Last week, the art department was privileged and pleased to welcome Janine Antoni, one of the world’s most popular and influential contemporary artists. In addition to sharing her time with a dance, art and art history class, she also gave a talk sponsored by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, the nonprofit group that sponsors the classes she visited. Her talk focused on her ideas of art and the body and how they are inextricably linked, as well as the processes behind her works and the critical issues she has focused on.
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Antoni’s work is her use of unconventional mediums. One of her first pieces out of graduate school, “Gnaw,” was made almost entirely out of chocolate and lard. In it, she cast two 600-pound blocks of the two mediums, which she would then, as the title suggests, gnaw on before recasting the dislodged pieces into chocolate boxes and tubes of lipstick. The piece challenges the masculine Minimalist movement, with the objects she created referencing societal pressures placed on women and their bodies. In a second piece, Antoni submerged herself into a tub of lard, using the displaced lard to create a large block of soap, which she would then bathe with, thus effectively creating two pieces of art out of her initial concept of displacement. Her works often explore these ideas of separation from the body, which can also be seen in some of her more traditional pieces. In her piece entitled “Wean,” for example, Antoni creates impressions of her own breast and nipple, as well as plastic nipples and their packaging to display the separation from a mother’s body that a child goes through in the process of weaning, both literally, from its mothers breast and figuratively, into society.
One of Antoni’s most well known works is “Loving Care,” which again explores the idea of the body. In the performance, Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and paints the floor of a gallery space with hair dye that she has substituted for paint. As she does this, she combats her position of vulnerability by painting people out of the gallery space, reclaiming the room and regaining her power. This work also references past works by male artists who would create art by covering women with paint; by reclaiming the space, Antoni reclaims power for women in the art world.
In one of her more intricate performance pieces, entitled “Slumber,” Antoni utilizes an electroencephalograph (EEG) to record her REM wave pattern as she sleeps. Upon waking, she weaves the EEG pattern into a blanket that she uses when she sleeps the next night. In creating this piece, she brings the unconscious dream state into the waking state; the blankets she creates with each graph are the physical remnants of her dreams. This piece is also directly feminist; the loom she uses clearly references women’s history and the traditional roles of women throughout history.
Antoni is also interested in communicating directly with her viewer, often incorporating them into her work. In one piece, from the show Move: Choreographing You, Antoni slipped a note into the coat pockets and purses of her viewers at coat check. The note read, in part: “The minute you saw me, you came straight over and then stopped. As if you couldn’t think and move at the same time, it seemed that you’d come to some conclusion because your thoughts started to lead you with such intensity… I felt as if I was made for you. I was completed by your presence. Will you carry me in your memory? Or is that too much to ask?” Antoni wrote this note as if she were speaking as a piece of art, which is fitting, as, more often than not, her body is the work being displayed in her pieces.
In her time at Conn, Antoni was invited to teach the classes sponsored by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. One of the things she discussed was the idea of movement and its fundamental importance to a performance piece. At the end of the class, she had the students complete an exercise in performance during which she requested that they stare into a partner’s eyes for fifteen minutes, exploring the nuances of their faces and establishing an emotional connection between the two.
One student from the class said of the experience: “I was unnerved for the first five minutes of the performance; I never realized how awkward and personal it is to stare into another person’s eyes, especially for such an extended period of time. But after the initial discomfort wore off, the experience was so raw and emotional.”
Through this exercise, Antoni demonstrated her ability to make people self-reflect and face deep-set emotions by utilizing the body and confronting the idea of the gaze. An incredibly talented artist, Antoni has a true gift. In our fast-paced world, she forces people to reflect inward, forgetting, for a moment, the hectic nature of society to completely embrace the body and its implications.
Arts Editor Melanie Thibeault contributed reporting.
