Janine Antoni


Janine Antoni is a Bahamian–born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. Antoni's works focus mostly on process and the transitions between the making and finished product. She often uses her body, both as an entity, or paying particular attention to body parts as tools, utilizing her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and, through technological scanning, the brain, to perform everyday activities to create her artwork. Her work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and education

Antoni was born January 19, 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 with a B.A.degree. She received a M.F.A. degree in 1989 in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design.

Career

s, a static scene containing one or more actors or models, are an art form that Antoni has used in her work. In her installation Slumber 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. 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, insists on an aesthetics of connections: between the artist and beholders, between the artists and the art institutions, and between the artist's conscious and unconscious processes.

Antoni explains this desire to be involved in the viewer's experience when she writes:
wasn't something that I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. 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. But there are times when the best way to keep people in that place, which for me is so alive and pertinent, is to show the process or the making.

She says of this performer/audience interaction: "This letter sums up my relationship to my audience. I have a deep love for the viewer; they are my imaginary friend."
Antoni has cited Louise Bourgeois as a strong artistic influence, referring to Bourgeois as her 'art mother.'
Antoni's work is in various public museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Broad, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
She was interviewed for the 2010 documentary film, !Women Art Revolution.

Work

''Gnaw'' (1992)

In her work Gnaw, Antoni used her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve two 600 lb cubes, one made of chocolate and the other of lard. She used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. Antoni made a statement about her work saying "Lard is a stand-in for the female body, a feminine material, since females typically have a higher fat content than males, making the work somewhat cannibalistic". In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.

''Loving Care'' (1993)

In Loving Care, Antoni used her hair as a paintbrush and Loving Care hair dye as her paint. Antoni dipped her hair in a bucket of hair dye and mopped the gallery floor on her hands and knees and in the process pushed the viewers out of the gallery space. In this process Antoni explored the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism. Her performance was at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, in 1993.

''Lick and Lather'' (1993)

In Lick and Lather, Antoni produced fourteen busts, seven cast from chocolate and the other seven from soap. She then "re-sculpts" the busts by eating them and bathing herself as the title suggests. The installation critiques notions of feminine beauty and hygiene, suggested by the extreme manner that many of the busts' features become distorted through Antoni's actions. The soap represents the societal expectation that the female body must be perpetually cleaned, while the chocolate brings to mind stereotypical depictions of female menstrual cravings. In a 2012 interview with Adrian Heathfield, Antoni discussed the response of some audience members to 'Lick and Lather' as conceptually correct, when they have bitten into the work. She describes the work as "all about desire".

''Tear'' (2008)

In Tear, Antoni created a wrecking ball in lead and then used it to demolish a building synchronized with the blinking of her eyelid. Each impact damaged the surface of the ball, thus telling its history.

''Crowned'' (2013)

Her work Crowned was inspired after her giving birth in 2004 to her daughter. A sculpture of a wall with plaster crown moulding, that has two plaster pelvic bones protruding from the wall and is framed by plaster splashed around the objects. It visually resembles the second stage in childbirth called, "crowning", when the baby's head is surrounded by the vaginal orifice.

''I Am Fertile Ground'' (2019)

I Am Fertile Ground was a site-specific installation in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Small photographs, close-ups of living bodies, are presented in gilded frames shaped to look like human bones. The work speaks to the fragility of the human form, surrounded as it was by the remains of some 560,000 individuals buried at Green-Wood, one of the earliest examples of a large park-like and varied in style cemetery, built in rural America.

Teaching

Since 2000, Antoni teaches fine art in a graduate course called "Master Class/Mentor Groups" at Columbia University, School of the Arts.

Personal life

Antoni is married to artist, Paul Ramirez Jonas and together they have a daughter. The couple met while in graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design.

Awards