The Brooklyn Rail

The boots face the Pacific at Del Mar. From a distance, they have the appearance of matchsticks or standing stones. At a squint, even people neatly spaced out along the shoreline, observing something happening in the water. But rubber betrays itself. It is a strange material—at once stiff and yielding. When empty, the calf buckles and sags. Each boot, designed to be perfectly uniform, a left made to be worn with a right, acquires its own stance, some listing slightly while others retain their upright posture, the sand behind scuffed with footprints.

This image forms the opening salvo in Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, a two-year conceptual art project that began in 1971 and culminated in an exhibition at MoMA in 1973. During those two years, Antin arranged fifty pairs of black rubber boots in various formations—queuing, circling, perched in trees, marching up hills—at locations across California and, later, New York. Each scene was photographed in black and white by Phel Steinmetz, then printed as a postcard and sent out to recipients.

The first time I saw that shoreline image it was larger than postcard sized—a little closer to A5. It was on the cover of a book about the project, which I’d found in a charity shop in North London for £4.50. I knew nothing about the work nor its creator but liked these boots with their backs turned to the viewer, half-amused and half-unnerved by their strangely formal arrangement.

100 Boots Facing the Sea (1971) first appeared to Antin in a dream. At that point it had been three years since the artist had relocated from New York to Southern California with her husband and child. They arrived in San Diego the day Robert Kennedy was shot dead, and two days after Andy Warhol was shot and survived. It was a turbulent time, punctuated by protests and violence, “the Vietnam War raging in our hearts, as well as on land,” she later recalled. While her husband taught at UC San Diego, Antin was adrift, feeling that she neither belonged in New York (known, disappointing, unreceptive on return) nor Los Angeles (unknown, culturally if not geographically distant).

Every year, if measured by its losses, is a year of horrors, but 1968 was especially lethal. Numbers for the military dead are easier to come by: 16,592 American soldiers dead, 27,915 Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers dead, approximately 200,000 People's Army of Vietnam and Viet Cong (PAVN/VC) soldiers dead. Figures for civilian fatalities tend to be attached to specific atrocities. Approximately 500 murdered by American troops in the My Lai Massacre. Somewhere between 2,800 and 6,000 murdered by the PAVN/VC in Hue.

Antin spent the latter half of that year making composite portraits of local people, assembled from consumer goods mail-ordered from the Sears catalogue. Jeanie (1969) was a side table holding hair curlers, matches, and a coffee cup; Molly Barnes (1969) a buzzing electric razor and pink bathroom rug dusted with baby powder. They were exhibited at Gain Ground, a non-commercial gallery space in New York’s Upper West Side. A subsequent exhibition in a room at the nearby Chelsea Hotel focused on women living in the city: Yvonne Rainer embodied in an exercise bike with a flower-filled basket; Carolee Schneemann by a red velvet cloak draped over an easel, a mirror behind catching the edges of a further, jagged shard on the floor.

These were portraits that required people to stand in a room and look, moving around the objects to puzzle out their implications. Antin found the Chelsea Hotel show, which had been moved there after Gain Ground folded, “especially gruelling” to stage and flew home frustrated, not least by the lack of interest from more mainstream galleries. Stuck between coasts and communities, she became determined to free herself from the limits of blank white walls and far away hierarchies. It was in the wake of that disappointing show that Antin turned to Mail art, a practice popularised by Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus artists Bob Watts and Ken Friedman. It was simple. It was direct. And all it required was a six-cent stamp, an address, and a work that could fit in a postbox.

100 Boots Facing the Sea was eventually sent on March 15, 1971, to “a mailing list of about a thousand names—dancers, writers, critics, museums, galleries, universities, and assorted innocent bystanders.” Weeks later a follow-up was dispatched, depicting the boots snaking their way to church. Soon there were regular missives, as the boots visited banks, took to supermarket aisles, waded through tracts of wild mustard, and traveled Route 101. In all, Antin sent fifty-one postcards, each with a descriptive title—100 Boots Trespass, 100 Boots on the Road, 100 Boots in the Grove (all 1971)—chronicling the boots’ journey from Southern California to the pavement outside MoMA via railway tracks, the Staten Island Ferry, Central Park, and under the Brooklyn Bridge.

This origin story, dream and all, has since acquired an almost-mythic sheen: the journey West, the volatile public atmosphere, a pivotal moment of artistic transformation. (Though one could point to the fact that Antin’s work immediately prior to 100 Boots did also involve objects tasked with standing in for people, the sensuality of flowers and furnishings switched out for the masculine force of 200 dollars worth of surplus Army-Navy gumboots.)

It is tempting to read these boots as a collective—a ragtag group, or more explicitly an army—but Antin has always referred to them as a single entity, a millipede marching forward on a hundred feet, kicking up dust. Like those consumer goods forebears, 100 Boots is a character study. Unlike those forebears, its subject is not caught in one static moment of selfhood but a series of unfolding episodes and experiences. En masse, the boots create a Kerouac-style chancer traipsing and trespassing his way across California as he looks for work, gambles in saloons, camps out, and eventually tries his luck in New York. Antin’s boots are at once prop, costume, and silent actor. “All picaresque novels have a hero, a dumb charmer,” Antin writes. “D’Artagnan was a jerk, Tom Jones was a fool, and Don Quixote was a madman—and mine wouldn’t talk.”

