, she said:

"I had a marvelous art-making machine—my personas. I never knew where it would go."

Professor VJ has written on digital flux personas, claiming that he is oftentimes "situated as the perfect person to play myself as is, although the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress cannot help himself and is always turning the role of the 'as is' into the always premiering as if."

He continues:

Role-playing the 'as if' allows the transmitting nerve centers of my processual image filters to initialize a performative thrust of narrative momentum that resists the machinations of Time itself so that I may continue distributing my many digital flux personas throughout the networked space of flows.

Antin comes from an artistic background in acting and writing, and began her visual art career as a creative persona in search of fertile new ground to apply her instrumental performativity to. This meant becoming any number of personas including a ballerina named Antinova, or the anti-nova, i.e. the anti-star. There is a kind of dark Jewish humor to her various persona shticks, as when she relates her stomping ground in La Jolla to the pre-volcanic explosion days of Pompeii. The way she sees it, both places were/are full of "beautiful people living the good life on the verge of annihilation."

With apocalypse just around the corner, no wonder she revels in the idea that "history and autobiography are always in the present [...] They're always being invented."

Roles within roles within roles. It reminds me of Lynn Hershman's Roberta Breitmore persona.

Interesting that Lynn, Eleanor, and Carolee Schneeman all helped revolutionize the way artists use their bodies, their personas, and quite different forms of feminism, to investigate the pseudo-autobiographical narrative potential of their working lives vis-a-vis visual art, performance art, and film.

Those three together point the way to what lies ahead in the near-future (now-future) world of distributed online art and the various media platforms they can be experienced on/with.

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Metadata: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Carolee Schneeman, persona, art