Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin works in photography, video, film, performance, drawing, and writing. She uses history as a way to explore the present. She takes things that have happened in the past, and mixes them with things that are happening currently, normally to find humor in something that was serious. She stages photographs as well as performance art, and even performs herself.  She researches things about history, and then finds a new way of looking at them.  For instance, in her "Helen's Odyssey" series, she found that Helen of Troy is often shown in art as a "dumb blonde because she was a much hated person". So Eleanor wanted to show different sides of her, being flirtatious, angry, big as life, etc.  I really liked looking through her photographs because even though they are obviously staged, they have a realistic side to them.  They aren't just photographs that you can glance at and understand, you have to take a deeper look into what she is actually trying to say through them.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/images/Antin-Eleanor_Constructng-Helen_2008-sml.JPG