In many of Antin’s photos, the boots acquire a comic aspect. Dispersed among cows in a meadow, it is almost as though the cattle could be wearing the boots. Resting on the shade of a porch in Sorrento Valley, they loll around like children feigning tiredness, having fallen on the spot. But empty shoes can also haunt, especially when, as in the case of these boots, they invoke both threat and loss. An empty shoe might be teasingly mysterious: who doesn’t want to know what happened to the wearer of the solitary high heel abandoned on the street, or the pair of oxfords sat politely on a garden wall, laces tied? But boots, especially choreographed in any kind of block or line, bring to mind certain noises and images (the march of troops, legs and arms swinging in perfect time) and certain fears (destruction, depersonalisation, death). Just as some postcards have a humorous touch, in others the effect is ominous, repeat blocks of black beetling across the sparse, sun-bleached landscape.

It’s easy to find these images eerie, given both the immediate context of the Vietnam War and the wider symbolic power that the empty shoe acquired over the latter half of the twentieth century. In displays at genocide memorial centers, including Auschwitz and Srebrenica, piles of empty shoes are used to illustrate atrocity, attempting to gesture by sheer volume at the scale of loss. A single pair can be powerful too, as in the case of artist Doris Salcedo’s “Atrabiliarios” series where pumps and sandals belonging to women disappeared during Colombia’s civil war sit in vitrines covered over with cow’s bladders, their forms blurry behind the membrane.

In recent decades, the empty shoe has also become a popular form of protest (against climate change, Israel killing children in Gaza, gun violence, femicide) by asking the onlooker to conduct their own empathetic resurrection, placing a person back inside the object in order to recall their humanity. “Unlike other pieces of clothing, which in a photo become abstract forms, shoes retain the shape of a body part,” Annie Ernaux writes in The Use of Photography. “They are the element that conveys presence in the realest possible way.” Gloves may resemble hands, but they collapse when unworn. A shoe keeps its posture, making it easier to picture the foot inside, the legs and torso and arms and head and beating heart sprouting up from the sole.

One reason, perhaps, why 100 Boots elicits complicated feelings is that, while at times the postcards echo the choreographed logic of war, in which historical violence is replayed by proxy, elsewhere they gesture towards other, more lively forms of play-acting or roleplay. The boots adopt the postures of civic life—queuing, worshipping, shopping—in ways that feel improvised, even absurd. They find and lose jobs. They ride rollercoasters. Sometimes, as in the postcard mailed on October 18, 1972, they are simply “Doing Their Best.”

I mean “play-acting” here not just as something staged, but in the sense that children intuitively grasp, given their instinct for imaginative aids. Play is, of course, the arena where the wider adult world is absorbed in all its rituals, complications, and vices; the inward dynamics of family and external sweep of world events digested, distorted, and ultimately dispensed with again. The bride removes her lace veil and returns to her toys. War happens in the playground, the dead springing back to life when the bell rings. The real is only real for the duration of the game and can always be undone.

100 Boots toys with ideas both solemn and silly—Vicki Goldberg writes of Antin that “her stories tend to be quixotic comedies wrapped around an elegy”—but its antihero, in all his braggadocio and disobedience, his restless spirit, only exists for as long as he is being put through his paces. He can embody the grief and brutality of war and the sometimes frustrating, sometimes freeing rhythms of daily living, before being packed away again, returned to being just a big pile of boots.

In youth, we readily accept the idea that clothing might conjure a person or persona. This may be a stock type. A pair of wings make the fairy, a dark scarf a vampire’s cape. Or it may be a broader concept. The child staggering around in their parents’ shoes—the twin clichés being mummy’s high heels and daddy’s galumphing brogues—is trying on “adulthood” for size, the results not just amusing for the mismatch in scale but the sense of something being parodied that is still beyond comprehension.

There’s a strange kinship with the 1971 children’s film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, set in England but filmed in Burbank the year before Antin began 100 Boots. Angela Lansbury plays Eglantine Price, a wannabe witch learning magic via mail correspondence post during WWII. When Nazis invade the South Coast, she animates an army of dusty suits of armour to repel them. It’s a bizarre ending: Norman, Cavalier, Viking, and redcoat uniforms marching in unison towards the battlefield, empty feet rattling. Bullets pass through them; a solleret is upended to pour out the spent rounds. There’s violence without blood, victory without victims. It is a safe vision of warfare, largely played for laughs: another kind of parody for children yet to grasp the full horrors of history.

The second time I saw 100 Boots Facing the Sea it was the original postcard. The whole fifty-one-part series was displayed at MOCA in Los Angeles, protected by laminated covers. I’d spent the preceding couple of weeks driving around the same landscapes Antin had used as her postcard backdrops, which also happen to be the backdrops to my wife’s childhood: La Jolla, Leucadia, Solana Beach. I hadn’t previously appreciated what a militarized area it was, full of war memorials and discount haircuts for veterans. On Christmas Eve, we went to San Clemente, the road cutting straight through Camp Pendleton. Established in 1942 and sitting in North San Diego County near Oceanside, it is now one of the largest Marine Corps bases in the United States. These days it occupies more than 125,000 acres and 17 miles of coastline. In the distance we saw replica Afghan villages, initially set up for drills involving actors, sound systems, and pyrotechnics. More recently they have been used to simulate natural disasters and embassy rescues. In the sixties, you would have found mock Vietnamese villages in their place, ghost towns constructed for a deadly serious form of play-acting.

Set against this backdrop, 100 Boots felt newly charged. Its fictional army, at times whimsical and at times disquieting, now echoed the real military presence embedded in the land. The boots became part of a broader choreography of simulated war, echoing on decades later. A dress can be just a dress, a boot just a boot. But we imbue what we wear with so many layers of intimacy, meaning, memory, and metaphor that a boot can also be a whole world. Antin’s work is often vexing because it offers up narratives that seem straightforward at first glance and grow ever more complicated the longer you spend in their presence. But 100 Boots can hold it all. It is funny and irreverent and weird, and also, occasionally, horribly melancholy, the boots marching on indifferently, step by step, postcard by postcard.