ART : Ever the ‘Wicked Little Girl’ : Eleanor Antin’s works may be on the fringe, but her audience isn’t. Her latest alter ego is a demonic little angel.

A skeleton wearing a frilly purple hat stands just inside the door of Eleanor Antin’s spacious studio at UC San Diego, greeting the visitor with an instant burst of the artist’s trademark fatalistic humor. Just in case the message doesn’t sink in, a handbill visible on the door cheerily illustrates several early warning signs of cancer.

The studio, like Antin herself and her work of 25 years in performance art, writing, installation and independent film, entertains--with an edge.

“My work, as several people have said, is people-friendly,” Antin explains, “which means it does have seductive properties and dreamlike properties that engage with people. It’s also funny. There’s a lot of comedy and romance. At the same time, there is always something dark, and I think that’s very much a part of my sensibility and maybe also part of my Jewish background.

“There’s always that certain mistrust, no matter how good things are . . . which is very Jewish. But it’s also very reasonable, healthy cynicism, because that’s what’s going to happen--we’re going to get older, we’re going to get sicker, the Republicans will get elected, all sorts of things. No matter how good it might be, it’s always going to change.”

Hailed as a “superbly restless” artist by Mills College art historian Moira Roth, Antin herself is no friend to stasis and the status quo. She has embraced a succession of media with ferocious intensity and combined them anew in fresh and challenging ways. Antin, a seminal figure in the history of performance art, has also won prizes for her writing, made films revolutionary enough to be considered instant cult classics and fused the genres of installation and video art, expanding the sensual and temporal boundaries of each.

In Antin’s latest work, an installation opening Saturday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, change comes in the form of a demonic little angel named Miriam.

“Minetta Lane-- A Ghost Story “ re-creates a life-size stretch of apartment facades in New York’s Greenwich Village of the 1950s, the heart of bohemian culture at the time and the site of Antin’s own coming of age. Three apartment windows become screens for rear-projected film narratives, turning viewers into voyeuristic time travelers watching lives from a lost era unfold. In one apartment, a young couple cavorts in the bathtub. In another, an Abstract Expressionist painter labors over a canvas. And in the third, an aged man tends to his pet birds. Flitting from one apartment to another--in essence from one film to another--and wreaking havoc in each is Miriam.

“She’s charming and amusing and enjoying herself, like a wicked figure in a ballet or like an urban, female version of the trickster character,” says Antin, 60, of her alter ego, as her own blue-gray eyes gleam devilishly beneath a head of dark, slightly wild curls. “But basically she’s this little demon who’s a life force that ends and destroys everything. The longer you live, the more you know it’s there, this anti-life force that’s part of life.

“I guess it’s an image of myself as a kind of wicked little girl. I think that when I’m 90, I’m going to look at myself in the mirror and see this wicked little girl. It’s a kind of personality that’s endlessly subversive. I do think, too, that comes from having grown up in the ‘50s, which was such a repressive time, politically as well as socially.”

Antin’s parents emigrated from Poland in the 1930s. Her mother, as an actress in the Yiddish theater and an ardent Communist, escaped double persecution. The stifling social climate of ‘50s America exacerbated what was for Antin already a natural, inherited consciousness of danger and alienation. But the ‘50s were also years of exploration that she romanticizes unabashedly in “Minetta Lane.” It was a time, she says, when being an artist was not just another career option but also a noble pursuit.

Antin studied art and writing at City College in New York and worked for several years as an actress, at first considering it to be her personal misfortune to be pulled in such diverse directions. But by the late 1960s, the traditional categories governing the art world had begun to dissolve.

“Conceptual art was opening up the possibility to cross mediums, cross genres, cross boundaries all over the place, to do something intelligent and fun, amusing, startling,” she recalls.

The Dadaists of the ‘20s, with their intermingling of poetry, art and performance, inspired her, as did the more recent, related Fluxus movement of the ‘60s. Her first artwork, the “Blood of a Poet” box (1965-68), held specimens collected from 100 poets and launched her career-long inquiry into what makes a person tick--physically, culturally, politically, emotionally.

In 1968, her husband, art critic and performance poet David Antin, was hired to run the art gallery at UC San Diego. They moved with their 1-year-old son Blaise to Solana Beach, a northern suburb of San Diego not far from where they live now, in Del Mar.

