In The Adventure of a Nurse, Eleanor Antin chooses to play a nurse – a stereotyped female character, but also a male fantasy. Thus dressed for the part, the artist controls cut-out and hand-coloured paper dolls by hand, like a puppeteer, in a very minimalist decor with a bed cover in a pink design. These dolls become the protagonists of a melodrama staged and acted out by the artist. The paper heroine of the story, Nurse Eleanor has a succession of romantic encounters with her patients throughout the story – with each character more surprising and seductive than the last. She thus meets a dying poet, a biker, a doctor, a French vagrant and an antimilitarist senator. Eleanor Antin animates all of these characters by hand and lends them her voice, like a child playing with dolls in their room.

This ironic, sincere work is the moving story of a young woman's fantasies, combining seduction, sex and betrayal; unless of course these are the fantasies that are generally attributed to women, but which actually remain exclusively masculine. The whole piece resembles a handmade soap opera, made with an economy of means. The essence of the work lies in the encounters that the naive Nurse Eleanor makes and the various emotions that she goes through. For example, she suffers both from the death of her beloved poet and from the sly seduction of the head doctor of the hospital she works in. Eleanor Antin thus presents us with a world of archetypes in which good opposes bad and in which all nuances are collapsed.

Priscilia Marques