NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The Art of Janine Antoni:

Labor, Gender and the Object of Performance

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Performance Studies

By
Stephanie Ann Karamitsos

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

June 2006

Volume I

 Copyright by Stephanie Ann Karamitsos 2005

All Rights Reserved

ii

ABSTRACT
The Art of Janine Antoni: Labor, Gender and the Object of Performance
Stephanie A. Karamitsos

The art of Janine Antoni (b. 1964) is prodigious in its multiplicity, multilayered in its concerns and allusions, and special in its performative character,
expanding upon and pointing beyond established artistic strategies and
categories. This study provides historical perspective to situate Antonis work
and recognize its specific contributions. Joseph Beuyss pioneering efforts
marked a trend toward dematerializing art. The term object art became part of
a historical shift in artistic practices, as some artists appeared to dispense with
the object altogether, requiring new approaches to making and thinking about art.
Antoni shares Beuyss interest in performance and the use of non-art materials.
While Beuys had a specific utopian political program, imagining art-making as
model for a new world and way of life, Antoni has identified her work with
feminism.
Antonis work explores conditions of labor, art and society and their
interrelationship, demonstrating how art is not simply about but of the world.
While Antonis work is not dedicated to eliminating or maintaining the separation
between art and life, it grants the distinction as a condition of modern or
iii

postmodern society. While art is not simply reducible to social categories, it is

related to and shaped by them in specific ways. Antonis work explores
categories of artistic production in the context of the social value and mediating
role of labor in modern society, where labor is peculiarly social and provides
categories for elaborating subjectivity (cf. Moishe Postone, 1993).
Antonis work has a critical relationship to historical feminist art and
discourse, challenging the views of some critics that miss the more sophisticated
aspects of her artistic strategies, which illuminate and seek to grasp issues of
gender in broader and deeper social context. Similarly, Antonis art relies on the
legacy of Minimalism, while pointing beyond it. Antoni elaborates on minimalist
forms and strategies; in each of Antonis works, medium is aligned with
laborious method. She complicates the original goal of viewer self-awareness
with her uniquely performative approach. While engaging such critical
performance, Antonis work remains committed to transformative production as
the practice of art.

iv

Acknowledgments
It is much easier to truly recognize the many and important contributions of
others after being able to step back for a moment from an endeavor such as this.
Those from Northwestern University include, first and foremost, my dissertation
advisor and chair Mary Zimmerman and the late Dwight Conquergood. I also
very much appreciate the efforts of the rest of my committee, Frank Galati and
Angela Rosenthal. I am grateful not only for the opportunity to work with
Professor Rosenthal when she was at Northwestern, but for her very generous
participation beyond her affiliation here. And, of course, I will always remember
the kind assistance of Alan Shefsky, who does so much for everyone in
Performance Studies.
I am very pleased and thankful for the opportunity to participate in
graduate seminars at the University of Chicago with Moishe Postone and
Kenneth Warren. I also am very grateful for the friendship and mentoring of
Adolph Reed, who first encouraged me to go back to graduate school.
I would very much like to thank the artist herself, Janine Antoni, who has
been most generous in working with me. I also am grateful to Luhring Augustine
and the kind assistance of the archivist there, Caroline Burghardt.
I owe a very deep personal debt to friends. Thank you so much Crystal,
Daniel, Reinessa, Mary Testa and Richard Berg. I am profoundly grateful to all of

my immediate family for seeing me through thisincluding our newest family

member Maria Fotinopoulos.
Toward the goal of completing this project, I must save my deepest
personal thanks for my very dear friend and closest colleague, Christopher
Cutrone. His intellectual, emotional and practical support were required to see
me through this. Thank you for everything, Chris.

vi

In loving memory of my mother

Mary A. Karamitsos
(1931-2005)

vii

Table of Contents
VOLUME I
Abstract
Acknowledgments
Dedication
List of Illustrations

iii
v
vii
x

Chapter I: Introduction

Theoretical background and premises

Antonis Background and Career

Antoni and abstract labor

35

Outline of chapters

39

Chapter II: Art and Theory: Premises and Problems

43

The Interdisciplinary and the Dialectical

43

The Problem of Defining Art

47

The Crisis of Art: Modernism(s) and More

50

Historical Frameworks and Framing the Historical

64

Chapter III: Reading Antoni: Four Works

78

Butterfly Kisses

84

Slumber

91

Lick and Lather

109

Gnaw

136

Chapter IV: Janine Antoni and Joseph Beuys

viii

156

VOLUME II
Chapter V: Antoni, Gender and Feminist Discourse

190

Antoni Amid the Feminists

191

Gender Illusions: Mom and Dad

209

Feminine morphology, mythology and Antonis Cradle

218

Collaboration: Target (Do It Yourself)

226

Collaboration: Womanhouse

239

Situating Gender and Femininity

249

Chapter VI: Antoni: More or Less Minimalist

269

Wherefore Minimalism

270

Feminism takes on the minimalist problem

280

Narrow Vision Feminism

295

Minimalism: Discourse and Beyond

300

Minimalism: Objects and Contexts

312

Situating Gender and Masculinity

327

Conclusion

337

Illustrations: Works by Antoni

354

Bibliography

376

Appendix: Illustrations: works by various artists

390

ix

List of Illustrations

Works by Janine Antoni (alphabetical by title)

354

and

355

Butterfly Kisses

356

Chocolate Gnaw

357

Cradle

358

Eureka

359

Grope

360

Lard Gnaw

361

Lick and Lather

362

Lipstick Display

364

Loving Care

365

Mom and Dad

366

Moor

369

Slumber

371

Unveiling

374

Wean

375

Appendix: Works by various artists (alphabetical by title)

390

Body Tracks (Ana Mendieta)

391

Chanel (Audrey Flack)

392

Corner Piece (Robert Morris)

393

Coyote: I like America and America likes me (Joseph Beuys)

394

The Dinner Party (Judy Chicago)

396

Fat Chair (Joseph Beuys)

397

Fat Corner (Joseph Beuys)

399

Felt Corner (Joseph Beuys)

400

I Make the Image (Martha Wilson)

401

Mainstream (Joseph Beuys)

402

Menstruation Bathroom (Judy Chicago)

403

Nurturant Kitchen (Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgets, Robin Weltsch)

404

Rainbow Picket (Judy Gerowitz, a.k.a. Judy Chicago)

405

Rubberized Box (Joseph Beuys)

406

S.O.S. Starification (Hannah Wilke)

407

Tallow (Joseph Beuys)

408

Target (Do It Yourself) (Jasper Johns)

410

Tearing Lead (Richard Serra)

411

Truncated Pyramid (Jackie Ferrara)

412
xi

(Untitled) (Donald Judd)

413

Variability of Similar Forms (Nancy Graves)

414

Wandering Rocks (Tony Smith)

415

The X (Ronald Bladen)

416

xii

Chapter I
Introduction

In 1993, Janine Antoni got down on her hands and knees on the floor of
the Anthony dOffay Gallery in London to begin her first performance of Loving
Care. She was dressed in the black leotard-style attire appropriate for a dance
rehearsal, but the bucket beside her suggested something other than
conventional choreography. She seemed poised to perform on the floor in some
way, perhaps even to scrub it; however, it soon became clear that the bucket
beside her did not contain detergent and water, but black hair dye. In a strange
twist on the conventionally feminine preoccupation of scrubbing the floor, Antoni
soaked her shoulder length hair in the bucket of dye and proceeded to "paint" the
floor with it. As she crawled in reverse, Antoni had turned her hair into a mop-like
paintbrush leaving enormous painterly marks over the space where an audience
would normally stand to view paintings on the wall. The floor was covered in
huge gestural swipes resembling the exaggerated brush strokes of abstract
expressionism as she dragged her dye-soaked tresses across it with relentless
energy. Indeed, the progress of the piece actually forced viewers to the edge of
the exhibition space, imposing a heightened awareness of where they stood in
relation to what they were seeing. Moreover, in the relatively refined space of the
gallery, Antonis oddly impassioned public performance of actions resembling
housework made a peculiarly provocative mess; her association of an act of
1

2
household drudgery with that of art-making drew attention to assumptions of
gender embedded in the notion of artistic genius, and the conventional
separation of art and life or the everyday.
Antoni repeatedly dragged her dye-soaked tresses across the floor, as if
literally bowing to the demands of enlarging the brush strokes of abstract
expressionism. However, there was a subtle irony to her apparently servile
posture and movements which might be read as a sly insertion of herself into a
specific art historical reference, as she dared to mimic the marks of past male
masters. Indeed, her unique combination of high and low references was
hardly a simple homage; Antoni crashed the scene of the gallery to thrash about
in an activity resembling menial domestic labor at a site where the objects
exhibited tend to be associated with a more lofty and sophisticated kind of labor.
During the European Renaissance, controversies about the separation of
art and the everyday as they have emerged so many centuries later were
unknown; however, the issue of mimicry as it related to the assessment of the
artistic ability of women was a matter of serious business. In the sixteenthcentury women were generally thought to be able only to master enough
eye/hand coordination to produce competent copies, while great invention was
left to the superior talents of men. Vasari granted Sofonisba Anguissola's
demonstrable ability to make "things of her own and with proper invention," as an

3
exception to the rule (Jacobs 97). Demonstrable proof was a matter of literal
concern in some cases. A woman, who appeared to be quite accomplished,
would have to have her labors witnessed to confirm that it was truly her own hand
at work. And so, with Loving Care, one of her relatively rare on-site
performances, Antoni acts out as if to mark the legacy of that additional burden of
proofthe outrageous requirement that women authenticate their work by
performing their artistic labors before an audience.
Loving Care is but one of many of Antonis works that variously treat the
artistic canon of great works as both a problem and a source of illumination.
Explicit art historical references appear in a number of her pieces. At times these
include allusions to, or quotations of specific recognizable works of art; in other
instances her pieces suggest more generalized evocations of the founding myths
of art historical discourse.

Theoretical background and premises

In his 1999 volume entitled What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Joseph
Margolis states: The recovery of the strategic complexities of artworks is, in its
way, the best clue to recovery of ourselves... (12). The core concern of this
dissertation is an examination of the works of contemporary American artist
Janine Antoni, whose efforts offer a uniquely performative contribution to

4
contemporary art. Margoliss provocative assertion may serve as the general
point of departure for this case study of Antonis work.
Antonis work is a special topic in Linda Weintraubs Art on the Edge and
Over: Searching for Arts Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s-1990s and
Arthur Dantos foreword provides some useful groundwork for this study. The
question with which he begins is Why does art need to be explained? Although
Dantos interrogatory seems plainly rhetorical, it may also be seen as a gesture
toward the whole enterprise of academic writing on artperhaps a plea for a
more self-reflexive and self-critical orientation. Moreover, it is a point that calls
attention to the problem of assuming that so much more is broadly shared and
understood about the topic of art and society than is actually the caseeven in
the expert precincts of academia. My case study of Antonis work follows from
this perspective.
After his brief historical overview, Danto eventually seizes upon the term
intractable avant-garde, which he uses to identify all the different artists and
works covered in Weintraubs textincluding Antoni. One of his statements
describing these artists is: Their intentions are to change the state of being of
the viewer. He notes: One must set forth to encounter the works, to meet them
on their own terms, one at a time, to see what they are trying to say, and what
they are trying to bring about as a consequence of the encounter (Danto, Art on

5
the Edge 16). It is not difficult to see Antonis work in Dantos account, as he
draws to a conclusion about serious works of a kind never before encountered in
the history of world art.
On a different occasion, Danto writes on Marcel Duchamps and his
notorious effort to exhibit a urinal with the Society of Independent Artists in New
York, using the assumed name of R. Mutt (Bride and Bottle Rack 30). As he
recounts some of the details of that event his concluding remark is particularly
significant vis--vis the difficulties in defining art:
Even though there was no jury, Fountain, as he titled it, was
turned down by the hanging committee on the grounds that,
while any work of art was welcome to be shown, this was not
a work of art. Having provoked that distinction was in some
ways Duchamps greatest contribution to twentieth-century
art and the ultimate vindication of the ready-made. It made

the problem of defining art a part of every piece of art made

since then [emphasis added] (Danto, "Bride and Bottle Rack"
30).
Antoni works in a way that is uniquely related to Duchampshe
rearticulates that defining moment, so to speak. She does not present a readymade object as art; rather, her objects readily refer to the making embodied in

6
their form. Duchamp reframes the object of mass production in the context of art;
in many of her pieces Antoni uses the context of art to draw attention to one of
the essential ingredients of the mass produced object that is never really
apparent in the product itselflabor. However, her focus is not simply about
labor in general, but the form of labor that is specific to mass production, and
more specifically, commodity productionabstract labor. Much of the character
of this kind of labor may be described in terms of capitalisms production for
productions sake and its fragmented, isolated conditions. Antonis singular focus
on the activity as suchespecially as it becomes most apparent through her
special integration of method and materials (e.g., using hair dye to paint the floor
with her hair)also becomes abstract in relation to a relative purposelessness
most often identified with some forms of artistic labor. Here the aspect of her
apparently compulsive activity, which doesnt seem to follow from any particular
goal, suggests not only the endless trajectory of productivity and growth related
to the regime of capital, but the relative freedom of art making in the context of
social modernity.
As Martha Buskirk notes in The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art,
some of Antonis materials could be found in a drugstore, under brand names
like Cover Girl Thicklash or Loving Care Natural Black hair dye (137). Here the
allusion to mass production is not only in the brand name materials, but in the

7
activities of feminine self-reproduction, which in turn develops on a mass scale in
consumer society. In other examples of Antonis work Buskirk remarks on the
fact that Antoni also uses generic but equally familiar substances like chocolate
or soap that both retain their original associations and gain new significant as
they assume unexpected forms (Contingent Object 137).
Apart from her photographic works, Antoni does not use any kind of
traditional art materials in her creations. She certainly alludes to art in other
ways, but her various mediums carry no such ready association; rather, they
almost invariably make some reference to particular, often gendered kinds of
ordinary daily existence. At the same time, she is highly specific about which
material to use in each case, as it becomes an integral part of an intense and
often extended encounter between her own body and a particular set of
circumstances (Buskirk, Contingent Object 137). Basically, Antoni takes certain
elements of the stuff of life or everyday reality and reveals some of its irreality
by way of placement within the context of art. Moreover, Antonis work is best
understood by assuming that it is never a matter of if art and life are related
the only and critically important question is how.