From there, Antin began mailing photographic postcards of an invented hero, “100 Boots,” in various stances in the environment--facing the sea, trespassing, marching through a grocery store. After two years and 51 cards, “100 Boots” had become a hero to more than just Antin. The work’s humor and vaguely militaristic undertones captured the imagination of thousands across the country who followed the character’s every move, right through the door of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the entire series and the boots themselves were exhibited in 1973. (The Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica will show “100 Boots” and related documentation beginning April 22.)

By 1974, Antin was teaching at UC San Diego, along with her husband, and becoming increasingly active in Southern California’s dynamic community of female artists. Against the sterile, impersonal backdrop of Minimalism, feminist artists of the ‘70s such as Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding and Rachel Rosenthal plunged into autobiography, using performances to probe the links between the personal and the political. This milieu gave Antin license to pursue what one critic termed “psychological vagrancy,” the adoption of a succession of fictional personas.

“When I became a feminist, I was interested in knowing, if I were a man, what kind of man I would be,” she says. “I figured I’ll put hair on my face, have a beard--I’ll be a man. I discovered I was a king and started taking on aspects of a king, politically.”

Dressed as the King of Solana Beach, Antin would wander the community and talk with residents about their concerns.

“Then I said, ‘Well, that’s my male self. What’s my quintessential perfect female self?’ I became a ballerina, and the ballerina is an artist, so that was my artist self,” she says, summarizing a long phase of live performances and appearances in her own films as Eleanora Antinova, an aging black ballerina of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

After the ballerina came the nurse, a character Antin initially disdained as pathetic but who eventually revealed herself to be “a great, fabulous self.”

Antin modeled her nurse persona after Florence Nightingale, who pioneered nursing as a profession, elevating its status to that of a respectable career. She staged performances in art galleries from L.A. to New York as “Eleanor Nightingale” and created around her a remarkably convincing series of photographs in the formal, staged style of Victorian-era photography. The series, called “Angel of Mercy” (1977), an important precursor to the contrived film stills of art starlet Cindy Sherman and the pseudo-historical photographs by the team of McDermott and McGough, was recently purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Antin was, as she puts it, “very hot” in the ‘70s. She was included in prestigious biennial exhibitions in Sao Paolo, Brazil (1975), and Venice, Italy (1976), and had a solo show at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego).

But performance art remained “the weirdo’s place to be in the art world,” according to Henry Sayre, professor of art at Oregon State University and author of the 1989 book “The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970.” Antin’s personas, Sayre believes, were born, in part, out of frustration:

“Those roles are safe ways for her to explore parts of her life that would be unsafe otherwise. With the ballerina, it’s the whole idea of failure, which is something that women artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s knew a lot about, because of the art world itself. It was what happened to you. Women were put on the margins and in the hinterlands. What’s always fun about Eleanor is that she can turn anger into theater and the theater can be funny and moving too.”

Comedy also flirts with tragedy in Antin’s films, which likewise have become building blocks for a new persona: Yevgeny Antinov, a controversial exiled Russian film director of the 1920s. Antin’s playful tampering with truth and time becomes marvelously rich when she “casts” her ballerina persona Antinova as the star of Antinov’s films “The Last Night of Rasputin” (1989) and “The Man Without a World” (1991).

Antin wrote and shot “The Man Without a World” in the style of Yiddish silent films, resuscitating both a lost culture and one of its more vibrant forms of self-expression. For Antin, history, like the individual, is little more than a construct, a rich melange of memory, fantasy and desire.

For most of her years in the art world, Antin has made a name for herself by using other names--those of her alter egos, her personas. But Antinova seems to have made her last curtain call with the recent publication of a book, “Eleanora Antinova Plays,” and Antin, ever cunning, charming and restless, has already moved on.

“I used to make art in these other voices, and I don’t have to do that anymore,” she declares. Since completing “Minetta Lane,” she has been writing, with her husband, a trilogy of screenplays about life in the ‘90s and hoping to tweak yet another convention by crossing over into the mainstream film world--a leap by some standards but not by Antin’s.

“More or less on her own and following a logic of her own that makes sense,” Sayre marvels, “she’s moved through every idea about medium that’s out there in the art world--making serious films and making them well, making complicated installations and making them well, managing to talk to as wide an audience as anybody I know. All kinds of people love the work. That doesn’t happen on the fringes of the avant-garde very often.”

* “Minetta Lane--A Ghost Story,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St. Saturday through June 11. (310) 399-0433. “The Return of 100 Boots” will be on view at the Craig Krull Gallery from April 22 to May 27, Bergamot Station, Building B3, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. (310) 828-6410.