If you missed “Performing Sculpture,” the first of the three-part Art Lecture Series last Monday at the CFA Cinema, you missed a photograph of a cow nursing from a grown woman in a bathtub.
Janine Antoni had pictured the photo shoot turning out differently.
“I wanted the cows in the background and me in a corner, like the manger in a cresh scene,” Antoni said. “After the photographer took a hundred shots, he came in for one last close-up, and a cow came right up and drank the water from the bathtub.”
Instead of the cresh shots, Antoni favored the anomaly. Her expression retains the serenity of the Virgin Mary, however, which makes the scene even more absurd. The image of a tender, physically intimate moment between woman and cow both touches and shocks the viewer.
Professor of Art Jeffrey Schiff introduced the evening’s speaker with a few words about the relationship between performance art and sculpture, because the majority of Antoni’s work falls under the umbrella category of sculpture.
“Performance values leach into visual arts, and visual arts values leach into performance,” Schiff said.
From the very beginning, Antoni disarmed the audience of art students and professors who seemed braced for longwinded academic jargon, with her first work, “Wean.” The slide appeared to depict a wall with six dents in it, varying in shape and size. Details of the piece revealed that the dents were indeed recognizable: They were impressions of Antoni’s breast, her nipple, three latex nipples, and the packaging for the three latex nipples.
The audience now familiar with her body, Antoni explained in a clam and conversational tone the intimacy of her work and its desired effect.
“It’s like when you sit down in a seat that’s still warm from the person last sitting there,” Antoni said. “My presence is there.”
Antoni charmed the audience with amusing anecdotes about her work and personal life, peppered with interjections that came off the top of her head. She recalled her childhood in Freeport, Bahamas.
“My mother used to tell me, ‘Here we live behind God’s back,’” Antoni said. “I always looked out over the horizon and thought, ‘That’s where the rest of the world is.’”
Nicole Irizarry ’09 remarked that Antoni’s personality put the audience at ease.
“She was laidback and comfortable, and had a sense of humor about her work,” Irizarry said.
The artist’s convincing manner helped the audience understand the often-bizarre pieces following “Wean.” For “Gnaw,” Antoni cast two 500-pound blocks, one of lard and the other chocolate, which she carved with her teeth. She then molded the scraps of lard into lipstick and the chocolate into boxes of chocolates, which were displayed next to the two blocks.
Antoni decided to use her teeth rather than traditional tools to carve the material as a way of describing her body. By leaving her mark on the lard and chocolate, she turns her body into the tool. By turning the refuse back into a product, she poked fun at consumerism.
“When you eat chocolate you get fat,” Antoni said. “You put on lipstick, which is made out of fat, so that maybe someone will give you a box of chocolates.”
After “Gnaw” came a series of pieces that put the artist’s own body under increasing amounts of duress. In “Loving Care,” Antoni created a painting on the floor of a gallery, made with black hair dye instead of paint and the artist’s hair as the paintbrush.
As Antoni painted more and more of the floor, the standing room decreased and viewers had to shuffle backwards out of the gallery.
“I was thinking about my mom and how the kitchen became her space, and could the gallery become my space that I could claim?” Antoni said.
Antoni said “Loving Care” was her most controversial piece, because many critics perceived it as hostile.
“Some people think it pushes people away, but they are the ones who never saw it in person,” Antoni said.
Material consumption and the relationship between women and beauty formed the overriding themes as the evening progressed. Antoni described her feelings of alienation from the material world, and believes that her work communicates with people on the most familiar scale, that of the body. She feels that “Gnaw” and “Eureka,” a piece in which she lay in a bathtub while lard was poured on her to see how much fat her body displaced, particularly prove these points.
“I feel that you have a body, and when you see the work, you can imagine chewing five hundred pounds of chocolate or getting dumped on by a bucket of lard,” Antoni said.
Most students seemed to find Antoni’s work exciting and thought provoking, but some questions lingered.
“I was wondering if she got up in the morning and thought ‘I’m going to make art’ or just started making whatever she felt like making,” said Matt Larkin ’10.
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