How Janine Antoni Simultaneously Disturbs and Delights
Janine Antoni’s hands descend over the eyes of a creamy-colored bust to the sound of water pouring from a faucet. Bubbles froth at the sculpture’s chin and twinkle from grooves between sculpted strands of hair. She caresses the immobile features, then turns the statue to face her. In this 2003 video, little of the artist herself can be seen: A sliver of bare leg presses against the white enamel of a bathtub; her quick hands studiously encircle the simulated cartilage of the bust’s outer ear as she uses the tips of her thumbs to excavate soap from the concha. Then, it cuts to Antoni seated in her studio, her features the same as those of the bust.
“For me, [this work is] about that conflict, that kind of love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance,” she says. “And, really, the problem I have of looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Is that who I am?’” Another cut reveals a chocolate version of the same statue.
The footage, which originally appeared in an Art21 feature, captures Antoni remaking a bust from Lick and Lather (1993), an installation commissioned for that year’s Venice Biennale that encompasses 14 busts mimicking neoclassical marbles, seven made from chocolate and seven from soap. Cast from a mold of the artist’s head and chest, the sculptures’ features wear away as the artist gently washes and devours her own effigy, an erasure accomplished through apparent acts of tenderness. The piece—now her best known—has been remade on a few occasions due to the intense responses it invites; during the Biennale, a young woman licked and bit some works’ noses off in an inadvertent collaboration. While nonconsensual, the girl’s gesture was not far from Antoni’s own response to the art that then dominated museums.
Antoni has chafed against the art historical canon since she first exploded onto New York’s art scene in the 1990s. Production, destruction, and gender are among her central themes—in her hands, they entangle and blur. Antoni is often misconstrued as a performance artist, perhaps because her objects bear palpable traces of the intimate and durational processes through which she molds and shapes them, operating as sensual surrogates for her body in space.
Last spring, when I visited her home and studio in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, I observed that many of her works take verbs as their titles: Lick and Lather, Gnaw (1992), Moor (2001), Tear (2008). In reply, she mused that museum wall labels list only materials, not how a work is created. “We have lost our connection to the way the objects we are in contact with every day are made,” she said. “This alienates us from our world.”
As an antidote to this material estrangement, Antoni uses her own body in the place of traditional tools. She has turned eyelashes and hair into paintbrushes, teeth and tongue into chisel and rasp, and bodies and bones into molds. While in her studio, Antoni and I sat surrounded by photographic works from her 2019 exhibition “I am fertile ground” at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. They show parts of the body—the sole of a foot, hands clasped in prayer, a hand resting against the lobe of an ear—and are housed in gilded frames, stamped by and molded from plastic casts of human bones of the kind found in anatomy classrooms and doctors’ offices. In our conversation, she described her fascination with the erotics of the traces a body leaves, comparing the forensic forms that her work takes to the warmth of a recently vacated seat. She framed her art as an interface between artist and audience, a mode of making space for another’s body to enter, adding, “The work is just an excuse to get close.”
BORN IN FREEPORT, Bahamas, in 1964 to Trinidadian parents, Antoni attributes her love of the body to her childhood in the Caribbean. While her mother kept house, her father worked as a physician at a clinic that he cofounded with his brothers. When, on occasion, neighbors would visit their home for emergency treatment, Antoni would play nurse, handing her father his tools while he attended to his patient. “He taught me the miraculousness of the body,” she reflected during our studio visit.
That sense of wonder was complicated in 1977, when, at the age of 13, Antoni left to attend a Catholic girl’s high school in West Palm Beach, Florida. Keenly conscious of the different ways in which a gesture might be read in the US versus the Bahamas, she began to understand the body as socially conditioned, responsive not only to cultural context but to gender, race, and class.
Thinking back to the concerns that motivated her as a young artist in the early 1990s, Antoni reflected, “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.” Rooting works in persistent biological rhythms such as sleeping, eating, and bathing, she began to question differences in the body as it consumes and is consumed. Works like Loving Care (1993) and Butterfly Kisses (1996–99) saw the artist transform cosmetics and other beauty products into media for gestural mark-making, drawing attention to the commodified production of gender.
Some of the same works also take on feminized gestures in the form of maintenance work and reproductive labor. In Loving Care, first staged live in 1993 at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, Antoni soaked her hair in a bucket of “natural black” hair dye from Clairol’s Loving Care trademark, the same brand used by her mother. On hands and knees, she “washed” the gallery floor with her dye-saturated hair, satirizing the gestural braggadocio of Abstract Expressionist action painting and the “human paintbrushes” of Yves Klein’s body prints. As black marks coated the gallery floor, onlookers were gradually expelled from the gallery.
