The Past in the Present: Eleanor Antin, Jewish Art and 1990s America

This essay situates two works by Eleanor Antin—the film The Man Without a World (1991), and the installation Vilna Nights (1993)—in the context of Jewish art as it was articulated in 1990s America. During this period, efforts were made by scholars, curators—and some artists—towards a new Jewish art that would be consummate with other contemporaneous identity-based practices. Although these efforts did not birth a new Jewish art, they did instigate a revived interest in the history of Eastern European Jewry. This was Antin’s subject in both The Man Without a World and Vilna Nights, but the representation of this history in both works challenged the nostalgia that it courted in other corners of 1990s Jewish art.