In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INVENTING THE PAST Eleanor Antin Minetta Lane, A Ghost Story (FilmicInstallation),Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York inetta Lane is a small alley between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue in what used to be the old bohemian area of New York's Greenwich Village. The narrow lane is lined with old fashioned two- and three-story houses, some gentrified, but most kind of seedy and run-down in a genteel way. It's a neighborhood that time forgot, left to decay discreetly and silently while trucks rumble down Sixth, and concrete and glass condos darken the skies behind it. The street evokes the lost artists' bohemia back in the late forties and fifties just before the economic explosion of the American art scene. The war was over. There was enough money around from the GI bill to live and work in a lowrent district where there was already an artists' community. Studios were cheap, so were paints and canvases, food and booze and cigarettes. All over the Village young people were writing, painting , getting psychoanalyzed, and fucking the bourgeoisie. Life and love were free, experimental-and safe. An age of innocence , a little breathing room before the fall. I waitressed at the Figaro, didn't get out until four in the morning, nauseous from capuccino and cigarettes. Gaulois were hip but I preferred Viceroy and Pall Mall. That fat creepy chess master used to watch me from his dark corner -he was famous, he had a draw with Nicholas, the Italian grandmaster who drove a cab. One night-late-I asked him to play. I was a chess nut-he destroyed me by advancing pawns with his stained yellow fingers until I was locked in and couldn't move. He didn't have to push a single officer. He looked at me and smiled. I hated him. Somebody murdered him in his basement on Bleecker Street a week later. For a couple of weeks a guy who made art jewelry on MacDougal waited for me and we would neck on the steps of the old church on West 12th and University. He got a charge out of that because he was Catholic . I recognized his live-in girlfriend when I saw her on the street, she was a dead ringer for me. Even wore her hair 54 N the same way, long and straight with bangs and gold hoop earrings. "That's your rival, Eleanor," I said. I thought she was very pretty. That's why I fell in love with him, but he stopped coming round and I forgot his name. That may have been the time I was living in the fifth floor dump on West 3rd where men banged on my door all night, insisting I was the hooker who used to live there. Or was I living with the old harpy on West 10th? Her lover had been a judge, a famous man who dropped dead, and she read about it in the Times obit but they wouldn't let her go to his funeral because of the family. It was a Thomas Hardy novel. She used to wait up for me every night with Fig Newtons and Earl Grey to bore me with her sad stories. She acted like my mother. Finally I ran away and sent a friend to move my stuff But he forgot my drawings , and when I went back for them she said there weren't any. I used to model for Isabel Bishop in her old studio on 14th Street. I could choose any comfortable pose I wanted, but once we started I couldn't move. Not even when the seemingly simple pose turned into a nightmare. She refused me any adjustment. If you make your bed.... She went on painting serenely and I used to limp out. It was a tough way to make twelve bucks. When I look at her paintings of working girls holding onto subway straps I know where they come from. In high school I used to cut classes and hang around the Village. I spent a lot of time in bookstores. I remember the one on Greenwich, the owner was a poet. He gave...

pdf

Share