JANINE ANTONI: [. The artist uses her mouth instead of tools to cut away materials. In it, she sculpted 600-pound cubes of lard and chocolate using her mouth as a tool. [2] The couple met while in graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design. Paul [Ramirez Jonas] and I have had a dialogue since 87; thats a long discussion and weve changed a lot over the years. Slumberwas the first time I incorporated fairy tales in the work. But Antonis wrecking ball was made of lead, so that every time it struck the building it was knocking down, it was suffering damage. The context surrounding Harlem pushed me into a place that I would have never gone. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992 What better time than Easter Sunday to be thinking about chocolate. Here came the Janine; there went the Judd. What is the impetus behind it? Photograph by Geoffrey Clements. Halfway into the show, a young woman, a teenager from Czechoslovakia who was there with her parents on vacation, bit three noses off my chocolate heads! Religion Which are aspects of form? I am collaborating with them and Im never sure how they will respond. There was something about it that was very touching. He believed that everyone was an artist. But think about babies! Join our newsletter for a weekly update of recent highlights and upcoming events. SHWere about the same age and I have the feeling that I was at AcconcisSeed Bed! What could the machine tell you about dreams and sleep? Im not sure the work promises answers but it definitely asks questions. It can be used so you dont have to sit on the toilet seat. SHAll of the pieces are like hosts for projection of true or false narrative. JABeatrice Thomasis a weird sore thumb, and so isSwoon. "[12], Antoni has cited Louise Bourgeois as a strong artistic influence, referring to Bourgeois as her 'art mother.'[13]. Janine Antoni (b. This work is number six from an edition of six plus four artist's proofs. In the way that weve claimed some of these seminal performance pieces from 30-odd years ago, and used them to empower us. She slept with a blanket which she continued to weave during the day, creating an infinite blanket connected to a loom that she slept with at night. The information they store is not sent to Pixel & Tonic or any 3rd parties. In her installation Slumber (1994), Antoni slept in the gallery for 28 days and while she slept, an EEG machine recorded her REM patterns, which she then wove into a blanket from the night gown under which she slept. [10] In this process Antoni explored the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism. In her 1993 work Lick & Lather, Antoni made a . These two pieces along with the Shaker works seem to go together. Can you talk about the support and collaborations with your family . This flat surface would be about the relationship. But I think I should tell you the story of the artworks from the show, and then the questions will come. Minimalist, machine cut, intellectual in tone and above all, clean, they had no relationship to the messy, visceral performance art that was generally the domain of female artists often with a feminist agenda. (e.g. Three-part installation: 600 lbs. Yes, and the copper seemed to bring it all together. Youve had tremendous opportunities for the work and you have been able to use them to scale up and scale down your practice, which I think is the only way to keep options open and let them feed you. Where do you want to be? Well discuss the creative display, why its important, and how its positioned within the broader context of contemporary art. They have also given me a lot of material to work with. Established styles have been passed down for centuries. Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964) is a Bahamian-born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. However close one comes to it, one cant get it back. Lick and Lather, self-portrait bustsseven in chocolate, seven in soapwere shown at the Venice Biennale. [23], In Lick and Lather (1993), Antoni produced fourteen busts of herself, seven cast from chocolate and the other seven from soap. JAArticulating a relationship. Antoni's work focuses on process and the transitions between the making and finished product, often portraying feminist ideals. Once the child isnt hurting herself or anyone else, you have to trust the process to unfold naturally and in its own time. Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964) is a Bahamianborn American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. These are the works that I really cherish. The you that you have licked away. Its beautiful in its completeness. Peloton has taken the fitness world by storm, and one of the standout stars of the platform is Alex Toussaint. