What You See, Unseen

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Janine Antoni is a contemporary American artist known for her performances
and sculptural installations. Antoni’s Gnaw (1992), is an
example of the artist using her body as a tool for sculpture. In the
work, she chewed 600-pound cubes of chocolate, then the same
quantity of lard, until she was too exhausted to continue. “The reason
I’m so interested in taking my body to those extreme places is
that that’s a place where I learn, where I feel most in my body,” she
once explained. “I’m really interested in the repetition, the discipline,
and what happens to me psychologically when I put my body to
that extreme place.”
Lick and Lather also took its lead from art history. On two rows of
facing pedestals, Antoni arranged 14 self-portrait busts, seven in
chocolate and seven in soap. Each of the sculptures had undergone
different degrees of defacement; the artist had cast herself and was
in the process of licking and washing herself away. The installation
was at once historical and contemporary; it was embodied in the
tradition of classical self-portraiture and was body art for the late
twentieth century. More than any artist of her generation (she was
born in 1964), Antoni has fashioned from her own body and its intimacies
an art of visceral delicacy. Her tools and her processes are
uncommon, from tightrope walking to steam shovels, from using
her teeth as a carving tool to re-casting silver in the form of the
inside of her mouth. But the effect of the materials she uses, and
what she does with them, resonates in her audience like memory
and blood.
Born on January 19, 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas, she received her
BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and her MFA from Rhode
Island School of Design in 1989. Antoni cites both Robert Smithson
and Louise Bourgeois as major influences on her practice. Over
the course of her career, she has received a Painting and Sculpture
Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a MacArthur Fellowship,
and a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award. Antoni currently lives and
works in New York, NY. Today, her works are held in the collections
of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of
Chicago, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Janine Antoni