White (whose performance entitled Autobiographical Fantasies staged at LAICA the previous year may well have inspired Traylor's exhibition title). 2 Their works were loosely united under the category of conceptual self-portraiture, one that seemed to belie the apparently objective documentary emphasis of conceptual art via its integration with subjective narratives of personal discovery. Indeed, the looping cursive font deployed on the exhibition's publicity materials self-consciously signaled its distance from the conceptual aesthetic of bureaucratic administration in favor of a romantic or narrative bent more akin to the epic productions of old Hollywood (fig. 1).Autobiographical Fantasies epitomized the approach of a number of Los Angeles artists who, working in a post-conceptual vein in the early to mid-1970s, produced work that took a playful sideswipe at documentary, history, and confessional life narrative. Other examples included Lowell Darling's multi-part project This Is Your Life (1973-76) and Antin's The Angel of Mercy (1977, restaged at LAICA in 1981, both of which, like the LAICA exhibition, presented life stories as conceptual art and merged fiction and reality. In each case, autobiography was deployed to trouble the idea of the artist as social chronicler, the status of life stories as political activism, and the assumptions of authenticity attached to the conceptual presentation of documentation as art. In these terms, the artists included in the exhibition have often been linked to the post-studio practices of John Baldessari (who served on LAICA's Board of Directors) as well as to the proximate Hollywood entertainment industry, with its emphasis on celebrity, artifice, and spectacular image production. In their critical approach to visual representation and their appropriation of forms of image projection and dissemination, the works in Autobiographical Fantasies anticipated Douglas Crimp's landmark Pictures exhibition, which would travel to LAICA from Artists Space in New York in the spring of 1978. 3 Such contexts are crucial for understanding the context of Autobiographical Fantasies, but they have the potential to foreclose other significant aspects of the works: their concern with material documents, their links to feminist art and politics in 1970s Los Angeles, and the way in which these discourses coalesced in works that implicated viewers in the space of the exhibition and subsequently in the archive. The works in Autobiographical Fantasies, like those of Antin and Darling, focused attention on the physical stuff of life stories, presenting autobiography as a process of archival accretion that activated a continuous telling, and in which material and conceptual gaps, slippage, or confusion might offer the opportunity for a critically imaginative or performative encounter. Approaching such practices through feminist and queer reading in the archive permits an understanding of them as proposing a critical performance of the self and the archive alike. It raises questions about how we e...