8
Antonis background and career
In 1964, Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. In a 1996 New
York Times interview with Kay Larson Antoni reveals that she not only grew up in
the Bahamas, but her family has lived in the Caribbean for more than 200 years.
Her parents have been very supportive of her ambitionsindeed, they have been
both subjects and participants in some of her artworks. Antoni still feels a strong
connection with her country of origin; however, she believes her early
experiences in the U.S. were certainly very important for her development as an
artist. She attended Catholic high school in the U.S., then received a B.A. in
1986 from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and went on to earn her M.F.A.
in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. After 11 years of
expensive schooling, Larson observes, she discovered that she couldnt just
casually step into her studio. Antoni explains in her own words: I had an
incredible self-consciousness about everything: the fact is that I couldnt make a
mark that didnt have some roots in art history (Larson H35).
To date, Antoni has never done a piece exclusively about the Bahamas,
though she will say it is at the core of my work. In a 1999 conversation with
colleague and collaborator Marcel Odenbach, she offers similar remarks about
how her extensive U.S. art education has shaped the form that my work takes
(Advertisement for Myself 34). In the same instance, she elaborates on having

9
initially been aware of herself as an outsider in terms of body language; Antoni
remembers feeling that hers was somehow inappropriate in America. She
identifies this heightened sense of bodily awareness as having contributed to her
interest in using her body as a tool. Antoni also feels that her Bahamian
experience of Carnival has been a huge influence in her workespecially in
reference to Mom and Dad, her 1994 photographic piece featuring her parents in
an elaborate form of masquerade she had designed in order have each appear in
the guise of the other ("Advertisement for Myself" 34).
Antonis extensive experience with dance has also informed some of her
work. Her mothers support figures significantly in the artists eleven years of
training in ballet and other dance classes. Interviewer Kay Larson comments
that Loving Care thus addresses not only her mothers hair color and sense of
beauty but also her ambition for her daughter. Im interested in thinking in terms
of dance, Ms. Antoni said. Mopping the floor is the opposite of ballet (Larson
H35). Indeed, Loving Care might suggest a defiant piece of choreography that
bears little resemblance to the pose and posture of balletperhaps not quite the
outcome her mother imagined with her original ambition for her daughter.
Antonis ambitions as an artist began early and her success has grown to
take her midway into the first decade of the new millennium. She has developed
an extensive and prestigious exhibition record with several awards, including a

10
1998 MacArthur Fellowship. Antoni has also been consistently daring with her
production of strikingly unusual works. A representative example of these is her
1991 Gnaw installation, with a showing in 1992 that is arguably the first major
milestone of her career. This early project features two marble pedestals
separately displaying the remains of two 600-pound cubes, one made of brown
chocolate and the other of lard. Off to one side is her no less imposing but
seemingly unrelated Lipstick piece, composed of a glittering glass and mirror
display case filled with a collection of items, which at first glance appears to have
little to do with her giant cubes. Eventually, the larger context of the whole
installation emerges, revealing the connection between the quirky arrangement of
objects through a narrative of the artists elaborate process of creating them. To
begin, Antoni had literally chewed around the two massive blocks of foodstuffs,
leaving them with the extensive marks of her labors. However, the title action of
the gnaw better describes an unusual kind of chiseling than efforts to receive
nourishment; her behind-the-scenes feast is actually about spitting out the
contents of her bites and collecting them for a by-products production. Lipstick
Display is the result with its 300 shiny red lard lipsticks assembled around fortyfive heart-shaped candy trays, made from the masticated chocolate.
The Gnaw installation is a notable part of the early story of Antonis
success, because these pieces were shown in her first solo exhibit in New York

11
at the Sandra Gering gallery. Remarkably, the same works were chosen for
exhibition in the often controversial but no less prestigious Whitney Biennial the
following yeara rather impressive response to an artists first solo show.
ArtNews proclaimed: Janine Antoni seized the attention of the artworldand the
mainstreamwith the now-infamous Gnaw, shown at the Whitney Biennial last
Spring. The account of her unusually rapid ascendance continues: Gnaw...was
almost universally praised in the biennials otherwise generally negative reviews
(Cembalest 122). Within five years Antonis work would be chosen for another
Whitney Museum exhibitionthis time it would be a solo show.
Antonis auspicious beginnings are also reflected in the way her work was
received in a broad range of international venues very early in her career.
Following that 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition, the installation traveled to Korea
to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. In 1995, Slip of the Tongue was
a solo exhibition shown in Glasgow and Dublin, which appeared in the way of an
early retrospective of works dating back to 1989, the same year she received her
M.F.A. Gnaw and Lipstick were shown, along with other major early works such
as Lick and Lather and Eureka. In Glasgow the exhibit was billed as her first
major one-person exhibition, and one review went on to describe her as one of
the most influential artists of her generation, receiving wide public acclaim for her

12
work at the 1993 Venice Biennale and the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial (Findlay
14-15).
Since the earliest events of her career in 1989, the amount of literature on
Antoni and her work has grown by leaps and bounds. Antoni has received a
good deal coverage in reviews, short articles and critical essays of one kind or
another, appearing in a broad range of national and international magazines and
journals; and, the word is out, so to speak, in a variety of book-length publications
as well. In Linda Weintraubs Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Arts
Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s-1990s, Antoni keeps company with
the likes of Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, Andres Serrano,
and the list goes on. Published in 2000, Antoni herself is largely responsible for
one handsome, self-titled volume devoted exclusively to her work; it includes an
impressive collection of essays by various esteemed writers and an exquisite
layout of reproductions making it a work of art in itself. Among the many sources
on Antoni, Martha Buskirks 2003 publication entitled The Contingent Object of
Contemporary Art offers some of the most extensive coverage of her work,
including several reproductions and a cover illustration devoted exclusively to
one of her pieces.
Living in New York and having established a base there for many years,
Antoni regularly exhibits her art in NYCs galleries, museums and colleges, as

13
well as others across the country. However, her impressive exhibition record is
hardly limited to the U.S., and the early forays to the British Isles, Italy and South
Africa are only a few examples of her ventures abroad. She has crisscrossed the
globe and literally left her mark in a rather stunning fashionespecially for such a
young artist. She has shown works in group exhibitions in nearly every part of
the world: from Kwanga, Korea, in the Kwangju Biennale 2000, to Sao Paolo,
Brazil; from the Istanbul Biennial to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The list of
exhibitions continues with its incredible array of cities: Zurich to Sheboygan;
Stockholm to Madrid; Tokyo to Copenhagen; London to Jerusalem; Barcelona to
Berlin; Athens to Oslo; and it doesnt stop there.
Over the course of Antonis extensive travels she has experienced a range
of different responses to the same works at various points along the way.
Reactions to her on-site performance pieces bring an extra measure of intrigue in
terms of live interactions with her audience. This has been especially true in the
case of her work entitled Slumber. Briefly, Slumber consists of a large loom
stretched like a wispy canopy over a bed where the artist would sleep in the
gallery at night, while hooked up to an electroencephalograph. During daytime
exhibition hours she would weave the design created by the machine registering
her rapid eye movements (REM) into a blanket. Slumber sets up a rather unique
set of circumstances for engaging an artwork. The structure of the piece offers a

14
useful boundary between artist and audience that is also porous enough to layer
the work with an unusual kind of collaborative spontaneity. For Antoni, there is
the characteristic presence of a narrative of production, in this case taking place
as live action, which can be interwoven with a meta-narrative of audience
interaction. The casual continuity of her activities at the loom invites direct
responses from visitors to the gallery. She describes these encounters from an
interview with Stuart Horodner:
It is a pretty unique experience, talking to your viewers as
they are looking at you and your work. The first time I
showed Slumber was in London and because the English
have a great knowledge of literature they came to it from that
angle. They would quote Shakespeare, or The Lady of
Chalot, or Greek mythology. Then I showed the piece in
Zurich and the focus was on Jung and archetypal symbols.
But in Zurich, the people were incredibly shy. Its all been a
bit of a lesson on how to get people to talk to me. Viewers
are used to having this private experience with the work and
it is intimidating to have the artist present (Horodner 51).
Antonis account from the Horodner interview about her experience with the
Slumber exhibition highlights her special interest in trying to empathize with her

15
audience. Additional details of various audiences, their responses and her
reactions are rather revealing:
I went from Zurich, where everyone had been afraid of me,
to Spain. I didnt want to make people feel uncomfortable,
so I had lots of little ideas about how to put them at ease.
But there was no need for anything like that in Madrid.
People were touching me, touching the loom, sitting on the
chair next to me. It was intimate and it didnt matter that I
couldnt speak Spanish. People just spoke to me and we
communicated in any way we could. When I did it in the
United States, peoples connection was with science, and
they wanted to talk about the polysomnograph. What could
the machine tell you about dreams and sleep? And in
Greece, the public makes a connection between the loom
and Penelope.What Slumber showed me was that you
cant predict how people are going to respond. Of course,
artists want to hit a specific chord in people, but the
experience of Slumber made me much more open-minded
and not so obsessed with pinning the meaning down
(Horodner 51).

16
For Antoni making art is always about a living process, whether it involves
creating a behind the scenes experience for herself, or carrying out another kind
of experience in live action before the audience. In either case, her process
includes efforts to imagine how others might understand her experience in their
own way. Antoni is able to work through this focus on the viewer in terms of both
her presence and her absence; more often than not the pieces making up her
larger body of work are fully behind-the-scenes productions. Her intensive labors
with the giant chocolate and lard cubes in Gnaw were not carried out before the
audience; whereas, the daily weaving tasks of Slumber and the full-length drama
of mopping in Loving Care involve performances at the point of reception. The
integral aspect of performance is revealed in different ways for each piece,
though the ultimate choice in this latter case was a matter of trial and error, as
Antoni explains:
The first time I did Loving Care, it was not a performance; I
did it as a relic and I showed it that way. It didnt work! I
realized that it wasnt like Gnaw where the history was on the
surface of the object and a viewer could re-create how it was
made by looking at it. While making Loving Care I realized
that the power was in watching me mop the floor (Horodner
51).

17
In this sense Antonis work may be considered performance art, whether she
engages in live performance as part of an exhibition or simply presents her
objects of performance. She also engages a dialectic of private and public
production in a way that turns the boundaries themselves into a place of ongoing
negotiation and discovery. She exploits the art context as a productive site of
both contestation and accommodation. Indeed, the very separation of art and life
is characteristic of a certain way of lifethe peculiarly modern society. Antoni
creates special circumstances of cross-referencing processes of everyday life
and artistic practices that may help to illuminate underlying conditions for both.
This is all part of the performativity of the aesthetic that the present study seeks
to unfold through an examination Antonis work.
Perhaps as expected, given the considerable expanse of her national and
international exhibition record, Antonis work has been included in shows among
a fairly broad array of artists, from more obscure art-world figures to household
names and art historical icons. In yet another instance involving Slumber, an
exhibit of the piece among works from a group of rather famous modern artists
inspired one writer to offer a picturesque touch to her account of the scene. In
this case, Antonis 1994 performance at the Anthony DOffay gallery in London
took place before an incidental backdrop of art by those such as Bruce
Nauman, Willem de Kooning, and Jasper Johns. This juxtaposition prompted the

18
reviewer to include the following comment for a piece in Art in America: The
effect was that of a gathering of elders watching over Antoni as she slept
(MacRitchie 109). The remark is more of a poetic observation than an indication
of Antonis specific debt to these formidable figures. Antonis body of work
generally reveals her special cognizance of art historical examples, but pieces
such as Slumber are of a kind that the earliest of these modern creators could
hardly have dreamt of doing. Indeed, the reviewers point is a reminder of the
fact that the invitation to exhibit her art amidst a display of works by the elders
is a clear indication of the growing recognition for Antonis efforts. Moreover,
Antoni has demonstrated some of her own powers to watch over the scene of
her exhibitions with a good measure of empathy and insight.
Antoni has exhibited work in a variety of venues; some of these are wellestablished and venerable institutions, while others are somewhat off the beaten
path. In any case, over the course of the nineties, her efforts built up an
impressive number of exhibits with impressive artists. In 1994, Antoni exhibited
work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston entitled, Self/Made
Self/Conscious: Bruce Nauman and Janine Antoni. In 1997, Antonis Mom and
Dad traveled with an exhibition entitled Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose, from New
Yorks Guggenheim to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg. The title of the
show is a combination of Gertrude Steins famous motto with the name of Marcel

19
DuChamps feminine alter; the subtitle is Gender Performance in Photography.
The list of artists whose work was part of this exhibition is a rather grand
collection of names, including the nearly mythical figures of Duchamp and Man
Ray, along with more contemporary folk such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy
Sherman. Another entry in Antonis exhibition record is Gender Affects, a show
featuring artworks along with a collection of documentary photographs and
artifacts from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
This 1996 show at the Fine Arts Gallery of Indiana University included Rachel
Lachowiczs gender inflected objects and work by the fairly notorious
performance artist Annie Sprinkle. On a related note, Antoni has shown her work
in more than one exhibit explicitly devoted to the theme of narcissism, along with
more established artists such as Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Jeff Koons and
Dennis Oppenheim. In 1996, Antonis first performance of Loving Care in the
U.S at the Wadsworth Athenaeum was given equal billing with a concurrent
exhibition of works by Klimt, Picasso and Warhol. A rather large exhibition,
Chronos and Cairo was mounted in 1999 on the subject of time as a theme in
contemporary art. In this case, Antonis work was part of a select group by artists
including: Joseph Beuys; John Cage; Marcel Duchamp; Allan Kaprow; Bruce
Nauman; Yoko Ono; Nam June Paik, and many other major figures.

