BloodyAntoni

Janine Antoni“Aperto”

ZhenTing, Joan

Essay Question

Artist ChosenJanine Antoni is an artist of modern times. She is one of the few in this field who focus more on process rather than the product. She aims to engage the audience in her art. She repeatedly uses her body or part of it as an instrument in the art she creates. Also, her intimate relationship with her parents highly influences her work.

Janine Antoni’s general beliefs.Antoni believes in the importance of mother-child relationship and the love-hate relationship with objects (e.g. desire vs loss), as portrayed in her artwork. Repetition is present. Things ought to be done more than once, causing a psychological impact. In this process of repetition, or rather, the cycle of life, women are tremendously important. Rituals can be defined as everyday activities, or basic blocks of our life. Antoni is uses performances to enlighten on the meaning of making. Also evident in other works are the gentle, loving acts while erasing self in the process of doing so. Rather than using the conventional mediums, Antoni chooses performance to make the artwork more genuine. Her mother and feminine identity influence her work. An artist’s identity ostracizes them from their gender when they are identified, and Janine brings back this commonly ignored aspect.

Definition of ritualThe definition of a ritual is a routine that is practiced constantly by a group of people. A ritual is significant, and is therefore a formal system. An example of a ritual would a mother nursing her child. A mother in our community is expected to take care of her child, not an obligation. The ritual must be performed constantly, and has significance as it is nurturing the child.

Description of ArtworkThe art piece, “#2038” was created in 2000, and focused solely on its process, as there was no end product to it. It reversed the natural order of daily rituals. In this piece, Antoni is depicted to be in a rusted bathtub, akin to a trough that cows drink from. Alongside are cows that drink from the same container. One of the cows is seen to be feeding on her breast. The significance of using a cow instead of any animal in this piece is because these creatures contribute much to our lives. It provides mankind with meat, milk and hide. Despite sacrificing itself, cows are still being treated brutally, being bronzed and having ear tags. The ear tag for the cow used is the origin of the artwork’s title. Reversing the ritual of mankind taking milk from cattle, Antoni allows a cow to feed from her breast. Also, she portrays motherly instincts towards the animal, which is something unusual. During the period that this artwork was being exhibited, Antoni suffered from breast cancer. She is also addressing this issue by incorporating her breast into this process.

InterpretationThe definition of “process” is the meaning of making. In the only documentation of #2038, the cow, comparable to her cancer, seemed to be consuming her breast. The cow is

involved in an act of mother and child, drawing lines with human relations. This suggests that the ritual of nurturing a child is actually hurting and stealing from the mother. Also, the reversed roles between mother and child, human and cattle are exposed. Usually, milk is taken from the cattle, while in “#2038”, this is reversed when the cattle to suckles from Antoni’s breast. This makes the audience reflect on the inhumane commercial treatment, such as being bred in an environment of overcrowding, as well as having their ears tagged for identification purposes.

General information on the artist’s art practice(beliefs and form) relating to ritual.Janine Antoni has two major beliefs present throughout her artworks, one of which is the relationship of mother-and-child, and feminism, that women are important in the cycle of life. Through art, she brings up the aforementioned themes by reenacting rituals such as weaning, which is typical of raising a child. Another belief is the love-hate relationship we have with objects, and Janine Antoni chooses to show this theme through the ritual of nurturing the child, which through the hated erasure of the self, nurtures the loved object. A final belief of Janine Antoni is importance of the process. Through the medium of performance art, she repeats mundane rituals in everyday life in the artwork, but by displacing essential components of the ritual (such as seen in most of her work, like displacing a child with a cow), she draws focus on the process in the artwork, and therefore the meaning of the process in the ritual.

Conclusion-Your thoughts on the artist’s art-making process in relation to ritual-A restatement of the artist’s work reflecting on ritual and culture

Bibliography

Websites

“Janine Antoni” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.Wikimedia foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Antoni . 1 March 2010

Josefina Ayerza, “Janine Antoni” Lacanian Ink http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXIX9.htm

Jennifer Bayles, “Acquisitions ath the Albright-Knox Art Gallery” The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 2010. http://www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2003/Antoni.html

Jerry Saltz, “artnet.com Magazine Features - The Artist Who Fell To Earth” Artnet , 2004. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/saltz/saltz10-2-03.asp

Stacie M. Lindner, “Janine Antoni: Finding a Room of Her Own” December 2006.

http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-12012006-133229/unrestricted/lindner_stacie_m_200612_ma.pdf

Books

Art 21: Art in the twenty-first century, Susan sollins, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. NY

