Janine Antoni

Born 1964 in Freeport/Bahamas, lives and works in New York

Galleries:
Luhring Augustine, New York






Janine Antoni has long been recognized as among the preeminent artists of her generation, ever since her iconic sculptures of the early 1990s—such as Gnaw, 1992, for which she used her teeth as a chisel. To the point of nausea she doggedly gnawed on a 600 lb chunk of chocolate and a 600 lb chunk of lard, and then made “products” from what she had chewed: 27 heart-shaped packages of chewed chocolate and 130 lipsticks made out of chewed lard, beeswax, and pigment. Routine bodily actions, such as chewing, are essential in Antoni’s art, including sleeping, bathing, and walking, but these are always fundamentally transformed and thus become richly evocative. For Touch, Antoni learned how to tightrope, after contacting an expert from New York City’s Big Apple Circus, arranging for private lessons, and practising for hours and hours. Once she was proficient, she strung up a tightrope between two tractors on the beach in front of the house in the Bahamas where she grew up, and proceeded to walk not on the beach but a slight height above it: a woman at the borders between ocean and sand, sky and earth. In the video she also magically appears to be walking along the line of the horizon.

Touch is all about balance, as a purely physical condition, and also as a psychological and spiritual state. It is also about risk and overcoming the fear of falling or losing control; as Antoni put it, it is about becoming “more comfortable with being out of balance.” As she walks on the tightrope, Antoni evokes a way of maintaining gracefulness and concentration in an often tumultuous and unnerving world. The artist’s body and vast distances, a familiar beach and the big world beyond the horizon, the daily adventures of childhood and the questing experiences of adulthood all fuse in a homemade circus act performed for no audience one morning on a Bahamian beach.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008–09: Prospect .1, New Orleans International Biennial, New Orleans/LA
2007: Fractured Figure, DESTE Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens
2006–07: Into Me/Out Of Me, Kunst-Werke Berlin; P.S.1 MoMa, Long Island/NY
2006: Out of Time, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bibliography:
Marsha Gordon, “A Great Desire: Interview with Janine Antoni,”
in Grrrh, no. 9, 2008
The Morning After: Videoworks From the Goetz Collection, texts by Ingo Clauß, Peter Friese, Ingvild Goetz, and Susanne Touw, exh. cat. Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen 2008
Linda Nochlin (ed.), After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, texts by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, Munich 2007
Nancy Princenthal, “Janine Antoni: Mother’s Milk,” in Art in America, September 2001