Janine Antoni Explores Gender, Consumption Through Body Art

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Janine Antoni delves into themes of production, destruction, and gender by using her own body as a tool and medium. Her work often challenges traditional art historical narratives, particularly those with a patriarchal bent.

Antoni is widely recognized for her 1993 installation, Lick and Lather, which debuted at that year's Venice Biennale. The piece features 14 busts cast from her own head and chest, with seven made of chocolate and seven of soap. Antoni sculpts and erodes these self-portraits through acts of washing and devouring, blurring the lines between creation and destruction. A 2003 video, originally part of an Art21 feature, captures Antoni recreating one of these busts by excavating soap from its outer ear.“For me, [this work is] about that conflict, that kind of love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance,” Antoni stated.“And, really, the problem I have of looking in the mirror and thinking, 'Is that who I am?'” During its presentation at the Biennale, a young woman inadvertently collaborated with the artist by licking and biting off parts of the chocolate works.

Antoni's artistic practice, which has been prominent in New York's art scene since the 1990s, frequently leads to her being misidentified as a performance artist. Her objects, however, often retain palpable traces of the intimate and enduring processes involved in their creation. During a visit to her Park Slope, Brooklyn, home and studio last spring, Antoni noted that many of her works are titled with verbs, such as Gnaw ( 1992 ), Moor ( 2001 ), and Tear ( 2008 ). She expressed concern over the disconnect between viewers and the making of everyday objects.“We have lost our connection to the way the objects we are in contact with every day are made,” she explained, adding,“This alienates us from our world.”

To counteract this material estrangement, Antoni substitutes her body for conventional tools, using her eyelashes and hair as paintbrushes, her teeth and tongue as chisels, and her body and bones as molds. Her 2019 exhibition,“I am fertile ground,” at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, featured photographic works of body parts housed in gilded frames, which were stamped and molded from plastic casts of human bones. Antoni described her fascination with the“erotics of the traces a body leaves,” viewing her art as an“interface between artist and audience” that creates space for another's body to enter.“The work is just an excuse to get close,” she said.

Born in Freeport, Bahamas, in 1964 to Trinidadian parents, Antoni credits her Caribbean upbringing for her deep connection to the body. Her father, a physician who cofounded a clinic with his brothers, taught her“the miraculousness of the body.” This early sense of wonder evolved when, at age 13 in 1977, Antoni moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, to attend a Catholic girls' high school. There, she recognized how gestures could be interpreted differently across cultures, leading her to understand the body as socially conditioned by context, gender, race, and class. Reflecting on her motivations as a young artist in the early 1990s, Antoni said,“In the early work, I was trying to understand how and why the world responds to me, given that I have this particular, gendered body.”

Her early works, such as Loving Care ( 1993 ) and Butterfly Kisses ( 1996–99 ), explored persistent biological rhythms like sleeping, eating, and bathing, and examined how the body consumes and is consumed. These pieces used cosmetics and beauty products to create gestural marks, drawing attention to the commodification of gender. In the 1993 live performance of Loving Care at London's Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Antoni used her hair, soaked in Clairol's Loving Care“natural black” hair dye, to wash the gallery floor. This act satirized Abstract Expressionist action painting and Yves Klein's body prints, gradually expelling onlookers as black marks covered the space.

Antoni's artistic foundations were significantly shaped by feminist professors at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she began her MFA in 1987. Mentors like Mira Schor and Roni Horn challenged the contemporary art world's patriarchal leanings. Schor particularly influenced Antoni by sending her to the library with a list of women artists, knowing the catalog would yield no results, thus illustrating the art world's marginalization of women. Schor then provided Antoni with books from her personal library, fostering an informal education in feminist art history. Antoni subsequently saw herself in dialogue with earlier generations of women artists, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. When invited to exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1996, the same venue where Ukeles performed her Maintenance Art Performance Series in 1973, Antoni restaged Loving Care, implicitly connecting her work to Ukeles's concept of“maintenance art.” Antoni's first solo exhibition after graduating from RISD, held in February 1992 at Sandra Gering's Broome Street space in New York, challenged masculine formalism through parody.

Source: ARTnews

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