As you round the corner of the entryway at Diane Rosenstein where this phrase is visible, the first works on view in Eleanor Antin’s Passengers are two massive photographs from her 2004 series Roman Allegories. Going Home is almost 9 feet wide and 4 feet tall. It depicts a very blonde girl seated on a suitcase plastered with travel stickers, looking off to the right of the camera, smiling in a forced, staged manner. She sits as though posing for a children’s clothing catalogue, but is dressed in Hellenic Roman garb and is surrounded by vague Roman detritus (pieces of columns, an urn, vague statues), a crow, and five adult figures all dressed similarly with their backs to the camera, facing the ocean. All of the characters hold umbrellas as if waiting for a deluge while already knowing their fate.

Eleanor Antin. Going Home from Roman Allegories, 2004; chromogenic print; edition of 4; 47 ¾ x 102 ¼ in. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

This piece works as a kind of beginning and ending, encapsulating the feeling inherent in Passengers—an existential question about life, death, culture. and the point of it all—with a humorous spin. Passengers is a retrospective of Antin’s work, but not in a way that I expected at all. Anyone familiar with Antin’s oeuvre knows that she was a pioneer of early conceptual and performance art. She created and developed characters—Nurse Eleanor, the black ballerina Eleanora Antinova, and the King of Solano Beach—but very few references to her work with the self exist in this show. In a separate small room toward the entrance of the gallery, all fifty-one photographs from her 100 Boots series are on display. This is the piece that made her famous in her 1973 MOMA show and it is one of the earliest examples of narrative conceptual art. Antin photographed 100 boots in various locations and mailed them to 1,000 people and institutions over two years. She conceived of this project as a sort of “pictorial novel” in which you can see the boots on a long journey. They begin at the sea (100 Boots Facing the Sea), do some mundane chores (100 Boots at the Bank; 100 Boots in the Market), commit their first crime (100 Boots Trespass), go to work (100 Boots on the Job), head east to New York, and eventually end up at the museum. In my favorite, 100 Boots on the Porch, Antin’s playful humor is evident: Some are lazing, some are daredevils perched on a ledge, while others are casually standing, facing each other—one can almost hear them talking to each other about the day’s events. This is a classic piece, one that is great to see in person and within the conceptual framework of this show.

Eleanor Antin. 100 Boots on the Porch from 100 Boots; 1971-73/2005; series of 51 archival digital prints; edition of 10; 8 x 10 in. each. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

In the main gallery are some rarely seen (and some previously unshown) drawings. The playful series Dance of Death (1974–75) consists of pastel sketches featuring a jolly skeletal figure of death, dancing with maidens or smoking with soldiers. There are also beautiful costume and stage-set drawings from her 1979 play Before the Revolution—one reads “Simplicity is an infinite cost,” perhaps referring to the lavish Baroque world in which the play exists, but which I read as a philosophical declaration on the part of the artist to remain grounded in complicated visual and human narratives.

Eleanor Antin. Costume Drawings from Before the Revolution (Double Marie); 1975-76; watercolor, pen, and ink on paper; 14 x 11 in. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

Eleanor Antin. Classical Frieze; 2008; video; 21:33. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art. Photo: Lenae Day.

My favorite piece is at the very end of the show. Classical Frieze (2008) is a twenty-one-minute film directed and produced by Antin that explores the process behind her classical pieces. In it, she says, “with photography you can invent any time period you want.” And she does just that in her beautiful monumental Historical Takes series (from 2001 to 2007) that photographically  re-create classical Greek and Roman scenes in the style of 19th-century salon-style painting. Five of these pieces are on view in the exhibit, but watching Antin’s own telling of their creation is the most fascinating and hilarious. The video shows her subjects getting ready for the shoots: It shows them putting makeup on, taking selfies in costume, gorging themselves in a suburban kitchen, naked men’s butts getting hair applied to them so they can be satyrs, young girls sheepishly viewing the goods on men in tight bikinis, awkward conversations, and the miscommunications that occur with a cast of twenty people. It shows the collaboration inherent in works as grand as this, as well as the joy and warmth she exudes as she makes her work. At the very end, it shows Antin, a tiny 70-year-old Jewish woman, lugging urns to their places on the beach—the same detritus in that entry photograph Going Home. The young girl is in curlers sitting on suitcases while some men are planting the columns along the beach as a resident fishes in the background. When the shot is finally set up and all actors are in their places, Antin yells “action” before a jogger runs from right to left—through the frozen Classical scene. Eleanor Antin has a way of bringing the past to the present in a way that allows for warmth, insight, and humor: the three pillars of great art.

Eleanor Antin: Passengers is on view at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art through May 31, 2014.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

“At this moment, my iPad is totally f–ing me up,” said Eleanor Antin last Sunday at the Hammer Museum, in Act V of Before the Revolution, a remaking of her originally one-woman ballet. Act V was actually called “The Interruption,” because the performers were slated to stop performing and the artist to come up on stage and muse about meaning and ownership. The iPad f-up was not scripted, however; the machine really was interrupting the planned interruption. “There’s something here that says ‘undo or cancel,’” she announced. “I don’t want to do either.” She could’ve played it off and attempted to finish her monologue without the script, but, instead she waited until a technician and, I think, her son had made her screen functional again. Then she continued.

