Born in the Bahamas and based in New York City, Janine Antoni works across disciplines, including performance, sculpture, and photography. In her process-based work, Antoni often uses her own body (or that of others) as a mark-making/performative tool.
Mom and Dad
“In Mom and Dad (1994), Antoni made up each of her parents in the guise of the other, photographing them together in three different permutations with either one or both of them costumed in this way.”
Momme
“For the 1995 photograph Momme, Antoni hid under her mother’s dress, her own adult body bulging like a pregnant belly.”
Loving Care
“When Janine Antoni performed Loving Care in 1993, she moved herself into the history of contemporary art, and she has occupied that place ever since. Like any negotiation with history, the understanding of her performance, in which she dipped her long hair in black dye and set about mopping the floor, has been complicated by its initial reception. Loving Care is famous because of a series of black and white photographs documenting the event that recalls the photographs Hans Namuth took of Jackson Pollock working on an Abstract Expressionist canvas. The association is apt; as a woman artist Antoni was mimicking the making of an action painting and claiming a piece of the territory that had been occupied primarily by male artists. (She was also referencing Yves Klein’s use of his models as paintbrushes with the transformative difference that in her enactment she was both model and master). But what the Loving Care photographs don’t show is that she was also driving out of the performance space the crowd that had gathered to watch a woman, in a vulnerable position, enacting a laborious and inexplicable ritual. Like so much of her subsequent work, Loving Care was simultaneously about being in danger and being defiant.” – Robert Enright
Lick and Lather
Antoni on Lick and Lather: “I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also the classical bust. So, the way I made it is: I took a mold directly from my body. … I started with an exact replica and then I carved the classical stand. I made a mold, melted down thirty-five pounds of chocolate, poured it into the mold. And when I took it out of the mold, I re-sculpted my image by licking the chocolate. So, you can see that I licked up the front and through the mouth up onto the nose, over the eye and back up over the ear onto the bun, and then down in the back around the neck.
I also cast myself into soap. She started as an exact replica of myself. We spent a few hours in the tub together. I slowly washed her down, and she becomes almost fetal because all her features start to be washed away. So, I was thinking about how one describes the self and feeling a little uncomfortable with my outer surface as the description of myself. And this piece very much is about trying to be on the outside of myself and have a relationship with my image. So, the process is quite loving. Of course chocolate is a highly desirable material, and to lick my self in chocolate is a kind of tender gesture. Having the soap in the tub was like having a little baby in there. But through that process, I’m slowly erasing my self. For me it really is about this kind of love-hate relationship we have with our physical appearance.”
Click here for an Art21 segment on Janine Antoni, from 2003 (segment starts at 36:05).