20
On some occasions, Antoni is one of the very few female artists whose
work is included in an exhibition, though she has also shown in all-female
venues. An example of the latter took place in 1994 at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York with a two-part exhibit entitled Bad Girls.
Antonis name is listed among an array of luminaries such as Lynda Benglis,
Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke. The following year the film Reclaiming
the Body: Feminist Art in America was made, which is described as loosely
based on the Bad Girls show and promotional materials include the following:
The film spans three generations of artists from Louise Bourgeois to Janine
Antoni, in order to give an overview of the history of this important movement
from the 1960s to the present day.
It is a rather different case at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., which
acquired a piece by Antoni in 2001. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden is the Smithsonian Institutions Museum of Modern and Contemporary
Art. Their permanent collection features two busts representing Antonis larger
work Lick and Lather. Her original 1993-94 piece consists of a fairly expansive
installation of fourteen self-portrait busts, half made of chocolate and the other of
soap. They appear on pedestals facing each other, with dark opposing light in a
corridor of crooked reflections: the chocolate busts have been variably reshaped
by the artists diligent efforts at licking over them; the soap versions have been

21
lathered into various states of reduction. The fact that the original piece was
pared down to two small, relatively symmetrical figures seems to create a subtle
shift in terms of the works reference to nineteenth-century classical portraiture,
perhaps suggesting a more demure presentation in keeping with Smithsonian
sensibilities. Indeed, a more tidy and less daring version of Lick and Lather might
seem appropriately lady-like (subconsciously or otherwise) to the more
traditional curatorial imagination, especially as the only piece by a female artist
situated among examples by those such as Alberto Giacometti, Jackson Pollock
and Claes Oldenburg. Nevertheless, precisely this same situation of being part
of an exhibition among the long-established masters contributes to the evidence
of Antonis growing stature as an artist.
Janine Antoni works in a wide range of almost exclusively non-art
materials with a common and primary focus on her chosen medium and its
necessary relationship to the technique, so to speak, as it applies in each case.
She often develops her eccentrically quotidian stagings to thematize gendered
terms of labor and consumption. Antoni performs art work resulting in
emblematic objects of that very work. Her process and the evidence remaining
of that process are bound together in self-referential objects of performance.
The focus on her labor often seeming illogically or absurdly carried out for
its own sake reveals an abstract character to labor itself. However, this

22
emphasis on labor via the physical processes that are a primary aspect of almost
every one of her works, is not a matter of the abstract quality of labor in the

abstract, i.e., an inherent fact about the essential nature of labor that is true for all
times and circumstances. Her works of art offer a prodigious moment of
awareness of a socio-historically specific form: labor peculiar to capital. The
actuality of this cannot be seen as it merges into the everyday appearance of
things.
Antonis art tends to bring process to the fore in a rather specific way. The
method to her madness, so to speak, often involves submitting her body to
physically extreme tasks or actions, which then becomes a major theme or
component of her work. The extraordinary demands of the material process of
her creations suggest the idea of labor more than the usually more refined notion
of technique as it applies to traditional art making. Indeed, in many instances
Antonis technique is all the more evocative of plain labor owing to its mundane
character and her use of common everyday or non-art materials. She has also
gone on to incorporate these fundamental aspects into exaggerated or eccentric
scenarios, emphatically reconfiguring the banal through the special twists and
turns she rendersquite literally, in the case of Loving Care.
However, the measure or intensity of Antonis physical extremes is not the
single factor that is most unique about her art. The array of artists who subject

23
themselves to a wide range of astonishing physical extremes is relatively
substantial, especially in the 1970s and 80s. Antoni is hardly the first to
incorporate demanding feats and strangely arduous activities into her work. Her
labors are also not among the most grueling or perilous devised by artists.
Certainly, the suspension works of the artist known as Stelarc are more
extreme in both degree and kind. In one characteristically severe case, he had
the entire length of his posterior flesh pierced with eighteen fishhooks, attached
by cords and rings to a pulley for the purposes of having himself suspended over
a New York City street. The quotidian and the mundane are markedly absent in
Stelarcs work. Worldly matters such as those associated with ordinary or even
intensified acts of labor are not his concerns. Indeed, he has plainly stated that
his art is about his desire to exceed earthly limits. I am not interested in human
states or attitudes or perversions. I am concerned with cosmic, superhuman,
extraterrestrial manifestations (Carr 11).
Chris Burdens work offers another case of art in the extreme. He has
taken his nearly nude form through the rigors of crawling over broken glass
(Through the Night Softly, 1973), and had himself nailed to the top of a
Volkswagen crucifixion style (Trans-fixed, 1974). In another unusual but less
physically taxing instance, he may be seen as having set a precedent for Antonis
Slumber with a piece where he installed himself in bed in the gallery for twenty-

24
two days (Bed Piece, 1972). One of the main differences is that Burden did not
communicate with anyone, becoming his own mute object of art, whereas Antoni
remained, perhaps more daringly, available to her audience.
In 1971, Burden made Shoot, yet another of his famous works involving
dramatic physical risks. The piece basically consists of Burden having someone
shoot him with a gun. However, his larger artistic project has been described in
more sophisticated terms: to demythologize certain choices, to deromanticize
certain symbols, to get real (Carr 16). The degree of physical punishment in
Burdens works may be similar to those by Stelarc, but his focus on the
conceptual aspects of his performances is at least somewhat closer to Antonis.
He is also similar to Antoni with his stated desire to create a specific bodily
experience for himself through his art:
He says he had himself shot so hed know what it felt like,
though he didnt mean physical pain so much as getting
ready to stand there. There was nothing theoretical or
metaphoric about knowing that the gun was loaded, that the
trigger would be pulled. Burdens performances created a
context in which it was possible, though not probable that he
would die. That context itself was the art (Carr16).

25
Compared to works like Shoot Antonis performance pieces arguably offer more
immediate psychic space for her to imagine the audiences experience; the far
less hazardous circumstances and bodily trauma would seem to allow all
concerned a greater degree of real-time presence of mind. However, Burden
also has a kind of empathic awareness of his audience, though in an apparently
more involuntary sense. As he explained it in 1975, when I use pain or fear in a
work, it seems to energize the situation. That situation was the relationship
between him and the audience. It was their fear and distress as much as his that
energized the situation (Carr 17). Burdens work has generally required the
immediacy of a shocking type of performance event; Antonis art focuses on
processes involving the body in a more integrally performative sense than as a
reactive prop, or passive component. Again, the nature of her work is suggestive
of labor and the body in a particular context of labor, as opposed to having the
body become almost incidental in relation to external and relatively arbitrary
events.
There are other artists whose work is similar to Stelarc and Burden by way
of prominently featuring single events as prodigious occurrences, in contrast to
Antonis focus on processes involving ordinary labor emphasized in extraordinary
ways. The example of the collaborative duo Marina Abramovic and Ulay may be
literally more down-to-earth than Stelarc, though quite similar to him in terms of

26
their feats of endurance and peril. Rest/Energy is a 1980 piece that literally held
Abramovics life in the balance as they posed with a tremendous bow and arrow
between them, relying on Ulays ability to prevent the arrow from releasing into
Abramovics chest. The performance featured her holding the wooden shaft
while he held the string taught on the opposite side. But the real daring came
with them leaning back in a balancing act using their body weight to keep the
deadly instrument from shooting until they were too exhausted to continue. On
the other hand, they have also devised extreme but far less dangerous
circumstances for their work. Their 1977 Imponderabilia featured the two
standing nude, face-to-face, with their backs against opposite sides of the
doorway of the Galleria comunale darte moderna in Bologna. They maintained
their position as living statues at the gate, forcing visitors to walk between the
narrow passage their bodies framed in order to enter the gallery. The two chose
the somewhat more mundane setting of the actual space within the museum for
their Nightsea Crossing. The circumstances were otherwise unremarkable for
their performance installation, which began with them simply being seated in
chairs across from one another at a long table. However, this scene
characterizes one in a series of ceremonial meditations they engaged in
between 1981 and 1986, entailing periods of fasting and silence that sometimes
lasted as long as sixteen days. Abramovic and Ulay would use every hour the

27
museum was open to sit and maintain a transfixed stare into each others eyes.
They were the work of art. A passage from Linda Weintraubs detailed account
describes it as follows:
Sometimes they emphasized their trance-like state by
placing a particularly distracting object, for example a large
snake, on the table between them. Visitors observed two
people who had passed beyond normal consciousness.
Instead of relying on words and gestures, Abramovic and
Ulay engaged in a form of communication rarely employed in
the Westpure psychic energy.Outside the museum as
well as within, the two severed their ties to conventional
modes of living and working (Weintraub, Art on the Edge
62).
But for Antoni, conventional modes of living and working are territories of
excavation, not matters subject to exclusion for the purposes of purifying the
mind. She often literally bites off, licks around and even bathes herself in the
stuff of life and its processes. She delves into the domain of compulsion and
obsession, for example, pointing to modern material cultures way of making us
and being of our own making, often in the same instance.

28
However, her work is not about a simple acceptance of the everyday as a
matter of the authentic and unmediated dimension of daily life in contrast to some
of the pseudo-sophistication of high art. This is not simply to deny the
existence of the latter, but her efforts do not involve the former as a type of
remedy for so-called elitist art, which is what some artists associated with a kind
of anti-art have at least implicitly claimed to be their mission. At the same time,
Antonis body of work is among those classified as performance and
performance related art which tend to incorporate the mundane or everyday
situations, movements and objects in place of more traditional art techniques and
materials. One much earlier case, which is superficially similar to Antonis in this
respect, is that of the happenings of the 1960s. Allan Kaprow is perhaps the
best-known exponent of this practice. In Henry Sayres The Object of
Performance, he describes Kaprows Happenings as among the most prosaic
and vernacular events in the art world of the early sixties. Kaprow, in his own
words, explicitly sought to eliminate art contexts, audiencesroles, plots, acting
skills, rehearsals, and so forth, to put in their place, as he describes it, everyday
life routines: brushing your teeth, getting on the bus, washing dishes But
today this kind of anti-art has largely become another category in the annals of
art history, which seems to have less to do with real life issues, while appearing
to have more in common with a type of stylistic innovation. By contrast, Antonis

29
work suggests that even the everyday is not merely a universal quotidian reality.
Hers is no empty, essentially formalistic gimmick, which may be said to
characterize some of the worst of the happenings. She seems to pose the
question of just whose everyday is at issue, and if these matters are always as
simple as they appearthough of course, the legacy of Allan Kaprows
Happenings is part of what makes Antonis work legible.
There are other artists who have included literal kinds of life acts or
narratives in their work bearing a closer resemblance to Kaprows anti-art efforts
than Antonis. There are also those who do not engage in the same kind of
physically extreme work that Antoni does, though a few may appear to have a
common concern with labor and labor processes. Mary Kelly has dealt with
maternal duties and the sexual division of labor with her Post-Partum Document,
begun in 1973 and first exhibited in 1979. The 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam
Schapiro project Womanhouse generally included a focus on women and
domestic labor. There are other examples, though relatively few artists deal with
labor as a specific theme or major element in their work; those who do tend to
approach the matter in ways that are either more restrictive and specific, or more
broadly construed than Antonis.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is one artist who has dealt more directly with
labor as a social issue. For approximately ten years, Ukeles produced work

