Janine Antoni was born on January 19, 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. After leaving her home and coming to the U.S., she attended college and got her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Later, Antoni attended Rhode Island School of Design where she then earned her M.F.A. Today, she is working in New York and is often described as a performance and sculpture artist; sometimes intermixing the two. Antoni received a fellowship from the MacArthur Fellowship, a painting and sculpture grant in 1998, and an award from the Larry Aldrich Foundation in 1999.
A quote from Antoni from the PBS Art 21 excerpt is what has convinced me our works are similar to each other and makes me believe I have a lot to learn from her. I “came to the knowledge through the experience of my body…” After watching her segment it became very clear to me what my intentions are for my upcoming work. I completely get and understand how and why Antoni uses her body as a tool for her experiments and work. In the Art 21 segment she explained that the viewer is able to identify with her personal work because they have a body too and therefore can empathize with the artist. This past semester up until the present I have used my body in my works as a tool to complete my experiments. I often worry that if my work is too personal then my viewer will not be as involved as I would like he/she to be. However, after going through and seeing how personal Antoni’s works are and how I felt from them, I know it’s possible to make personal work accessible.
Some of her works were live performances while others were performances that were documented with photography or some part of the performance turned into her final piece. An influential piece of hers is “Loving Care.” This was a performance that took place in a gallery space in 1992. Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and on her hands and knees paints the floor while dunking her head in hair dye. While she is performing this, she gradually works her way closer to the viewers and eventually pushes them out of the space. Another piece that influences me is “Lick and Lather” from 1993. Antoni made a mold of her bust out of chocolate and soap. Then she fed herself with herself and washed herself with herself. All the while that she licked and washed these busts, she gradually erased the identity of the bust; her identity.
Antoni is heavily influencing my upcoming shoot. I plan to really think and try to understand how to use my body as a tool and how to gain knowledge from my body’s interactions with the outside world.
Luhring Augustine Website (displays some of her work)
PBS Website for Antoni
Other sources of info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Antoni
PBS art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century: Disc Two, Season Two; stories, loss, and desire time, and humor. Copyright 2003
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