Janine Antoni Overview

Biting, chewing, spitting, and blinking are only some of the bodily processes Janine Antoni employs to create her art. She sets her teeth to enormous blocks of chocolate and lard; she dips her hair in paint and mops the floor with... [more]

Biting, chewing, spitting, and blinking are only some of the bodily processes Janine Antoni employs to create her art. She sets her teeth to enormous blocks of chocolate and lard; she dips her hair in paint and mops the floor with it; she lades her eyelashes with eyeliner and patterns the canvas by blinking. She takes every compulsive practice associated with femininity and hyperbolically engages it, both participating in and criticizing a society that she characterizes as "bulimic." Why bulimic? Because, Antoni believes, we are constantly and compulsively consuming and discarding the products of our culture. Bulimia, in this instance, does not serve as a mere metaphor; it is rather a widespread physical disposition that reaches far beyond its clinical definition. Thus, Antoni's work engages this physicality directly. During her celebrated performance "Gnaw" (1992), she was forced to decide at each moment whether to spit out or swallow the material she was consuming (chocolate or lard). She enacted, in a sense, the bulimic's ambivalence regarding the function of the mouth; is it an organ for expelling, or rather for ingesting? Antoni asserts that it is both. The two processes embody the two forces that Antoni believes define our society -- the desire to consume and the desire to discard. Discarding takes on a double meaning in "Gnaw." On the one hand, it is the practice of the bulimic, who vomits everything she eats. On the other hand, it is the fixation of a culture that has come to enjoy the pleasures of packaging perhaps more than the product. "Packaging is a symbol of our times," Antoni says. "It is a seduction -- unwrapping is like undressing. The stuff around the object is often more signifying than the object it contains." Antoni conflates the two meanings of discarding in her art: she sculpts the spit-out residues of chocolate and lard into heart-shaped candy boxes and lipsticks. The products of her destructive process are symbols of our society's obsession with the surface. Each of Antoni's projects engages the body in a kind of compulsive activity, a repetitive fixation that characterizes a section of society. Her "Loving Care" (1993) takes the domestic chore of mopping and exaggerates its obsessive aspect. As Antoni dips her hair in paint and mops the floor with it, the audience, standing in the room at the beginning of the piece, is progressively forced outside. The activity is at once revealed as a societal tick, an obsession, while it is also claimed as a source of empowerment. The ambiguity inherent in this gesture is characteristic of all of Antoni's work. She inserts herself within -- indeed she embraces -- the very activities she seeks to criticize. For Antoni, critique is not a merely intellectual practice; rather it is a physical engagement that reveals, by means of hyperbole, the threatening facets of an obsessive society. [show less]