30
identified as Maintenance Art, whereby she literally worked to create or locate
art at the center of scenes of devalued labor. The idea for this originated with
Ukeless personal struggles as an artist. By the beginning of the seventies, she
started noticing that the demands of raising children were impinging severely on
her opportunities to make art as a separate studio-based activity. As Lucy
Lippard put it, when her children started to arriveshe found her art time
slinking out the kitchen door (Pink Swan 259). On the face of it, Ukeless
strategy appears to have reversed the transcendentalist trajectory of artists like
Abramovic and Ulay more decisively than Antoni. As Lippard narrates:
To get back [to her art], she simply turned around and
renamed her domestic duties art, initiating an ongoing
series of explorations that have ranged from donning and
doffing snowsuits, changing diapers, and picking up toys, to
scrubbing a museum floor, to following (and praising) the
workers who maintain a large city building, and finally to
becoming the official artist in residence of the New York City
Department of Sanitation, where she found her niche. (Pink
Swan 259)
The reference to Ukeles following and even praising workers was formalized
in her Touch Sanitation performance piece in which she shook hands with 8,500

31
sanitation workers in the five boroughs of New York City. In another discussion
of Ukeless work Lippard describes this as a dialogue and handshaking ritual
using a prototypical feminist strategy that uses mens productive but despised
support work as a means to call attention to all service work (Pink Swan 168). In
this case, Ukeless piece suggests defying the perception of such workers as
untouchable in a vividly literal way. It may also point to one of the ways the
division of labor in this society contributes to the intensified degradation and
dehumanization of certain kinds of labor and the people who perform such
services. However, as Lippard continues her narrative from the earlier passage,
exaggerated terms emerge to produce a kind self-congratulatory tale, which also
distracts from the quality of Ukeles work, particularly its suggestion that division
of labor may be part of the devaluation of labor.
Since the late seventies Ukeles has used the department as
a base for her now international investigations of social
maintenance and waste management. Her work consists of
real-life performances of workers days, research about
environmental effectiveness, and installations constructed
from the products and tools of their labor. One of her many
functions is to humanize and beautify (even beatify) those
who, like women, do the dirty work, to endow them with

32
grace and nobility (Once she choreographed a street
ballet of garbage trucks.) (Pink Swan 259).
This narrative brings a number of questions immediately to mind. Whatever the
intent, this account seems patronizing toward the workers. It also becomes more
of a story of how Ukeless actions brought them redemption. More importantly
perhaps, in this case it seems that art simply becomes a field of symbolic action,
whereby the symbolic develops into a form of distraction; the deeper implications
of a perceived need for moral uplift are obscured by a kind of aestheticization.
What of the more radical point of how it is that fundamental human worth may be
questioned in terms of the status of labor? There may, however, be a point of
revelation here that would not have been part of the program, so to speak:
Human decency in relation to labor may indeed be in such short supply that this
is how a grand gesture of its cultivation can be imagined in such heroic selfaggrandizing terms. If this kind of art manages at all to call attention to the way
personhood can be summed up with the term laborer, does it purport that
individual acts of recognition and respect are the ultimate remedy? But the
questions do not end there. Did Ukeles need art to guide her course, to help her
find her niche? If so, what is it about the specific nature of art as it may be
understood through her example that is transformative? She may still have

33
performed many a good deed, but what did art have to do with it? Did calling her
work art make it more or less virtuous somehow?
These examples are presented to provide points of contrast that may help
to illuminate the unique nature of Antonis work. But what has been revealed in
terms of the true difference between the Ukeles and the Abramovic-Ulay artistic
projects in the end? How should we make sense of the distinctions? Abramovic
and her partner Ulay have basically asserted that their art practice is at the
center of a spiritual quest. Their claim has been that they carry out living as art.
But however else it might be valued or appreciated, why should it be seen as
much more than solipsistic? In any case, they at least appear to be honest about
their stance of turning away from questions about the relationship of art and
societyor being resolved to treat such questions as irrelevant. However, if by
their logic art and life are simply matters to be merged in a particular way, what
are the compelling reasons to continue to think in terms of art at all? Perhaps
this is their point, but its articulation is difficult to discern, or simply not very
persuasive. In Ukeless case, her version of making art part of life becomes a
strategy for addressing specific social ills. The comparison with the Abramovic
and Ulay example may not be quite this symmetrical, but perhaps social
program could be inserted in the place spiritual quest as a way to understand
Ukeless approach. In challenging these kinds of art practice, the point is not to

34
advocate for the strict separation of art and life; but is merging or combining them
in some way as simple as the choice made by a particular artist? Such efforts
dont actually dissolve the separation in the larger world beyond them, even if it
were at all tenable (or truly desirable) to have everyone simply do their part, so to
speak.
Antonis art is not dedicated to eliminating or maintaining the separation
between art and life, though it allows for the fact that this separation is a condition
of modern/post-modern society. Moreover, her approach is not based on the
idea that the situation is simply a matter of individual artistic choice. Antonis
efforts test and explore the boundaries between art and life as a given challenge,
not something to be vainly wished away. The special focus on labor or the way
her process is emphasized in terms of labor is an important aspect of the way her
work draws attention to the relationship between art and life.
Antonis art is not about the kind of political conceits, or calls to direct
action found in the case of Ukeless work. At the same time, it is not about a
simple transcendence of the political that characterizes much of the work by
more extreme body and performance artists. But Antonis work is not so clearly
goal-oriented in the way many of these other kinds of work are. Her work, both
the process and the object(s) draw attention to themselves in a way that seems
to keep raising questions: What is this? What is she doing? What could this be

35
about? In my interview with her in February 2005, she gave the impression that
she expects something quite like this. She imagines her work as layering in
meanings at various points in her process and with her audiences experience of
the work; it is not about something one immediately has to get once and for all,
as repeated engagement with the work may settle into the imagination in different
ways. She realizes for example, that sometimes her allusions to other artworks
or types of art come through, and sometimes the raw materiality and visceral
quality of the piece may be compelling enough. Each piece then becomes an
exploration of the category of artistic production.

Antoni and abstract labor

Antoni uses the exaggerated quality of physical extremes in a way that
refers to common labor drawn out in uncommon ways. Her art most often
involves her performance of useful labor in ways that are just twisted enough to
attract special attention (whether through live performance or the testimonial
aspects of her objects), but still recognizable as such; while at the same time, the
usefulness of her labor in the most common sense is rendered abstract in the
context of making art. We have seen examples of mopping (Loving Care);
weaving (Slumber); licking and washing (Lick and Lather). The first case is
familiar in terms of service occupations and housekeeping; the second is

36
basically part of the fundamentals of making fabric for clothes, bedding, and so
forth. The last two examples of licking and washing have more to do with
personal labor, but this is work that goes into the maintenance of the body, which
is then enabled to perform more laborthe commodity of labor-power is
reproduced through such acts. In each case, there is a clear allusion to common
useful labor and processes, but they are not ultimately carried out in the normal
way. These labors also become of interest, in part, through their odd
deployments with related and familiar materials, which may appear in unfamiliar
forms and/or quantities; but the ultimate object/performance refers back to the
process that is the making of her objects as much, if not more than the things
made. And thus, it is with artthat which in this era is forever reinvented and
often takes up with various kinds of abstraction outside the realm of Rothko
paintings or Calder sculptures.
Antoni does make abstract geometrical objects in some works, such as
the gnaw cubes and the soap block for her Eureka piece. She takes the jagged
line from the graph reading in Slumber, which is normally meant to be
scientifically interpreted, and creates an abstract design by copying it into her
weaving. She renders her self-portrait busts far more abstract in certain
instances with her Lick and Lather piece. However, in present-day art these
kinds of abstraction have become somewhat commonplace; it is the context of

37
her process involving these elements that makes the difference, which
significantly includes references to abstract labor in the Marxian sense.
In modern (meaning capitalist) society the dual character of labor breaks
down into its concrete or useful quality and an aspect that is abstract, measured
in terms of quantitymoney and profit. This duality is definitive of a generalized
form of labor that pervades society and underlies all social production. Concrete
and abstract labor may not look at all different from each other. Indeed, they are
simultaneous and the distinction is not apparent to the eye. Abstract labor can
only be understood as a feature of commodity production, which is part of a
social scheme of commodity relations. This latter point is especially important
and is the most useful way to situate the term commodity in the following
passage from Marxs Capital on abstract labor, which is worth quoting at length:
As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality,
while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity,
and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.
If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only
one property remains, that of being products of labour. But
even the product of labour has already been transformed in
our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we
abstract also from the material constituents and forms which

38
make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece
of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous
characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the
product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner,
or any other particular kind of productive labour. With the
disappearance of the useful character of the products of
labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied
in them also disappears; this in turn entails the
disappearance of different concrete forms of labour. They
can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced
to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour.
There is nothing left of them in each case but the same
phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed
quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human
labour-power expended without regard to the form of its
expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human
labour-power has been expended to produce them, human
labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social

39
substance, which is common to them all, they are values
commodity values [Warenwerte] (Marx 128).
This study does not seek to make a neat one-to-one correspondence between
the above passage by Marx and Antonis work; however, it is based on the
premise that while art is never reducible to the social, it is always related to
society in some way. Antonis art develops a special focus on labor in a world
where labor is peculiarly social. The point here is to clarify the Marxian concept
of abstract labor and the nature of the society that has given us this dual
character for labor. This is fundamental to Marxs social critique and remains
relevant to our lives today; it situates Antonis work and the nature of art itself
historically speaking, of course. Ever since modernism, art has been licensed to
be abstract and purposeless (in the normal sense), as part of its unique capacity
to create challenges to our normal sense of things. Antonis art exploits this fact
in a special, unusually performative way, warranting a detailed investigation and
analysis that will be taken up over the course of this study.

Outline of chapters
Chapter II will review some of the major theoretical premises and
problems relevant to this study, as well as explaining how Antoni's work becomes
a special topic for Performance Studies. The purpose is not only one of defining

40
terms, but of examining the special problem with "terms" as they arise within a
study of contemporary artespecially from the perspective of being inextricably
related to the world of objects and the contemporary problem of subjectivity. This
chapter will also outline a philosophy of history, both in art historical terms and
beyond.
Chapter III of this study is devoted to close analysis of specific works by
Antoni, which are most suggestive concerning conditions of labor, art and
society. The key to my analysis is that the significance of these matters lies in a
context of interrelationship, not simply a sum of isolated elements. Moreover, a
close read of individual pieces demonstrates how a deeper engagement with
Antonis work reveals the ways in which her work is not simply about the world
but very much of the world. When the artist notes that all my work deals
withthis movement that begins with the body and traces its way into culture
(Jinkner-Lloyd 2), this may be truer than she even realizes at times. In any case,
Antonis performative works rendering the apparently strange familiar and the
apparently familiar strange focus on the constructed nature of both the natural
and the unnatural, and various points between.
Chapter IV focuses on a comparison between Joseph Beuys and Antoni.
Both the differences and similarities between them can be enlightening. By the
time Beuys toured the U.S. in 1974 he was already something of a legend.

41
Although legendary status may not yet be conferred on Antoni, both artists seem
to be emphatically one of a kind. One major area of similarity is their shared
interest in performance and the use of non-art materials. However, Beuys had a
specific political program in mind and Antoni does not, though she has identified
herself and her work with feminism. Beuys has been described as a symbolist,
an expressionist, a mystical romanticist (Kuoni 1), none of which would fit Antoni
very well. At the same time, Beuyss program for imagining the energy and
creative orientation of art-making as a model for a new world and way of life is
related in part to Antonis work. Her efforts would hardly appear to be part of
such a romantic vision, while her art nonetheless tends toward acknowledging
the actuality and movement of desire that is part of his thinking.
Chapter V focuses on the importance of gender in Antonis work and
critical reception in relation to gender issues. A review and analysis of some of
the history of feminist art and feminist discourse will be included in order to
situate Antoni in both historical and theoretical terms. An examination of her
performative approach will explore the relationship of her work to examples of
historical feminist art as both an important legacy and a significant point of
departure.
Chapter VI will examine Antonis work in relation to the category of
minimalism and works historically identified as minimalist. Following upon the

42
example of the previous chapter and her relationship to feminism, Antoni relies
on the legacy of minimalism as both an influence and a negative inspiration; she
both quotes and comments upon minimalism in her work.

Chapter II
Art and Theory: Premises and Problems

This study of the art of Janine Antoni includes a critical examination of

issues in contemporary art and society. The purpose of this chapter is to review
some of the relevant theoretical premises and problems. The underlying
assumption from the interdisciplinary perspective of Performance Studies is one
of interrelationship best explored through multiple lines of inquiry. Concerning
the more specific focus on art, the basic premise is that though art is inextricably
related to the larger world out of which it emerges, it is best understood as a
distinct form of practice and a unique dimension of experience. The special topic
of Antonis performance and performance-related art is therefore also a case
study in art as a category of experience.