THESE WORKS GREW in part out of vital lessons Antoni took from feminist professors she encountered when she began her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1987. Teachers like Mira Schor and Roni Horn were then challenging the patriarchal bent of contemporary art. While Antoni was shaped by her contact with both artists, the lasting lesson was Schor’s, and it came from outside the classroom. After encouraging Antoni to familiarize herself with the work of other women, Schor sent her student to the library with a list of names. When the catalog failed to yield a scrap or mention of the women cited—as Schor knew it would—her point, about the art world’s marginalization and erasure of women, was made. Schor lent Antoni books from her own library, sparking an informal education in an alternative, feminist history of art.
From that point on, Antoni began to figure herself in dialogue with earlier generations of women, particularly those active in the ’60s and ’70s, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. In fact, when she was invited to show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1996—the same site where Ukeles had famously presented her Maintenance Art Performance Series in 1973—Antoni chose to repeat Loving Care, implicitly framing her version of floor-cleaning as a work of “maintenance art.”
Antoni’s first solo exhibition after graduating from RISD was a reckoning with a patriarchal art historical canon, with works undermining masculine-coded formalism through parody and play. Invited by New York gallerist Sandra Gering to produce an installation in her Broome Street space in February 1992, Antoni opted to appropriate Minimalist forms with a feminist twist. Gnaw began with a mold for a straight-edged cube, which she used to cast two blocks, each weighing 600 pounds: One was made from lard and the other from chocolate. The references she was dressing down were clear: The white of the lard suggests Sol LeWitt’s modular cubic frames, while the chocolate surface, mottled by blooms of sugar and fat, approximates the rusted gradations of Tony Smith’s steel Die (1962).
But Antoni didn’t stop there. With her teeth, she bit brittle mouthfuls from vertices and edges, the serrated enamel tracing grooves in the cubes’ malleable planes. In a 1994 Flash Art interview, she explained, “I was interested in the bite because it’s both intimate and destructive; it sort of sums up my relationship to art history.” She continued, “I feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it: It defines me as an artist and it excludes me as a woman, all at the same time.”
When it came to discussing Gnaw, Antoni stressed the physicality of her process—especially its stark contrast to the outsourced industrial-scale fabrication common among Minimalist sculptors. The act of biting challenged the cerebral distance of geometric form. Then the expelled chunks of material became the basis for additional objects exhibited in mirrored cases in the rear of the gallery: The lard was combined with beeswax and pigment to produce tubes of lipstick, while the excess chocolate was cast into heart-shaped bonbon boxes. Heightening the work’s oral drive, the Gering Gallery invitation card featured drawn cross-sections of infants suckling at both a woman’s breast and a baby bottle, underscoring Antoni’s embodied approach and emphasis on matrilineal legacies. The following year, the work took its place in the landmark 1993 Whitney Biennial, a show that marked a watershed turn toward social justice and identity politics.
ANTONI’S EMPHATICALLY PHYSICAL practice soon led her to dance. In the summer of 1996, she was invited by curator France Morin to participate alongside nine other artists in The Quiet in the Land, a monthlong residency at the last active Shaker village, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Enmeshed in the community, the artists lived, worked, ate, slept, and attended services alongside their hosts. During the residency, Antoni shot the video Around the World, Around (1996) in the meeting house, inspired by the Shaker practice of ecstatic dance, an extension of their belief that physical labor is a form of prayer. The work opens on a shot of several rows of benches, spindled backrests visible one through the other. The camera shudders gently alongside Antoni’s footsteps, which echo through the space as it meanders over floorboards, a fireplace, and more worn seats. Gradually, she begins to turn, then spin. Windows flash into and out of sight. Her breath comes in fast, static bursts. The camera struggles to focus as her motion picks up speed, until all that we receive are streaks of color and light. Suddenly, we see stillness and a skew angle of woodgrain as she topples and lies straining for breath on the floor.
Antoni’s work grew even more corporeal following her diagnosis of breast cancer at age 33. By 1999, she had undergone surgery and completed several years of chemotherapy and radiation. Swapping observations on living through cancer with artist Guadalupe Maravilla in a 2021 interview for BOMB magazine, she recalled that ritual was vital to her battle with the disease, that it was “a process that provides the condition for transformation.” She incorporated somatic dance into her daily life; in 2005, she began to regularly attend 5Rhythms, a movement-based meditation practice rooted in gestalt therapy and developed by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. She also took classes with Emilie Conrad, who established Continuum Movement, a form of movement therapy that embraces a heightened attunement to the natural world.
