Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Image not available - no digital rights
between source photograph, postcard and screenprint: 'The
photographs are a statement of fact, the hand coloured version a
poetic interpretation, and the print underlines the illusion involved
in the transcription of the three-dimensional world into a two-
dimensional print.'5
Eleanor Antin (
b.
1935) is a filmmaker and performance
artist based in California. Her sequence of photographs
The
Last Days of Pompeii
(2001) is, as the artist has said in a recorded
interview, deliberately based on nineteenth-century academic
painting, 'because we are dealing with England and France, who
invented Rome in a way.'
They invented Rome to help glorify their own role as great
colonial powers with India and Africa and whatever they
were colonizing. And especially the Brits. They had an
enormous fascination with Roman subjects and obviously
did see themselves in that guise as the new Rome. So I
thought that it would be interesting to see our relationship
through the eyes of nineteenth century salon painting,
which I've always loved anyway. It's such campy painting . . .
I also wanted to have someone's eyes, a single character,
who would be a Pre-Raphaelite woman who would look
and watch and observe everything in her wheelchair. She's
in a wheelchair and only in the end and final picture -
which is the only one that deals with the devastation and
the destruction - is she standing up. Once the disaster
happens she stands and walks.6