The interdisciplinary and the dialectical

An important remark from Joseph Margolis's What After All Is a Work of
Art? bears repeating: "The recovery of the strategic complexities of artworks is, in
its way, the best clue to recovery of ourselves... This formulation crystallizes a
principal point of concern in my investigation of Antonis work. Complexities is a
watchword as well, reflecting the warrant for a hybridized approach, drawing on
research and insights from various fields. Some examples of work from such
diverse fields include Moishe Postones reinterpretations in Marxian critical
43

44
theory, as well as aspects of American feminism by historian Alice Echols;
perspectives in the social history of art by Arnold Hauser, to the popular writings
of Susan Faludi. Naturally, writings in critical art history and theory are of primary
concern, but various ideas from those who never directly address matters of art
or performance may also be relevant in some instances.
This particular interdisciplinary study calls for a dialectical approach with
an eye on coming to terms with the amalgam of concerns constituting the
category of art. What follows in this overview will not necessarily accord directly
with specific efforts by Antoni, or with previous characterizations of her work.
This will be more of a preliminary effort to peel back and peer through to some of
the conceptual layers underpinning the examination and analyses to follow.
Many of the ideas presented here are intended to be born in mind over the
course of subsequent chapters and may serve as future points of reference.
To begin, an explanation of dialectics or dialectical thinking is in order to
remain clear about just how it is being considered in this case. This will not be
about a mechanistic concept of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, or what is often
referred to as the common vulgarization of Hegels approach. Merleau-Ponty
refers to the adventures of the dialectic, described as such for the way it is in
principle a thought with several centers and several points of entry, and because
it needs time to explore them all (Merleau-Ponty 204). This study treats such

45
complexity in the Marxian sense as intrinsically related to the sophistication of our
world. The following two passages will serve toward explaining the meaning of
dialectical for our purposes. The excerpt below includes most of a long
paragraph appearing in the original text on the heels of an argument against
Cartesian reductionism; it begins by examining the concept of part and whole:
Part and whole have a special relationship to each other,
in that one cannot exist without the other, any more than up
can exist without down. What constitutes the parts is
defined by the whole that is being considered. Moreover,
parts acquire properties by virtue of being parts of a
particular whole, properties they do not have in isolation or
as parts of another whole. It is not that the whole is more
than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new
properties. But as the parts acquire properties by being
together, they impart to the whole new properties, which are
reflected in changes in the parts, and so on. Parts and
wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the
relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things
that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the
other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the

46
other, that properties of both evolve as a consequence of
their interpenetration (Levins 3).
Perhaps a more familiar articulation regarding the dialectic may be found in the
introduction to a volume entitled How to read Karl Marx:
The central concept of dialectical reasoning is contradiction.
In the dialectical viewpoint all phenomena are understood to
be relations, which interpenetrate with other relations, and
which can be understood in terms of processes, usually of a
developmental character (Fischer, How to Read 20).
For purposes of this study, it may actually be more useful to imagine the
opposition of art and life, or art and society as concretely implicated in
Levinss explanation of the dialectical relationship of part and whole. Indeed,
there are other oppositions or dichotomous constructions that may not seem to
correspond precisely to part and whole, which are nonetheless relevant to the
case. Some examples of these are: public and private, subject and object,
and individual and society. These theoretical concerns are materially
embedded in this study's focus on artespecially the art of the present day.

47
The problem of defining art
Defining terms may normally be a straightforward step in building a
foundation for examination and argument. However, in the case of art, or the
work of art, the effort to work toward a definition may result in a more productive
and illuminating process than the discrete and terminal goal of defining allows.
This process will begin with an examination of matters to be excluded, or
negative examples. Philosopher Joseph Margolis states one of his disclaimers
rather plainly: I am not concerned in any strenuous way with official definitions of
art. He is, however, concerned that the comparison of entirely detached
abstract definitions really has no point, since it risks all connection with the living
parts of the tradition of the arts that probably called the effort into play in the first
place (Margolis 68). At the same time, Margolis does insist that works of art
are not mere real things, because the latter is lacking in what he terms
Intentional properties, adding a touch of formality with his use of capitalization.
This is not identical to authorial intent; rather, he describes such intentionality
with a list of possible concerns or characteristics: all representational, semiotic,
symbolic, expressive, stylistic, historical, significative properties (Margolis 34).
Margolis goes on to qualify matters in at least one important way: Intentional
attributes are not determinatethough, under interpretive conditions, they are
determinablewhen compared with what is usually taken to be the determinate

48
nature of physical or non-Intentional attributes (Margolis 58). In the simplest
sense, it is useful to think of these attributes as related to the difference between
art and nature. It is also the case that for Margolis, situating art in his expanded
terms of Intentionality and Intentionally structured is not about any ultimate
reckoning with what is true or false. He notes, Its the elusive nature of artworks
that forces us to give up on a strict bivalence (Margolis 60).
Margolis cites as a positive example Mikhail Bakhtins notion of the
carnivalesque, which he finds to be very promising as a way of describing
conditions for contemporary art (Margolis 23). It is worth examining in brief some
of the details of Bakhtins carnival sense of the world in his own words:
A free and familiar attitude spreads over everything: over all
values, thoughts, phenomena, and things. All things that
were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one
another by a noncarnivaliistic hierarchical worldview are
drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival
brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with
the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the
insignificant, the wise with the stupid (Bahktin 123).
In The Aesthetic Dimension, though he specifically refers to art, Herbert Marcuse
could be elaborating on the carnivalesque in a way that follows directly from the

49
last sentence of the above passage when he remarks, aesthetic form reveals
tabooed and repressed dimensions of reality: aspects of liberation (Marcuse,
Aesthetic Dimension 19). Bahktin explains that carnivalistic life is life which is
drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent life turned inside out, the reverse
side of the world (monde lenvers) (Bakhtin 122). Compare Bakhtins life
turned inside out to Marcuses reference to Mallarm: The poetry of Mallarm is
an extreme example; his poems conjure up modes of perception, imagination,
gesturesa feast of sensuousness which shatters everyday experience and
anticipates a different reality principle (Aesthetic Dimension 19).
Clearly there is a sense of something having been shattered when
considering Theodor Adornos opening sentence in Aesthetic Theory: It is selfevident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not
its relation to the world, not even its right to exist (1). The dire sense evoked
with this statement is more a matter of effect put toward situating art in the
context of historical crisis. A more in-depth examination of some of the contours
of that crisis may be accomplished by tracing through its various formulations in
selections of art historical discourse.

50
The crisis of art: modernism(s) and more
Adornos assessment of radical instability concerning art grew out of his
awareness of the tumultuous changes taking place in the late sixties leading up
to his death in 1969. Dantos discussion of these developments may serve as a
useful encapsulation. At one point, he marks the special significance of a shift
involving the abandonment of painting as the central form of artistic expression.
He continues his brief overview:
Up until then, the great changes of modernism, beginning
with Impressionism and proceeding in a sequence of
revolutions from Neo-Impressionism through Cubism and
Fauve, to abstraction, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism,
and Pop, had as it were taken place within the implicit space
of the picture frame (Danto, Art on the Edge 15).
Dantos description of developments from Impressionism through Pop as a
sequence of revolutions in art is also qualified with the term modernism. The
use of this term is sometimes either overly broad, or arcanely specific in ways
that may be confusing. In this case, though it seems clear enough that Danto is
using "modernism" in a traditional art historical sense, as it relates to the present
study the significance of the modern or modernity in the context of social theory
warrants some clarification. In a socio-historical context, this study follows from

51
the idea of modernity articulated by Moishe Postone. The following passage
from Postones introduction to his critique of traditional Marxism offers important
specifics:
This reinterpretation treats Marxs theory of capitalism less
as theory of forms of exploitation and domination within
modern society, and more as a critical social theory of the
nature of modernity itself. Modernity is not an evolutionary
stage toward which all societies evolve, but a specific form of
social life that originated in western Europe and has
developed into a complex global system. Although
modernity has taken different forms in different countries and
areas, my concern is not to examine those differences but to
explore theoretically the nature of modernity per se.
(Postone 4).
In noting this passage, the point is to work toward an understanding of the social
term or terms of modernity generally used in this study as essentially
synonymous with capitalism, which Postone later describes as constituting the
very fabric of modern society (76). Moreover, the development of this specific
form of social life is not about some inevitable march of human progress; nor is it
the reductively logical outcome of the workings of human nature. (The concept

52
of a fixed and timeless human nature is itself historically specific.) Of course, this
idea of social modernity is very much related to art, though rarely in the sense of
any strictly aligned correspondence. However, in somewhat simplistic terms,
there is one instance that appears to be modeled directly from the condition of
modern society, which is not necessarily about social realism; that is, the claim
that art is fundamentally about the opposition of individual and society. In some
cases, the artist comes to embody the idea of social rebellion or alienationeven
a hope of reconciliation. This idea of the artists role involves various figures and
narratives, though it generally concerns the individuals position in terms of social
crisis. In The Necessity of Art, Ernst Fischer refers to an earlier moment of
modernity with his description of Delacroix in heroic terms as one for whom the
flame of the Revolution had yet to be extinguished, whose Romantic pathos
expressed a tremendous feeling of struggling humanity He later quotes
Baudelaire commenting that Delacroix never lost the traces of his revolutionary
origin, and described Delacroixs work in these terms: A good picture, true to
the vision which has begotten it, should be brought into being like a world
(Fischer, Necessity of Art 74). Fischer then notes that years later, another artist
perceived a condition of disintegration in contrast to the wholeness of Delacroixs
revolutionary fervor and vision: Only patchwork, no longer all of a piece:
Cezanne recognized that the grand unity had been lost, not only in art but in

53
social reality (Necessity of Art 74). Another twist on this narrative of the artist in
relation to society reveals certain contradictions involving one of Cezannes
contemporariesa person generally described as one of the most influential
figures in modern theaterHenrik Ibsen. Arnold Hauser notes that even though
Ibsen owed his European fame to the social message of his plays, the
dramatist held fast to his own gospel of individualism, his glorification of the
sovereign personality and his apotheosis of the creative life Moreover,
Hauser comments: His thinking revolved around private ethical problems;
society itself was for him merely the expression of the principle of evil (Social
History of Art Vol. 4: 215). During another more expansive moment of modernity
Hauser offers a contrasting account with the case of Picasso:
He represents a complete break with individualism and
subjectivism, the absolute denial of art as the expression of
an unmistakable personality. His works are notes and
commentaries on reality; they make no claim to be regarded
as a picture of a world and a totality, as a synthesis and
epitome of existence (Social History of Art Vol. 4: 234).
One version of the artist as individual against society is developed through
feminism. Judy Chicago portrays this antagonism in terms of the definitively
oppressive effects of social control and exclusion of women engineered by men

54
and involving male culture. In this case, the opposition of society is about a
patriarchal order divided against its female members as a more or less coherent
group; however, for Chicago there is an emphasis on the individual heroics of
women as artistsnot least being that of her own contributions. At the
conclusion of her autobiographical account in Through the Flower, she sums up
her own struggles as a woman and an artist in both personal and social terms:
Finally, in the spring of 1974, I made a real breakthrough in
my work. I found a way to convey clearly the content that
was still hidden in my earlier images. This made me realize
that I had been involved in a process, a process which had
allowed me first to experience myself, then express myself
fully, a process that has rarely been available to women and
which, in my estimation, is simply not possible in a maledominated situation. Once I could actually be myself and
express my point of view, both personally and professionally,
I recognized that through my art, I could contribute my
values and attitudes as a woman to the culture in such a way
that I could affect the society (Chicago, Through the Flower
206).

55
Ultimately, whether the opposition of individual and society is interpreted in
more cynical terms about the individual as essentially alienated by a timeless
human condition or is variously attributed to historical causality, it is related to
modernity. At one point, Postone elaborates on this condition of modernity
through Marxs notion of the social individual, as that which expresses Marxs
idea that overcoming capitalism entails overcoming the opposition between
individual and society (32). Postone includes a detailed explanation of the
context of this opposition, including an introduction to Marxs critique of the form
of labor peculiar to capitalismabstract labor. In terms of the following passage,
it is not necessary to be thoroughly convinced of the particular viability of
overcoming presented in this narrative to understand that the opposition to be
overcome is directly part of the historically specific character of modern society:
This notion [of the social individual] does not simply refer to a
person who labors communally and altruistically with other
people; rather, it expresses the possibility of every person
existing as a full and richly developed being. A necessary
condition for the realization of this possibility is that the labor
of each person is full and positively self-constituting in ways
that correspond to the general richness, variegatedness,
power, and knowledge of society as a whole; individual labor

56
would no longer be the fragmented basis for the richness of
society. Overcoming alienation, then, entails not the
reappropriation of an essence that had previously existed but
the appropriation of what had been constituted in alienated
form (Postone 32).
The antagonism of individual and society, in this sense, does not simply originate
with the contents of any given critique of society by any particular individual or
groups of individuals; rather, the opposition stems from the broader condition of a
specific form of social life. This is not to dismiss forms of social protest or other
efforts toward social transformation as pointless or irrelevant; it does, however,
point to conditions of immanent critique. It entails a fundamental acceptance that
the critic/critique is also part of the object of critique, which may admit to the
desire for a transcendent position in relation to the object, while conceding the
impossibility of any absolutely outside perspective.
Throughout Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, immanence and art emerge
together repeatedly in various formulations. At times art seems to represent the
individual pitted against society, resembling a kind of proxy. However, the
situation is not quite so straightforward, as in the case of this proposition about
art in the modern world: What is social in art is its immanent movement against
society, not its manifest opinions (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 227). In other

57
words, art is not a simply illustration or a map directing the way out of social
injustice. In addition, art as an exploration of subjectivity may provoke
recognition, but not from some extrinsic position of objectivity. In the case of the
artist's relationship to society, though he or she may live and work in the margins
of society, this marginal status is an intrinsic aspect of modern society.
In another instance, Adorno notes, "Art keeps itself alive through its social
force of resistance He goes on to explain how art's contribution to society
is not communication with it but rather something extremely
mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inneraesthetic development, social development is reproduced
without being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation,
radical modernity preserves arts immanence by admitting
society only in obscured form, as in the dreams with which
artworks have always been compared (Aesthetic Theory
226).
In this way, the situation for art is comparable to that of the individual by being
part of society but not identical with, or reducible to it. Art is also capable of
reproducing something of the social or social development in its own distinctive
form as art without simply functioning as suchwithout imitating it.