“Dance was slowly taking over my entire life,” she told Abigail Levine in a 2016 interview for Movement Research. But, for Antoni, dance was merely another face of visual practice, and it didn’t take long for her to find a way back to sculpture again. In the summer of 2011, Antoni attended a workshop given by Anna Halprin, a pioneering choreographer of postmodern dance, at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and soon they were working together. Halprin invited Antoni to perform Paper Dance, Halprin’s improvisational choreography from 1965. The score is simple: Make sounds with paper, crumple and tear it, gather up as much as you can, and leave the stage. What originated as a movement-based and aurally oriented piece became, in Antoni’s hands, durationally drawn and sculptural. Halprin had instructed her, “Just do what you do in the studio with material, and the dance will make itself.”
Antoni worked with Halprin over several years before Paper Dance was shown publicly. Over this time, Antoni thought about the intergenerational aspect of the work, noting that it was choreographed when she was an infant. “I was moved by… Anna’s gesture of giving her work away,” she reflected in her studio. “But something else also happened akin to transmission, which I am still trying to understand.” As they worked, Antoni installed a dance floor in her studio, eventually embarking on collaborations with other choreographers, including Stephen Petronio and Annie-B Parson.
Antoni’s iteration of Paper Dance officially premiered in 2016 at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia and was shown again in 2019 at the Contemporary Austin. Attendees sat on and around crates containing Antoni’s past work, visible for some performances and sealed into their wooden armatures for others. In their midst, she moved, drawing with shadow and motion on the impressionable surface of a roll of brown paper, which blended into the nude planes of her skin. She talks of this work as an alternative to a mid-career survey, a history filtered through the lens of flesh.
BY THE TURN OF THE century, Antoni was equally attuned to the lineage of feminist artists who had charted a path for her as she was to the generation that would follow. From 2000 until 2012, she taught a mentorship course at Columbia University, and spent one week each semester with a group of students in the MFA program. “The whole city was my classroom,” she recalls. “If I teach anything, I teach how to nurture the creative process.”
Among her students number multimedia artist Chitra Ganesh, sculptor Aki Sasamoto, and performance and video artist Liz Magic Laser. Laser, who began her career at Columbia in the photography department, remembers an exercise in which members of her cohort each held a cube of ice in their hands until it melted. The activity directly inspired Laser’s first forays into performance, which has remained her primary medium since.
Antoni’s role as mentor and peer continued with some students beyond their time together at Columbia. Laser attended 5Rhythms sessions with her former professor. Painter Allison Katz worked for several years in her studio, a period Antoni recalls with gratitude: “We wrote and thought together. That’s how I work: I think that my students and assistants have helped me make my work as much as I’ve had any influence on them.”
Now, Antoni is preparing for her first museum retrospective, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) in December of next year. In a recent phone conversation, Joey Orr—MCA Deputy Director and Chief of Curatorial Affairs, co-organizer of the exhibition alongside independent curator Adrian Heathfield—said that while the show will primarily feature sculptures, drawings, photographs, and video, “there’s no way to walk out of the exhibition without having had an experience with the body.”
Throughout her career, Antoni has considered how works are physically altered by time and how their resonance shifts in response to different cultural moments. In a 1999 interview with Stuart Horodner for BOMB magazine, she noted that she never saw live versions of some of the works that most influenced her practice: Carolee Schneemann staged Meat Joy (1964) the year Antoni was born, and Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) took place before she had immigrated to the US. For her, this fact was not entirely negative: She felt that her distance from the works permitted productive misinterpretation. “They become our works through projection,” she observed to Horodner. “I’m interested in how stories get passed down.” And her own works function in a way like performance documentation, objects bearing traces of a past action: For her iconic sculpture Saddle (2000), she cast cowhide over herself while planted on all fours, her body as much an absence as a presence.
The act of working on her own retrospective with the MCA’s curatorial team has pushed Antoni to reconsider her oeuvre. When I asked whether someone else might reperform Loving Care in her place—whether her works are open to the body more generally or are specific to her body in particular—she deliberated. “If you asked me 20 years ago, I would say no. Because all those works were about my relationship to myself.” But then, reflecting on the passage of time and its potential to transform her art, she mused, “I’m looking for new interpretations of the work that honor its past meanings and push them forward to meet our moment.”
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