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. On the other side the rocks touch ever so gently. greenish-blue finish on bronze or copper due to oxidation. For example, in 1992, she chewed and spit out 600-pound cubes of chocolate and lard. There is a point where Im actually feeling the repercussions of the object on my body. Janine Antoni,Slumber, 1994, performance: loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, EEG machine and artist's REM readings. SHI was thinking about the artists you are historically linked to Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendietapeople who politicized their naked bodies in dance, performance, and photo pieces. pliable material is shaped into a three-dimensional form. For one, I became part pirate or lion. Image size 28 x 33. The works that I really love are things like Carolee SchneemannsMeat Joyor Joseph BeuyssI Love America and America Loves Me, or Chris Burden having himself shot. SHThinking about work that doesnt use your body as an instrument, how do you plan to make future pieces? Its hard to know how to take it. She has said that her body is a funnel through which the world is poured, and for the last 20 years she has discovered subtle ways to effect that pouring. I cant claim that piece. More than any artist of her generation (she was born in 1964), Antoni has fashioned from her own body and its intimacies an art of visceral delicacy. What is Unique About Janine Antoni's Gnaw? We spent several days using Photoshop to superimpose images of me onto pictures taken from the building. It consists of two enormous cubes made of lard and chocolate. JAI just believe in the power of art, what it can do for our lives. But in Zurich, the people were incredibly shy. Im really careful about what I show and what I dont show. Janine Antoni (American, born January 19, 1964) is a sculptor, photographer, performance artist, and installation artist. Personally, I want to broaden my audience, and I choose seduction over hostility. Its all been a bit of a lesson on how to get people to talk to me. In the end room, all is revealed, but its backwards and Im aware that it is a construction. Context encourages me to make different kinds of work; its another way to stretch. "Interdependence: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovi. Request Permissions, Published By: University of California Press. You told me once that you feel like you have to hit a home run every time. Gnaw, 1992); the absent body, gender roles, and the oral focus are recurring issues in her work. Initially, I was going for a very different image. of Chocolate The heart and. I do this to get some objectivity on myself, and my friends give that to me. It didnt work! Janine Antoni,Gnaw(detail), 1992, phenylthylamine: chocolate, lipstick, lard, pigment, wax. Gnaw (1992) - Janine Antoni Heart shaped packages and Lipsticks "I feel it's not chocolate without fat," she says. I am tapping into stories that, as a young girl, conditioned me or were the stories I fantasized about and to go back and face them, reconstruct them in some way. Patina. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements. I start out with an idea of what I want the object to be, and I try to impose it on the material. JAIf I dont have an experience with the object, how can I hope that the viewer will have an experience with the object? The chocolate can also be connected to stereotypical ideas of womanhood in its common consumption by women. Janine AntoniGnaw," 1992 . 600600Janine . Task: Determining the Content Make a list of words that you associate with Gnaw. The following interview was conducted in Janine Antonis studio in Brooklyn in October 2009. I try to do that in a lot of different ways, by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives that people might relate to in terms of process everyday activities--bathing, eating, etc. (61 x 50.8 cm.) ? Instead, I started to consider skyscrapers and Gothic buildings and began to look for other Gothic buildings that I might use to create this image. And they talked about the history of work being destroyed, like the Pieta. Saddle, 2000, full rawhide, 27 x 32 x 79. This part of the display is called Lipstick/Phenethylamine Display. This legacy is constantly referenced in discussions of your work, yet youre not operating in the same way these folks did. Search Sponsored by BOMB: artists in conversation, since 1981. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward. Janine Antoni's exhibition "Up Against" is on view at Luhring Augustine in New York through Oct. 24. What is phenethylamine and how do you pronounce it? The relationship is so dynamic, so full of potential, and much more visually interesting than two flat surfaces. If I can stay open and have the courage not to hang on to my original idea, the material starts to speak back and tell me what it wants to be. The first piece she made after graduating from Yale in 1989 was a set of negative wall imprints of her breast and nipple. Gastronomica When my work takes my body to a physical and sometimes psychological extreme, it becomes a complex relationship. I wouldnt be able to do anything that I am doing without some key people in my life. Her performance was at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, in 1993. She keeps returning to the doubleness of things; nowhere is that more evident than in Tear, the piece that dominated Up Against. Part of the piece took the form of a two-and-a-half ton wrecking ball, an object we invariably associate with destruction and violence. I chose not to leave them because for me, the interest lay in the licking and the washing as a gentle, loving act, and how that butted up against the fact that I was defacing myself. Janine Antoni's gnaw. The audience is the wild card. . BOMBs foundersNew York City artists and writersdecided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. She wanted to prove that sculpting was not necessarily an act of the hands, and she created pieces that resembled the textures of the materials used in her work. Imagining is much more provocative and makes each viewers story slightly different. Conduit, 2009, copper sculpture with urine verdigris patina, framed digital c-print. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. The work is project-driven, research is involved, its collaborative in terms of technical assistance and people you need to help you. [9] This particular work was seen as a tableau vivant because of its spectacle aspect: The aspirational focus of this tableau vivant, while situating the artist as an object on view, simulataneously [sic] insists on an aesthetics of connections: between the artist and beholders, between the artists [sic] and the art institutions, and between the artist's conscious and unconscious processes.[9]. I had an opportunity to work with a home for the elderly, and I decided I was going to interview all the women there and ask them if they had any advice on how to be a good mother. And I had this idea in my mind that it would be finished when I created a completely flat surface between these two rocks where, visually, these two forms would become one. The griffin is itself a hybrid of a lion and a bird. I was so wrong! Each prompted some intriguing responses. The one thing I know and trust is my own experience. Bio. On two rows of facing pedestals, Antoni arranged 14 self-portrait busts, seven in chocolate and seven in soap. SHWhat have you learned from repeatedly showing and performing some of these pieces? Gargoyle because you were thinking Gothic building? Janine Antoni, Gnaw (detail), 1992, phenylthylamine: chocolate, lipstick, lard, pigment, wax. [32][6][33], Antoni is married to artist, Paul Ramirez Jonas and together they have a daughter. JACertainly its not my goal to push the audience away or be aggressive. At those moments when 'the creation stands between the observer and the artist's creativity,' it might be best, as D. W. Winnicott suggests, to focus on 'the creative impulse itself.'" 1 In September 2015, when Janine Antoni arrived at the conference "Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance . I learned about this specific work in my art history class a few years ago, and to me, Antoni provides a thought-provoking commentary on eating disorders and the double standard for women. BOMB's Oral History Project is dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. Then its almost like the ideal relationshipnot only in art. Thats different from how we have traditionally learned to approach a conceptual work of art. I am exploring how to communicate through experience. Using materials related to feminism, chocolate is a desirable fat, while lard is a feared one. When I was looking atSwoon, a guard saw me apparently uncertain as to how to proceed through the piece, so he told me what the breathing was. A lot of meaning comes out in the fight that I couldnt have known before starting. Gnaw comprises two 600-pound cubes one of chocolate, the other of lard and a three-paneled, mirrored cosmetic display case. In Gnaw, Antoni chewed away at two 600-pound blocks of chocolate and lard, an act of literal consumption that was also the ingestion and re-formation of the minimalist cube. Janine Antoni. . A professional window cleaner harnessed us up, so what you dont see is that I have a harness that goes under my dress. Lick and Latheris about me in relationship to myself. I dont see it that way. That inescapable condition of being alivethat we visit damage on others and damage visits us in turnmay well be the cause of the tear in the magnificent eye that occupied the gallery for two months last fall. Ive thought about how these pieces become props for storytelling. Janine Antoni is a Bahamian contemporary artist who works with different materials, such as soap, lard, and chocolate. A few years ago a friend told me shed found this thing on the market called a Travel Mate. Nothing is predictable. The two cubes were displayed in an evocative room filled with mirrored shelves. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. And having posted about artists working with their own body the last couple of days, today I'm all about an artist who uses her body not as the source of the image but as the tool to make the work. Usually the material resists me all the way. . Was it done out of frustration? She completed the piece by melting down the gnawed chocolate into 40 heart-shaped candy packages, and mixed the lard with pigment and beeswax to make 150 lipstick containers, which were then exhibited in a display case.