58
In his famous essay Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg offers
significant points of clarification concerning modernism, including a discussion of
immanence and self-criticism as definitive aspects. However, before turning
directly to that text, a brief review of Greenbergs symbolic stature is warranted
especially in relation to the inadequately examined substance of ideas related to
both modernism and post-modernism. There was a time when the terms of art
and modernism included Greenbergs work as a kind of standard-bearer of
professional discourse. Having long since been identified as an unsympathetic
character who represents, in Hal Fosters words, a modernism become
monolithic in its self-referentiality and official in its autonomy (Foster, Recodings
130), Greenbergs ideas seem to have been largely dismissed as irrelevant by
advocates of succeeding post-modernism, along with the modernist art
Greenberg supported. However, as we have seen in the case of Danto, Fosters
discussion of art in the 1990s is earlier situated in relation to great modern
changes. In fact, in the very next sentence following his disparagement of
putatively Greenbergian art, he admits, postmodernism derives from this
modernism (Foster, Recodings 130), albeit in a brief and underspecified way.
By contrast, Greenberg immediately sets out to expand the concept of
modernism in Modernist Painting. The very first line declares: Modernism
includes more than art and literature. He also describes modernism in a more

59
specific social sense than Foster does for postmodernism. Greenberg elaborates
by identifying modernism with the broad sweep of traditional historical terms, as
he embarks on an explanation of its self-questioning character:
Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around
and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has
gone furthest in doing so. I identify modernism with the
intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical
tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he
was he first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I
conceive of Kant as the first real modernist (Greenberg 103).
Postone discusses the immanent nature of Marxs critique as that which takes
no standpoint outside of its object (Postone 170). Greenberg describes a kind of
immanence directly related to self-criticism, which may actually be easier to
grasp in simple concrete terms. He continues: The essence of modernism
liesin the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the
discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more firmly in
its area of competence (Greenberg 103). Here we may directly trace the points
of contention between Hal Foster and Greenbergs text. Foster cites the same
passage in his attempt to firmly establish the critical difference between
Greenbergs modernism his postmodernism. He begins by explaining that what

60
self-criticism is to modernist practice, deconstruction is to postmodernist
practice. Foster then engages Greenbergs terms directly:
If the essence of modernism is to use the methods of a
discipline in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of
competence, the essence of postmodernism is to do the
same but in order, precisely, to subvert the discipline.
Postmodernist art disentrenches its given medium, not only
as an autonomous activity but also as a mode of
representation with assured referential value and/or
ontological status. In general, postmodernist art is
concerned not with the formal purity of traditional artistic
mediums but with textual impurity"the interconnection of
power and knowledge in social representation (Foster,
Recodings 13031).
Foster's concern for "interconnection" is certainly unobjectionable, but beyond
such generalities, his formulations are underspecified at best. He may be least
convincing with his case against Greenberg. While many have objected to
Greenbergs ideas, what is the true substance of Fosters response? His point of
contention appears illogical in relation to Greenbergs clearly stated position:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art;

61
modernism used art to call attention to art (Greenberg 103). In light of this, how
does Foster argue that postmodernism is in direct opposition with Greenbergs
modernism for eschewing a mode of representation with assured referential
value and/or ontological status? Moreover, while even implicitly identifying
Greenberg as an advocate of modes of representation with assured referential
value is mistaken, the connotation is also oddly positivistic. In this case, even as
a point of refutation, what would give rise to such a notion of absolute assurance
within an inherently interpretive discourse regarding the interpretive objects and
activities of art?
Foster claims that the postmodernist form of practice seeks to subvert the
discipline," but what does this mean? Greenberg supports the idea of an
immanent critique, which uses a discipline to criticize the discipline itself. In the
case of Foster's postmodernism, subversion is simply a given value. What would
this mean in the case of Antonis Loving Care, for example? Should her piece
simply be summed up as a subversion of abstract expressionism by the way she
paints the floor with her hair? What would be the impact of merely aiming to
subvert something that had long ago been fundamentally challenged or
subverted time and again? Antoni clearly maintains her reference to the
discipline with her version of brush strokes, which also relates to the
autonomous activity of abstract painting. However, her activity resembles both

62
art "work" and housework in a manner that goes beyond simple subversion; she
uses art against itself in the same moment that it asserts itself. It is not entirely
clear what Foster means by disentrenches, but it is easier to identify Antonis
approach with that which is carried out in order to entrench it more firmly in its
area of competence. She creates her own entrenched area of competence with
a performance that is uncanny in its simultaneous like-art but not-like-art way.
Here art is not simply defeated, overturned or "subverted"; it is being complicated
in a richer, more beguiling sense.
It may be that Greenberg's terms need some adjusting. Perhaps the word
establish would have been less mystifying than entrench, though area of
competence may indeed be easier to understand in terms of the more traditional
medium of painting. However, if we turn to another part of Greenbergs text,
Antonis work seems to precisely fit the point, while standing it on its head at the
same time. A significant aspect of Greenbergs modernism involves the notion of
both art in general and each particular art as defined by its quality of
uniqueness and irreducibility. However, it is not until he elaborates in the
following way that Antonis example seems made to order: It quickly emerged
that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that
was unique in the nature of its medium (Greenberg 103). In this case, the way
in which Antoni seriously deviates from what Greenberg would have meant by

63
medium is, at the same time, what makes her particular use of non-art media
precisely that which identifies her art (in its own strange way) with a unique and
proper area of competence, that coincides with all that was unique in the nature
of its medium. Obviously, Antonis work is not about what Foster identifies as a
modernist focus on the formal purity of traditional artistic mediums. At the same
time she produces some remarkably analogous cases through her use of nonartistic materials and inherently related techniques. For example, in Loving
Care the paint she uses with her "paint brush" head of hair is not paint but hair
dye. As the analysis of Antonis art unfolds in this study through a focus on
specific examples of artworks, her method of both honoring and complicating or
problematizing the distinction of art in the same instance becomes more
apparent. Her unique way of both observing and defying tradition are also best
understood in terms of a necessary relationship. This is at least one important
way in which Antonis approach to art is more dialectical, whereas, at least in this
case, Fosters approach as a critic is more dogmatic.
By emphasizing a concern for purity and certainty as definitive qualities
for his idea of art, Greenberg also appears to be dogmatic. At the same time, it is
hardly clear that Foster's vague opposition of textual impurity translates into a
substantial opposing postion to Greenbergs notion? Moreover, what is it about
postmodernisms practice of subverting the discipline or disentrenching that

64
actually relates to the interconnections of power and knowledge in social
representations?" He never quite explains this. It is also left to wonder what is
inherently pure or impure about these matters and, in relation to what exactly?
Furthermore, what does Foster mean by social representations? In his terms,
perhaps Antonis clear reference to art historical "painting" in Loving Care is
simply too affirming of an artistic tradition, while somehow breaking the
connection with social representations? In the chapters to follow, Antonis
artworks reveal that the choice between some of the ideals of purity claimed for
Greenbergs modernism and the anarchic or contextless idealism of Fosters
postmodernism is a false one.

Historical frameworks and framing the historical

Returning now to one of Dantos characterizations of dramatic change in
art, clearly Greenbergs disposition in writing his essay Modernist Painting
would not have been amenable to the crisis Danto describes in terms of the
abandonment of painting as the central form of artistic expression. As Danto
continues to situate art and art historical developments, his reference to the
region beyond the confines of the picture frame becomes his own kind of
framing device for picturing a major shift in artistic production:

65
By the mid-sixties, pictorial space was no longer the scene
of revolution: artists moved outside the picture into forms of
productions quite unprecedented, for the understanding of
which pictorial aesthetics was of relatively little use. There
were happenings, there was performance, there was
installation, there was that shapeless array of avant-garde
gestures known as Fluxus, there was video, and there were
mixtures of mulitmedia artworkscombinations of readings,
performances, video, soundwork, and installation (Danto, Art
on the Edge 15).
Dantos concise itemization of historical developments in art very broadly
construes the conditions relevant to Adornos opening remark of the
posthumously published Aesthetic Theory about the crisis of art. Otherwise,
Dantos account is merely intended to be part of a general introduction to the
discussion of contemporary art in Art on the Edge and Over. However, one of his
generalizations is worth scrutinizing as it relates to questions of modernism.
Danto identifies Impressionism as the beginning of the great changes of
modernism. However, the origins of modernism may be traced to the eighteenth
century, especially in developments surrounding the French Revolution. Arnold
Hauser explicitly identifies work produced under these revolutionary conditions as

66
modern art. He also explains: It is only with the Revolution that art becomes a
confession of political faith, and it is now emphasized for the first time that it has
to be no mere ornament on the social structure, but a part of it [emphasis
added] (Hauser, Social History of Art Vol. 3: 147). Hauser elaborates:
Post-revolutionary romanticism reflects a new outlook on life
and the world and, above all, it creates a new interpretation
of the idea of artistic freedom.The romantic movement
now becomes a war of liberation not only against academies,
churches, courts, patrons, amateurs, critics and masters, but
against the very principle of tradition, authority and rule. The
struggle is unthinkable without the intellectual atmosphere
created by the Revolution; it owes both its initiation and its
influence to the Revolution. The whole of modern art is to a
certain degree the result of this romantic fight for freedom
(Social History of Art Vol. 3: 153).
Hausers characterization of an unprecedented shift in ideas about art during the
French Revolution finds an echo in Dantos claim about the 1990s and
intractably avant-garde artworks: It is an exciting moment in the history of art,
but a very different moment from any our predecessors have lived through
(Danto 16). Hausers quotes from early French modernism also resonate with

67
the ideas of an artist most often identified with post-modernism: A total work of
art is only possible in the context of the whole society (Harrison 891). Joseph
Beuys expressed this point in a 1972 interview, as his work was beginning to be
less about objects, or even discrete performances, and more about a
pedagogical mission. Beuyss notion of art as part of the foundation of the
social structurethe terms cited by Hauserform a practical pedagogy
whereby the artistic element must be embodied in every subject: I am pleading
for a gradual realization that there is no other way except that people should be
artistically educated. This artist education alone provides a sound base for an
efficient society (Harrison 892).
Hauser emphasizes how the connection of art with the practice of social
struggle is a matter of course in Revolutionary France. At the same time, he
points to the contrasting example of another kind of development: the nineteenth
century is the first to conceive of lart pour lart which forbids such a practice
(Hauser, Social History Vol. 3: 147). Beuyss twentieth century artistic vision is
not at all consistent with this notion of art for arts sake; however, for all his
revolutionary intent and desire, his artistic program could never be taken for
granted in quite the same way as in France almost two centuries earlier. Indeed,
there are surely differences between the world of the French Revolution and that

68
of Beuys; however, they have at least one fundamental idea in commonthat art
and society are inextricably related.
T.J. Clark argues for the critical importance of another revolutionary
context in Image of the People. In this case, he focuses on the Revolution of
1848 and its profound significance for both art and society, devoting special
attention to the example of Gustave Courbet and his work. Clark refers to
Courbets moment, if you will, as part of a time when art and politics could not
escape each other (Clark, Image/People 9).
In his time, Courbets realism and his focus on the everyday are clearly
revolutionary and concretely specific. In the 1960s and 70s pioneers in
performance also look to the everyday as a way to revolutionize their art;
however, in the latter case, incorporation of the real world or the here and now
is often underspecified to the point of being abstract. In Performance Theory,
Richard Schechner discusses Allan Kaprows efforts to blur the boundaries of art
and life. He quotes Kaprow directly regarding his strategy to reintegrate the
piecemeal reality we take for granted. Not just intellectually, but directly, as
experience in this moment, in this house, at this kitchen sink (Schechner 150).
Clearly, in his moment, Kaprows experimentation complicates the idea of
art and its relationship to the world, which Schechner recognizes for its
significance in the development of performance theory. However, as this study

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will explore, Antoni s art creates its own complications for the everyday,
especially in terms of gender and labor. When Kaprow refers to a reality we all
take for granted, he does little more to situate this reality, other than as a way
to stretch the limits of art and attempt to give it a direct connection to bare
quotidian existence; with reference to Kaprows explanation, any given situation
of being at the kitchen sink as just another experience in this moment comes
from a perspective that would not be part of everyones everyday. There is a
pointed example of this problem in an incident recounted by Henry Sayre in The
Object of Performance:
In the fall of 1971at Cal Arts, Allan Kaprow told a group of
students that sweeping the floor might be a potential
exercise for a performance piece. He was speaking in the
context ofthe Happening, which had from the beginning
emphasized the artistic potentiality of mundane and banal
objects and actions. But an angry Faith Wilding jumped up
to protest that half the population of the country was
oppressed by such household activities as sweeping up and
Kaprow was being insensitive to the condition of women
(Sayre 92).