Before the Revolution was first performed in 1979, and Antin played all the roles–12 in total–with the help of life-size, two-dimensional Masonite dolls. It told of an imaginary black ballerina (Eleanora Antinova) dancing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and evoked the great hope that modern art could break down walls that, of course, never quite fell. Antinova, the talented black ballerina hopes to play the real, iconic roles, but is instead offered primitive ones (“For you we will re-stage Pocahontas,” Diaghilev says). Antin has always been interested in the self being more than just one thing, so, in 1974 when the modernist idea of the single identity still festered, impersonating a fictive character that couldn’t have existed felt radical.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

Reactions to the original performance were apparently mixed.”I guess [people] wanted actors who were smooth and effortless, seamless, what they called professional,” Antin wrote in the program notes for the new Before the Revolution. This one, co-directed by Alexandro Segade of the collective My Barbarian, was, in some ways, seamless. It included a “professional” cast. Daniele Watts, who played Eleanor Antinova beautifully, has guested on network television. Matthew Henerson, who played Diaghilev, appeared in A Christmas Carol. They traveled across the stage and interacted with trained, practiced intentionality that isn’t often found in performances by artists who took “Theory and Practice” rather than, say, “Advanced Movement.”

Rehearsal for Eleanor Antin's Before the Revolution in 2012. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute.

But still, the whole program played out like an interruption, of history, of professionalism, of artistry, of expectations. It starts out with Antinova learning to curtsey, to defer to her audience while still upholding her veneer, then follows her as she tries to wrangles for real, “white” roles (but “we love you because you are black,” Diaghilev protests) and as she impersonates Marie Antoinette and tries to rewrite the history of another woman trapped in misunderstandings and circumstances beyond her control. It was the tone of the performance, though, that made all the difference. Antinova, who remains optimistic though less and less naive, never lets go of the idea that her enthusiasm could change the system (of the Ballets Russes). And Antin, who during her “Interruption” said that she was going to make this ballet, the one about the ever-misunderstood Marie Antoinette, “her ballet, my ballet and fill the stage with credit, my credit,” never lets go of the idea that a self could become a multitude that together takes back history.

Eleanor Antin, “100 Boots,” 1971-73.

Alright, I’ll say it. A show that features conceptual art circa 1970 threatens to be dry. At the outset, you know you’ll be getting mostly documentation: photographic, video, film, and paper. Beyond the ordinary wall text, there will probably be artists’ statements explaining what was done while you weren’t looking. The typewriter, the mimeograph, and the camera will act as not-so-silent partners to the artists’ projects. “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” at the Orange County Museum of Art doesn’t escape these confines, but ends up offering you just a little bit more.

Bruce Nauman, “Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips),” 1970.

The show is divided into categories like “Mapping the Land,” “Politics,” “Public and Private Space,” and “Language and Wordplay.” As with previous shows I’ve seen at OCMA, these divisions hinder the overall experience. I found myself wishing that the curators had stuck to working chronologically or geographically, simply because most of the works are more interesting when viewed across categories, instead of in isolation. Bruce Nauman and Bonnie Sherk, for instance, would have made interesting counterpoints to each other; “State of Mind” includes Nauman’s Thighing (1967), Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips) (1970), and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), to name a few, which pair nicely with Sherk’s Sitting Still series, where the artist photographs herself sitting in public locations usually used for passing through, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the corner of Mission and 20^th in San Francisco.

Bonnie Sherk, “Sitting Still II, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco,” from the “Sitting Still Series,” 1971.

“State of Mind” will appeal to those in the know before it appeals to the general public—Tom Marioni’s Process Print (1969) failed to capture the attention of the dozens of school kids running around the day I visited, as did Chris Burden’s video piece, Documentation of Selected Works (1971-74), in which Burden talks about most of his iconic performance pieces (Bed, Shoot).  It’s one of the gems of the show, as are most of John Baldessari’s pieces, which show themselves to be not just humorous and playful, but—by the time you get to Voluble Luminist Painting for Max Kozloff (1966-68)—downright contrarian.

John Baldessari, “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-six Attempts),” 1973.

There is something for everyone, however; these same kids took delight in the hippie-looking, cut-out dudes featured in Allen Ruppersberg’s Al’s Grand Hotel (1971) and the animal intestines in Suzanne Lacy’s pieces. Also popular amongst the ten-year old crowd: sculptural works like Nauman’s Yellow Room (Triangular) (1973), Stephen Kalthenbach’s Raised Floor (1967/2011) and Robert Kinmont’s 8 Handstands (1969/2009)—one of which he performs at the edge of a cliff.

Robert Kinmont, “8 Natural Handstands,” 1969.

Kinmont’s piece touched me, too. The legacy left by conceptualism, California-based or otherwise, is pervasive, demanding and often unpleasurable.  Despite this, contemporary work that picks up conceptualism’s language is usually diluted and easy to overlook.  Concepts and actions that were once novel—if not out of bounds—are now familiar and trite. Walking into the main room of “State of Mind”—full of back-to-back projections, televisions, photographs, prints and paintings—after looking at Kinmont balancing at the edge of a cliff, offers just the faintest whiff of the energy of the moment.

“State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” is on view at the Orange County Museum of Art through January 22, 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time.