Art and the Body - Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni is a contemporary artist who focuses predominantly on process, which is essential to the outcome of her work. She explores themes surrounding femininity, desire and pleasure, birth, death, motherhood and transformation. She works with an array of media, where sculpture, installation and performance all intertwine. Throughout her entire art practice, Antoni maintains a supreme connection with her body, in which she attempts to discover herself from the inside out. She undergoes repetitive and sometimes painful actions such as biting in order to fully become aware of her senses and to ‘get back inside the body’. In her works Lick and Lather, 1993, Touch, 2002 and Saddle, 2000, Antoni blurs the distinction between the artist and the artwork, using her body to physically transform the work.

For Lick and Lather Antoni made a series of busts of herself, using ephemeral materials of chocolate and soap. She then began eroding them by licking the chocolate and washing herself with the soap. This process provided the artist with a deeply physical connection to the work, in which she used her senses of taste, smell and touch to transform the busts. Antoni performs a loving and gentle ritual on the casts, leaving traces of herself and of the intimate experience that she has with the work. There is a strong female presence in this piece, which references the freedom of body and sexuality expressed in feminist performance art from the 1970’s.

Lick & Lather, 1993
Two busts: one chocolate and one soap
24 x 16 x 13 inches
(60.96 x 40.64 x 33.02 cm)
Courtesy the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York




Touch 2002
Video still Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine New York




Saddle, 2000
Full Raw Hide; cast of artist's body
26 x 33 x 79 inches
Courtesy the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Touch creates the illusion of walking on the horizon- something that is not physically possible but which resides in our imagination. With the help of a video camera, Antoni attempts to defy gravity by installing a wire that is level with the ocean line, and walking on it so that it appears that for a brief moment she is touching the horizon. While we know it is just an illusion, we get a sense of her body up in the air, with the wind and waves distorting her balance. The effect of this delicate image of Antoni against the horizon is to make us consider our own body balancing on a thin wire, which perhaps is a metaphor for the imbalance within our daily lives.

There is a coexisting presence and absence of the artist’s body in Saddle, which outlines the physical shape of her body underneath the hide of a cow. This work is about emptiness in form, as while we think that we can see her outline, Antoni really is not there. There is a spatial dislocation, which removes both the artist and the cow from their physical forms, leaving a ghostlike trace of two bodies that were once living and breathing. Finally, we notice that the artist’s body is in a defeated, crawling position, which ties in with the title of the piece. She is letting herself be dominated, such as the cow was in order to produce the hide, a defining element of the work. Saddle presents the body as a mortal, temporary state, which brings the viewer to question what happens to the body after death.

Antoni is at the same time removed and physically present in her practice, allowing viewers to draw on their own experience of the work. The artist engages with the theme of the body by using it to leave evocative traces within the work to which the viewer can relate. In doing so, she draws our awareness to our own body and senses.

Bibliography

Princenthal, Nancy, Janine Antoni: Mother's milk, (Art in America, New York: Sep 2001. Vol. 89, Iss. 9;124), 5

Heartley, Eleanor, Thinking Through the Body: Women Artists and the Catholic Imagination, (Hypatia,18.4 2003) 3-22

Heartley, Eleanor, Art and Today; Art and the Body, (New York, Phaidon Press, 2008), 217-239

Nixon, Mignon, Bad Enough Mother,October, Vol.71, Feminist Issues (The MIT Press: Winter, 1995), 70-92

http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/janine-antoni/#/images/1/

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/antoni/index.html

http://artnews.org/gallery.php?i=100

http://bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2191

http://www.artcritical.com