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Of course, the effort to be more specific may give rise to new questions or
challenges, such as those involving identity politics. Nonetheless, the point is
that the assumption of neutrality for all mundane and banal objects and actions
is characteristic of attempts to merge art and life through the exclusive but
arbitrary selection of non-art elements, which may ultimately amount to little
more than artistic novelty. At times the striving to overcome the separation of art
and life renders life generic and contextless in order to achieve the narrow goal of
erasing the distinctions. Such efforts also depend on the sense of an art/life
boundary simply existing outside of history to be readily vanquished through
mere acts of contradiction.
Performance art by Kaprow and others working with similar ideas may be
understood as reacting against a notion of autonomous art, even when
articulated in a different fashion. Schechner quotes Kaprow selectively,
portraying the idea of autonomous art in terms of polar opposition:
Simplistically put, artlike art holds that art is separate from
life and everything else.The root message of all artlike art
is separateness and specialness; and the corresponding one
of all lifelike art is connectedness and wide-angle awareness
(Schechner 150).

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This kind of articulation renders the issue of making artlike art or lifelike art a
simple matter of choosing one or the other in the sense that such choices exist
independently as pre-given models corresponding to the fulfillment or corruption
of our basic humanity. It does not allow for the way such instances of
specialness in art may very well be connected to lived experience; nor does it
indicate exactly how any and all conditions of life automatically offer a sense of
connectedness or wide-angle awareness. Another problem arises with
Kaprows attempt to frame his artlike versus lifelike dichotomy in broad historical
terms: A supposed conflict between art and life has been a theme in Western art
at least since ancient Rome (Schechner 150). His remark sets forth the idea of
a consistent, thoroughly and arbitrarily fashioned division that is regularly
maintained roughly since classical antiquityas if it is a generically western
problema transhistorical notion dressed up with historical terms. Certainly,
Courbets realism relates to a notion of the everyday in his world, but it is not
about the same kind of triumph over autonomous art posited by those such as
Allan Kaprow. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully examine the
qualitative differences or similarities between these cases; however, this basic
comparison should begin to explain how such concerns ought not be reduced to
a consistent and recurring theme. Ultimately these points are about different
approaches to history, including but not limited to issues of art or art history.

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In his W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought Adolph Reed offers
a useful set of guidelines for critical historical analysis:
Present interests do inescapably shape reconstruction of the
past, and we probably never can recover earlier mental
states or authorial intentions with definitive accuracy. Yet we
can recognize that different interpretations are more or less
anachronistic, more or less careful and rich, more or less
plausible as representations of the content and structure of
past ideas or controversies. Acknowledgment that
interpretation is contingent upon contemporary purposes
does not eliminate the need to confront past thinking as
much as possible on its own terms, and that need entails
situating it within historical context (Reed 98).
Adorno puts a finer point on historical context in relation to the idea of art: The
concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it
refuses definition, adding later that, the arts will not fit into a gapless concept of
art (Aesthetic 2). However, Adornos point is not that no concepts need apply.
Indeed, to those who would claim that one cannot say what the properties of an
artwork are in times such as ours, Margolis does say: My own general answer
is that whats new is probably at least two hundred years old, and that whats

73
contemporary about whats new is that we are now willing to experiment
everywhere with the possibility that there are no principled constraints to honor in
art or criticism (Margolis 15, 16). But Margolis does not abide any grand
pronouncements of the end of art or the end of history, which has put him at
odds with Arthur Danto, even though Margolis otherwise respects much of
Dantos work. In this case, the point is not to dwell on the details of their dispute,
but some of Margoliss response is worth quoting at length:
I am speaking of the nature of history and of understanding
art, for we cannot fathom art except historically, just as we
cannot fathom ourselves except historically. Any alternative
presupposes that reality has a changeless, contextless
structure and that cultural history is simply the phenomenal
face of invariant human nature made intelligible on that
confession alone. But if, instead, the arts are horizontal
constructions made by ourselves (who are also artifacts of
history), then the modernist conception would be completely
mistakenthat is, the conception that art has a fixed
essence or that the periods of arts history are rectified only
when brought into line with arts essence (Margolis 23).

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Peter Brger proposes a general scheme for historicizing art in Theory of
the Avant-Garde. Brger observes shifts in artistic production and reception as
they relate to changes in the social formation. He formulates three historical
categories: sacral art, courtly art, and Bourgeois art. These broadly
distinguish art in terms of purpose or function, production, and reception.
The sacral form generally renders the purpose or function to be that of cult
object, produced though collective craft, with its reception labeled collective
(sacral). The primary form of courtly art is the representational object,
produced by the individual, but also having its reception identified as collective
with the term sociable. The category of bourgeois art uniquely describes
purpose in terms of subjectivity: portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding. In
this case, both production and reception are identified as individual (Brger 48).
Brger also acknowledges the limits of his simple scheme of categories by
providing a number of qualifying details:
Production by the individual that characterizes art in
bourgeois society has its origins as far back as courtly
patronage. But courtly art still remains integral to the praxis
of life, although as compared with the cult function, the
representational function constitutes a step toward a
mitigation of claims that art play a direct social role. The

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reception of courtly art also remains collective, although the
context of the collective performance has changed. As
regards reception, it is only with bourgeois art that a decisive
change sets in: its reception is one by isolated
individuals....The advent of bourgeois art is also the decisive
turning point as regards use or function. Although in
different ways, both sacral and courtly art are integral to the
life praxis of the recipient. As cult and representational
objects, works of art are put to specific use. This
requirement no longer applies to the same extent to
bourgeois art. In bourgeois art, the portrayal of bourgeois
self-understanding occurs in a sphere that lies outside the
praxis of life (Brger 48).
Brgers bourgeois category is, of course, hardly the end of the story; rather, it
marks a decisive shift, which is more like a beginningespecially in relation to
the of avant-garde and beyond. Brger goes on to explain, The European
avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in
bourgeois society (Brger 49). His theory explains how one form of avant-garde
attack targets the individual character of artistic production central to art in
bourgeois society:

76
In its most extreme manifestations, the avant-gardes reply
to this is not the collective as the subject of production but
the radical negation of the category of individual creation.
When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects (a urinal, a
bottle drier) and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the
category of individual production. The signature, whose very
purpose it is to mark what is individual in the work, that it
owes its existence to this particular artist, is inscribed on an
arbitrarily chosen mass product, because all claims to
individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamps
provocation not only unmasks the art market where the
signature means more than the quality of the work; it
radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois
society according to which the individual is considered the
creator of the work of art. Not from the form-content totality
of the individual object Duchamp signs can one infer the
meaning, but only from the contrast between mass-produced
object on the one hand, and signature and art exhibit on the
other (Brger 51-2).

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Clearly, Antoni elaborates on Duchamp's historical moment and much more, as
this study will explore. She also appears plainly implicated in another of Danto's
observations about the "intractable avant-garde":
It is art that really attempts to meet Hegels challenge by
rising to the level of philosophy while at the same time
remaining concrete and physical. It is an art, certainly, that
requires thought in order that it be encountered productively.
It is an art that exacts sacrifices of its practitioners no less
than those who encounter it (Danto, Art on the Edge 16).

Chapter III
Reading Antoni: Four Works

Janine Antonis work is extraordinary: it is both passionately visceral and

coolly sophisticated, primal and conceptually rigorous. These qualities not only
describe the range and heterogeneity of her body of work as a whole, each of
them may be embodied in the single instance of an individual piece. Yet even
though her art contains such oppositional extremes and it is expressed in a wide
variety of media from photography to sculpture, one condition remains constant:
there is always a pervasive sense of process, a performative dimension to
Antonis work.
Antoni leaves forms and traces of herself in her work that are not
instances of self-portraiture in the usual sense. Even the evidence of her own
intimate bodily contact with her materials is not simply nor primarily about her as
an individual, but rather an expression of larger ideas surrounding the body and
intimacy. Nonetheless, while she does not portray herself in her art with specific
autobiographical emphasis, she does use herself both to call attention and
contribute to an ongoing discourse concerning the self-consciousness of the
artist as both subject and object, creator and reference. One way of framing the
artists relation to his work and the process of its creation, is keenly articulated in
the following excerpt from Manns Death in Venice:
78

79
It is certainly a good thing that the world can see only
finished works of art without knowing their origins, the
conditions for their existence; for knowledge of the sources
from which the artist derived his inspirations would often
confuse and frighten away his public, thus vitiating the
effects of his outstanding achievement. Strange hours!
Strangely enervating labor! Oddly productive intercourse
between the mind and a body! (Mann 38).
This passage from Manns novella reveals some of the thoughts of a writer
considering the problems of his art and art making. It portrays the artist as a kind
of embarrassed exile. Here there is a sense of shame or awkwardness about
private personal angst and its causesin this case involving his deep but distant
infatuation with a beautiful boy. By contrast, Antoni appears to revel in exposing
everythingincluding the awkward, the ugly and even a sense of repulsion as
part of a given work. Indeed, the writers anxieties about being caught in plain
sight, so to speak, amidst the sources of his inspiration suggests a precise
inversion of Antonis determined efforts to reveal the process of production as
both source and inspiration in itself. However, Antoni s work does not
necessarily contradict the passage from Death in Venice in terms of the element
of anxiety. Rather, her art often frames a vast and densely inscribed collection of

80
anxious moments set forth to engage her audience in the disquieting aspect of
her labors. In Antonis case, the bizarre quality, or strange focus on her labor
becomes part of the outstanding achievement.
There is, however, one major point in common between the way in which
Mann frames literary art and Antonis visual/performance or performance-related
artthe self-referential aspect. Both Death in Venice in particular and Antonis
general approach include references to the art and the artist as integral to the
work itself. This may seem more apparent in Mann through his elaborate firstperson account of a writers reflections on his art and his self-conscious process
of working; but the emphatic transparency of Antonis process as a primary
aspect of her work references the art itself, as much as do her clear art historical
references. Her work includes herself as the performing and creating artist,
whether through live performance or only trace evidence of the same in the
objects she creates. It is also the case that these references do not simply
concern the self of the artist as the source of inspiration, but point to the process
of perceiving the self, especially in relation to the work.
Of course, Antonis work is about more than simple self-depictions or, for
that matter, the broader sense of self-referentiality. Indeed, the proof of its
complexity and depth may be found in the wide-ranging and often quite
persuasive interpretations it has invited, as well as the numerous different

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attempts to categorize it. One way to preview the multiple interpretive
possibilities of her art involves just a glimpse of Antonis presence in an array of
examples from contemporary art discourse. Edward Lucie-Smiths Art Tomorrow
includes Antonis work in a chapter entitled The Body and Identity. While the
focus in her case is exclusively on the issue of gender, her work is also
implicated in the wider range of the chapters topics simply by being included.
Here Lucie-Smith points to how over its long history in the west, art has always
had strong links to theatrical presentation, and, the way the human figure reemerged in avant-garde art thanks to the rise in Performance Art from the 1960s
onward. However, between references to the 60s and medieval mystery plays,
one point stands out most provocatively in relation to Antonis work: Real
bodiesrather than bodies represented in painting and sculpturebegan to be
perceived as the animated, or at any rate animate, equivalents of Duchamps
ready-mades (Lucie-Smith, Art Tomorrow 186). In Linda Weintraubs Art on the
Edge and Over Antonis work is the focus of a short but substantial chapter,
which is first in a section entitled Some Processes. Susan Sollinss second
volume of Art 21, the companion book to the National Public Television series,
devotes a chapter to Antoni under the larger heading Loss and Desire. On the
other hand, three large volumes devoted exclusively to women artists and their
work place Antonis example under broader more conventional headings, when

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the distinction is made at all. In the anthology The Power of Feminist Art, edited
by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, Antoni lands in a chapter entitled Beyond
the Seventies: The Impact of Feminist Art. Nancy Hellers fourth edition of
Women Artists has a strictly chronological organization putting Antoni in the last
chapter Into the Twenty-first Century. In this case, the discussion of her work
opens with the remark: No single category can accommodate the art of Janine
Antoni (Heller 279). Uta Grosenick edits a compilation entitled Women Artists in
the 20th and 21st Century, basically giving Antoni equal billing with 92 others
through the alphabetized organization of artists by name. The non-hierarchal
scheme includes a range of older figures such as Judy Chicago, Georgia
OKeefe and Frida Kahlo, along with women of more recent fame such as Laurie
Anderson, Mona Hartoum and Rachel Whiteread. The entry for each artist in the
Grosenick volume includes a short essaythe title for Antonis work is Sublime
Self-irony.
The case of Martha Buskirks The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art
distinguishes itself from all of the above for the amount of space and depth of
discussion afforded Antoni and her work. First published in 2003, the books
cover is filled with a reproduction of Lard Gnaw in its eventual state of collapse.
Buskirk devotes a large portion of the introduction to Antoni, as well as
substantial discussion in two of the other five chapters. She singles out Antonis

