On The Road With 100 Boots

100 BOOTS by Eleanor Antin, Philadelphia, Running Press: 1999 (197-) 779.092 ANT

With the arrival of spring, our thoughts turn to getting out and looking around. That may be why, in March 1971, the artist Eleanor Antin began a project that became a picaresque novel in postcards – 100 Boots.
Antin (b. 1935) was living in southern California at the time; she bought one hundred boots at an Army Navy Surplus store with no clear purpose in mind. But, lined up in pairs, they began to hint at latent possibilities. Soon Antin was photographing the boots, arrayed in pairs and lines in various settings. She captioned the pictures to suggest a narrative and began sending the resulting postcards (51 in all) to approximately 1,000 people she had met in the art world. Some were baffled when they began receiving the semi-regular missives; others were intrigued.
Between March 1971 and July 1973 the boots crossed the country from California to New York They began their odyssey in a conventional way, shopping at a grocery store, attending church, visiting the bank, and attending a drive-in movie. Antin took their very first group photo on the beach at Del Mar, California.
Soon the boots were walking about their generation, they got political. They joined demonstrations, committed trespasss and civil disobedience, and finally had to hit the road. Along the way they dabbled in the back-to-nature movement in the Sorrento Valley, once memorably passing a flock of geese headed in the other direction. Huddled under a bridge, the boots resembled so many black leather hobos and after crossing the La Jolla Desert on foot, in September they definitively headed east by hopping a train.
After various adventures, the boots arrived in New York City in May, 1973, like generations of immigrants, on the ferry. Disembarking, they became tourists, crossing Herald Square, strolling through Central Park, and entering the Egyptian Garden where they circled around a belly dancer.

And then, just as Antin had hoped, the boots marched triumphantly into the Museum of Modern Art, where they were given their own room, making their creator one of a mere handful of women to receive a solo show at MOMA in the 1970s. For, all along, Antin had been looking for a way to circumvent a system that was inhospitable to women. Conceptual art, which places the idea before the aesthetic execution, was a likely tool for a subversive moment. Credit (or blame, depending on your viewpoint) for initiating conceptual art if usually given to the surrealist Marcel Duchamp for his 1917 creation of "R. Mutt."