ART REVIEW : 3 Windows on Antin’s ‘Ghost Story’

San Diego-based artist Eleanor Antin became a well-known presence in Los Angeles in the ‘70s through the then-widely-unrecognized genre of performance art and related experimental filmmaking. She went on to wider recognition elsewhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but hasn’t been seen much here in recent years. She’s best remembered for playing out alter-ego personalities based on historic types such as a king, an aging African American ballerina and Eleanor Nightingale, a nurse in the Crimean War.

Now Antin’s work has evolved from the temporal to installations that hold still long enough for ordinary museum-browsers to get a handle on her sensibility. On view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is her latest, an installation titled “Minetta Lane--A Ghost Story.”

Viewers enter the piece through a ramshackle corridor that looks like a cross between a spooky fun-house and a set from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” At the end it widens into a darkened miniature courtyard facing three uncurtained windows, allowing visitors the forbidden thrill of playing Peeping Tom.

Attention is first drawn to the studio of a female artist working overtime on a large Abstract Expressionist-style canvas. She slugs from a bottle of booze, smokes, paces and scrubs away on her painting. One is perfectly conscious that the scene is created through a rear-projected film, but color and context make it engagingly convincing. There is ambient sound but no dialogue.

Presently a charming little girl of about 10 enters the scene. She wears ringlets and a dress-up outfit suggesting the Victorian era. This is the ghost, Miriam. Clearly invisible to the painter, the girl mischievously apes her movements and, when the painter leaves the room, paints a large black “X” across the canvas and departs.

Returning, the artist sees her vandalized work, goes slightly berserk and places a telephone call. This calls attention to the second window where a nude young couple are in delightful dalliance in a vintage bathtub. They are not happy about being interrupted by the phone. The guy answers. He could be the painter’s shrink, unfaithful lover or just a friend, but he gets rid of her call as soon as possible and gets back to play.

Miriam appears, tweaking both lovers until they get into a brawl. The ghost is so tickled with the havoc she’s wreaking she does a backward somersault before vanishing again.

She turns up next in the elegant digs of an elderly gent visible through the third window. He’s contentedly tending his caged birds. A Christmas tree twinkles in the background. Miriam appears. One by one she snuffs the lights in a crystal chandelier suspended overhead. As the last one goes out, the old man loses consciousness, either cozily dozed off or dead.

That’s the end if you’ve seen enough, but there’s something significant about the way the whole cycle just starts over again. Exiting the magical courtyard one encounters a TV monitor playing a black-and-white video loop. It shows a wrecking ball knocking down a building, presumably the one we’ve just left.

A wall label explains that the action of “Minetta Lane--A Ghost Story” is set in New York’s Greenwich Village in the ‘50s, a time and place Antin holds in nostalgic regard as symbolizing an artist’s Bohemia that was idealistic and lyrical.

Even if one shares the sentiment, the explanation may be an artistic mistake. Tacking this work to a time frame raises what seem to be irrelevantly literal questions. If this is the ‘50s, why is the film in the style of silent slapstick? The artist paints in a ‘50s manner but one still practiced. The lovers’ cold-water flat harks back at least to the ‘30s. The aura of Miriam and the old gent are virtually Dickensian. The installation could be a variation on “A Christmas Carol.”

None of these considerations really hurt the work, they just act as a reminder that an artistic experience is better when it leaves certain things to the imagination. That said, “Minetta Lane” has a lot going for it. The only other artist it brings forcefully to mind is Edward Kienholz, who virtually invented the genre of the life-size tableau. By adding literally moving pictures and implied story line to it, Antin makes an original extension of the art of Assemblage.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, through June 11. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays . (310) 399-0433.)