Pictures

http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2008/11/post_8.html

http://starfishtherapies.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/repetition-and-the-beauty-of-redo/

http://cinie.wordpress.com/2009/05/

http://www.albrightknox.org/Past_Exhibitions/2003/Antoni.html

http://www.duruplastik.com/english/genelbilgi.html

http://www.weylandts.co.za/products/cow-hide-2/zoom

http://www.nursingmother.co.cc/

http://www.askamum.co.uk/Listen-and-watch/Search-Results/Video-tips/Video-Weaning/

Resources and Images

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_AntoniJanine Antoni (b. January 19, 1964 -, in Freeport, Bahamas ) is a contemporary artist whose work focuses mostly on process. She often uses her whole body or different parts of it, such as her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and brain as tools and with them performs everyday activities to create herartwork. For example, in her work Gnaw (1992) Antoni uses her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve two 600 lb (300 kg) cubes, one made of chocolate, the other of lard, and then used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.[1]

http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXIX9.htm With Janine Antoni "we are at a time when all kinds of artistic languages are possible, and minimalism is one of the languages available. I've also used expressionism-in my performance in London, Loving Care, 1993-and even 19th century classicism, in Lick and Lather. I'm interested in everyday body rituals and converting the most basic sort of activities (eating, bathing, mopping) into sculptural processes. Even in doing this, I imitate fine art rituals such as chiseling (with my teeth), painting (with my hair and eyelashes), modeling and molding, (with my own body). In terms of materials, I use what is appropriate to the activity. Those materials, soap, lard, chocolate, and hair dye, all come in contact with the body and redefine or locate the body within our culture. These materials also have a specific relationship to women in our society. The gender of the viewer informs the reading of my work."

In Eureka, from 1993, based on Archimedes discoveries of displacement while bathing, Antoni had herself lowered into a bathtub full of lard, from which her body supplanted an amount equivalent to her person. She then used the lard to make a large cube of soap. 

With 2038, from 2000, which Antoni creates seven years after Eureka, she is back in the tub. Yet a tub that looks like a vessel used as a trough for cows. She lies in it while the bovine creatures drink the water of her bath; is one of them feeding on her breast? Because it belongs in the place of dreams, the image is in turn an expression of the desire, thus it will unravel the kind of hidden complicity involved in the jouissance-joy of it.

Hathor was the goddess of the moon. She shaped into a cow to become the mother and the spouse of the sun.

The cow dips to drink, to nurse at her breast? Antoni's earring unravels an unperturbed, perhaps mythical picture of womanhood in sharp contrast to the cows whose ear tag, deplores the artist, "both names and reveals its identity as a biological machine."

"I work differently from a lot of conceptual artists who begin their process with an idea: I begin with the idea of an experience I want to give myself. The meaning reveals itself to me through the experience, through the process."

http://www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2003/Antoni.html Nurturing is also a theme in the photograph 2038 in which the artist herself, in an old-fashioned bathtub, appears to be nursing a cow identified as #2038 by the metal tag in its ear. Here Antoni conflates the nurturing roles of woman and cow, contrasting the tenderness of this encounter with the reality of the cow’s existence as milk, meat, and hide for human use.

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/saltz/saltz10-2-03.asp ...That Antoni only went halfway resonated, too. At 39, she's just shy of the precarious period we call mid-career. Her reluctance to go beyond this point echoed that but also contained a more poignant aspect. Several years ago Antoni battled breast cancer. Her last show contained a photograph titled2038, which may have obliquely addressed this: the topless artist lying in a water-filled animal trough as a cow nestles and obscures her right breast, as if to suckle from, conceal or consume it. Antoni claimed the title, taken from a tag number on the cow's ear, expressed "inhumanity." I think it's also a subconscious wish for long life: Antoni will be 74 in 2038.

http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-12012006-133229/unrestricted/lindner_stacie_m_200612_ma.pdfJanine Antoni's object- and performance-based works draw from multiple influencesincluding feminism and conceptualism, and in these works the artist has fashioned aninvestigation of the self through the examination of the mother/child dyad, creating amore than fourteen-year body of work about these relationships that explore theimplications of feminine imagery. Antoni’s works are an effort to distinguish her body asa feminine subject-object, but also to identify with as well as separate herself from themother. While she is a conceptual artist, Antoni puts great emphasis on materiality. Forher, the concept defines itself within the materials, and it is the process of the making thatinterests her most, empowering what is traditionally overlooked, forgotten, ordisempowered. As she alternately separates from and connects with the mother and theforemothers of the artistic heritage that have surely contributed to establishing thisidentity, Antoni allows new images of the female to be made visible in a culture wherethey have traditionally been lacking.