83
work as an important example in describing the way successive generations of
artists have drawn upon precedents established since the 1950s, which often
leads them to bring together multiple and...distinct approaches and procedures
(Buskirk, Contingent Object 7). She goes on to take special note of Gnaw in
terms of its appearance in the Museum of Modern Arts 2000 Open Ends
exhibition. Buskirk uses this example to discuss the organization of the
exhibition, which suggests how difficult, if not impossible, interpreting art
according to divisions based on style or movement has become since 1960.
Gnaw is categorized in the exhibit with a selection of works identified under the
heading Minimalism and After. Buskirk is quick to point out, Antonis work
might just as easily have been included in Actual Size, Matter, or One Thing
after Another, which were also among the exhibitions eleven arbitrary and often
overlapping categories (Contingent Object 11).
Along with these relatively cursory examples of Martha Buskirks
articulations, Dan Cameron also offers a sense of the complexity of Antonis work
through a select few points. In an essay entitled Habaeus Corpus from the
catalog Slip of the Tongue Cameron remarks, Antonis proposition is primarily an
experimental one, describing how she also pushes to revamp some of the
familiar tenets of both conceptual art and feminism, so they emerge in her work
as fresh alternatives to a received history that is generally dismissed as dry and

84
impenetrable. Earlier he points out: Considered as a whole Antonis work to
date represents the most engaging hybrid of body art and traditional sculpture to
have emerged in recent memory (Cameron, Habaeus Corpus 48).
This chapter will examine some important parts of that whole in depth
with a concentration on individual works, including a special focus on labor and
gender as both separate and interrelated issues in Antonis art. Of the various
ways contemporary discourse situates Antonis work, a point by Simon Taylor is
especially significant in relation to these concerns: Antoni is working within a
specific political context, and the performative dimension of her work contradicts
the facile notion of a natural body that excludes the social realm (Taylor 60).
Below I will describe and analyze four of Antonis major works: Butterfly Kisses,
Slumber, Lick and Lather, and Gnaw.

Butterfly Kisses
Antonis 1993 Butterfly Kisses stands out in relation to the rest of her work
to date in that it bears the greatest resemblance to an older tradition of artmaking, that is, drawing or etching. However, though the effects suggest
something similar to those rendered by pen and ink, her method is hardly a
familiar drawing board activity. This piece is actually comprised of the strokes left
by her blinking repeatedly against the paper with heavily mascara-soaked lashes.

85
Although Antoni leaves a greater concentration of marks in the center of each
page like the form of the eye, there is no picture to be discerned, no external
referent of that kind. The result of her most unusual technique is ultimately a
diffuse and abstract field of marks. At the same time, a shift in the directional
pattern of lash strokes distinguishes the two drawings referring back to her
production as a literal one-from-each-eye diptych.
The specifics of Antonis process appear directly in the title of Butterfly
Kisses: like the loving act of a mother tickling her small childs belly with her
eyelashes, Antoni brushes her lashes on the paper. However, her exaggerated
and laborious repetition of the same action has less of a light and tender quality;
her continuous, darkening blinks lack a similar sense of casual spontaneity. She
alters the familiar association with an affectionate gesture, calling special
attention to the making of the piece with the clear evidence of her more seriously
focused labors. This behind-the-scenes performance turns Antoni into a kind of
eye-batting machine as she blinks for a documented 1,124 times. The result of
this rather unorthodox form of artistic inscription is the image of a densely
charged field of marksthe vivid residue of her intensive process.
The emphasis on process in Butterfly Kisses also complicates the
historically charged issue of the artistic hand of genius. Antoni uses an odd
form of manual labor that actually leaves out the definitive hand; it does not

86
involve the special high refinements of the hand, nor does it include the usual
kinds of coarse or brute tasks sometimes associated with manual or low labor.
Her activity is similar to free-hand drawing in the sense that it does not involve
the tracing of another image, though it involves traces created in a largely handsfree fashion. Additionally, Antoni violates another norm of drafting technique in
terms of posture and positioning: I recall my own experience in life drawing class
as an emphatic lesson in body awareness, not only in observing the model but
also in ones own practice of drawing the model. Our instructions included
persistent reminders to avoid the nervous impulse to put our noses to the paper,
pulling in our hands and faces as if performing microsurgery. Antoni thumbs her
nose at a number of rules, so to speak, as she literally presses the very same to
the page to draft with her lashes.
As in nearly all her work, Butterfly Kisses is not handmade in terms of
evincing the virtuoso artistic handthe mark of genius traditionally identified as
male. At the same time, while this kind of denial of the hand is now a wellestablished strategy for both men and womenone of the relatively new
traditions of modern art practicein this case Antoni adds a hint of parody with
her feminized mascara touch. In Other Criteria, originally published in 1972, Leo
Steinberg describes the turn away from the mark of the hand as a way to
transcend the debility of manual gesture (Steinberg 62); Antoni adds an unusual

87
twist to this turn. Indeed, her work has a way of reinvigorating or reworking past
insights and practices; in this sense we may identify her efforts with another
passage in the same text by Steinberg: ...American artists seek to immerse the
things they make or do in the redeeming otherness of non-art...The game is to
maintain invention and creativity with an anti-art attitude (Steinberg 63).
Butterfly Kisses may at first appear to be the results of more conventional
ink drawing or dry brush technique, but a careful inspection reveals that it is not
quite like a drafted-by-hand image, after all. The actual arms length leverage of
drawing would not produce such marksat least not without a deliberate effort at
imitating the same conditions as Antonis techniqueand there is reason to
doubt that the results would yet be quite the same. In a way, Antonis Butterfly
Kisses is closer to a miniaturized Jackson Pollock painting than something
produced at a drafting table or an easel. Her Loving Care performance piece is
the example most often identified with reference to Pollockespecially his own
performance of painting as documented on film by Hans Namuth. However, in
this instance the action aspect of their work is the primary similarity between
Antoni and Pollock. The results of Antonis brush strokes in her live
performance of Loving Care are far more like the painterly abstraction of Willem
de Kooning or Franz Klein than Jackson Pollock. On the other hand, Butterfly
Kisses, though on a much smaller scale, resembles Pollocks concept of the

88
overall painting, the painting seemingly without beginning or end (Arnason 524).
Antonis piece is also similar to Pollock for appearing to portray space as a void
charged with particles of energy (525). Moreover, her posture in relation to the
paper in terms of the position of her head is similar to Pollocks method of putting
the canvas on the floorthe difference, in this instance, is a matter of proximity.
Pollock allows the force of gravity and chance to be more of a factor in his work
than more commonly practiced techniques for painting, while Antonis approach
includes the limitation of temporarily obscured vision while her eye is immediately
against the paper. In both instances, the performative process is an integral part
of the work. However, it is just as significant that the point of comparison
between Pollocks example and Antonis is, on the one hand, a similar kind of
departure from traditional artistic technique, while the resemblance also brings
the important distinction of Antonis approach into sharper relief. The image of
Pollock doing his drips-and-splatters performance as part of his legendary
artist/anti-hero status is complemented by Antonis reference to the stereotypical
female preoccupation with make-up and the ordinary smallness of its
applications, as well as other girlish diminutive acts. There is an element of
comic absurdity, as well, with the reference to batting eyelashes as a clichd act
of feminine flirtation; Antonis actions appear to play out in mock conformity with

89
the idea that women artists can only mimic great historical developments with
teasing and insipid gestures.
Considering Antonis strange new version of a time-honored artistic
technique in relation to one old notion of artistic aspirations suggests a more
playful bit of trifling, that is, the literal aspect of Antonis process relates to the
ideal of painting as a triumph of mimetic faculties emphasizing the ultimate
achievement of verisimilitude in a punning fashion: With a keen and active eye,
she couldnt have gotten closer to the image if she tried. Of course, the notion
that the primary task of the artist is to accurately reproduce nature or capture
reality would undergo a radical change with the advent of photography, leaving a
lasting mark on the development of painting and much more. Clearly, Butterfly
Kisses is not about creating an illusion of reality in the same sense; its concrete
aspects are more like life than life-like. However, Antoni does press her eye
extremely close and nearly flush with the surface of the paper in the same way as
a photographer does when looking through the viewer of a camera. In her case
the view at that point is more of a blind spot, but the idea of her eye taking over
the image-making function in quite the way it does relates to a formulation by
Walter Benjamin in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction:

90
For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction,
photography freed the hand of the most important artistic
functions, which henceforth devolved only upon the eye
looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly
than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction
was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with
speech (Benjamin 219).
Indeed, in a rather literal fashion the eye here accelerates the process of
pictorial reproduction, or visual design, in this case. Here the artist plays off the
absence of the actual mechanization Benjamin characterizes as able to keep
pace with speech, with the suggestion of a now internalized quality. The speed
and sophistication of imaging technologies, having long since out-run speech,
here seem to leave in their wake the mute traces of the laboring body.
Butterfly Kisses reveals the traces of the laboring eye in an almost surreal
sense, since, outside of a medical context, the eye is rarely considered in relation
to its muscular capacities. Indeed, precisely with reference to surrealism, this
work suggests a famous cinematic moment: in this case the eye, literally pressed
into service, frantically blinks as if to defend against the kind of razor slash that
occurs at the beginning of Buuel and Dalis Un Chein Andalou. The evocative
accumulation of eyelash marks on paper also resonates with the viewers own

91
effort to imagine the experience of making those marks. Plainly named in its title,
Butterfly Kisses is most emphatically a product of Antonis specific actions and
not a creation of the hand. The hand is hardly capable of reproducing the rare
and delicate sensation of eyelashes fluttering against the skin, and Antonis
marks are the unique traces of her own singular method just as giving butterfly
kisses to someone is its own special gesture of affection.

Slumber
The mechanical operation of the artists eyes comes into direct play again
in Antonis Slumber. However, unlike Butterfly Kisses, the eye movements are
involuntary and animated by sleep. In this 1994 piece, she appears to portray
dreams or the dream-state as these might be derived from empirical science and
material fact. She accomplishes this, in part, by literally creating some of the
piece in her sleep. At the same time, the literal aspect of performance in
Slumber is a feature of its complexity as one of Antonis most elaborate artworks;
it is hardly a simple rest-and-relaxation diorama, as the title might initially
suggest.
In Slumber, Antoni has herself literally wired up to a polysomnograph
machine in order to register her rapid eye movements (REM) while spending the
night in the gallery. The public exhibition space here doubles as both a site for

92
the public display of art and a private laboratory where Antoni becomes her own
specimen for experimentation. During her less than cozy slumber in the relatively
stark gallery setting, the tracing of her eye movements directs a line into an
intermittent zigzag pattern on paper as one measure of her dream-state. In the
morning she begins to take part in a public performance of weaving the same
blanket she uses during sleep. Antoni utilizes the imposing structure of a
specially designed loom as both a kind of stage set and a productive apparatus,
equipped with 316 spools of dye-free wool. In this live half of the installation,
Antoni sets herself to the tasks of a continual weaving project, which include
integrating strips of material from her ever shrinking nightgown into the
background of her ever lengthening bedcover. Antoni manually weaves the
exact pattern of the polysomnographs jagged line with the contrasting fabric of
her sleepwear. Gradually the blanket displays more and more of a greatly
enlarged and colorful copy of the original ink traces of her dream-state. At the
same time, while Slumber involves a juxtaposition of opposites, the contradictory
aspects are more dialectical than a simple polar opposition. Slumber follows a
living process and a looping flow of energy and impulse between Antoni and her
tools of production. The polysomnographs register of a line on paper is a
characteristic product of an electronic apparatus, but in another sense, Antonis
special activity during sleep also drives the movement of the machine.

93
Nonetheless, the reference to dreams involves the notion of mental activity driven
by the subconscious mind. Then there is the matter of the loom, which is not
animated by electricity but by the willed movements of the artist. Resembling the
stubbornly persistent Penelope in this way, Antoni greatly expands her project
through travels to many cities to repeatedly perform her weaving labors for
different audiences. Her living art process embodies a sense of the mythic
heroines ever renewing hope over a ten-year cycle of perpetual weaving and
unraveling, attempting to discourage her greedy overbearing suitors as she
awaits the return of her husband Odysseus. The apparent endlessness of the
weaving project also suggests the automaton-like drive of a compulsive disorder,
while in the overall design of the piece, Antonis conscious planning emerges as
a decidedly significant factor. Ultimately, the different forces at play in this piece
present elements of ambiguity; it seems that this is part of the wondrous and
defining indeterminacy of this work. Slumber may be like a monument to active
curiosity, an emblem of both perpetual mystery and critical consciousness.
Nancy Spector, a curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum
in New York writes of Slumber:
While Antoni appealed to modern science and technology to
create her sculptural essay on sleep, she also invoked an
entire literary tradition of weaving women with her

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architectural loom. Weaving is an archetypal symbol for
dreaming, and the combination of woman and loom has rich
mythological and religious connotations. In some cultures,
weaving is associated with fertility and origin myths (Spector
19).
Spector offers a list of figures known for their special role in the art of weaving,
including a Japanese Shinto sun goddess and a Mayan water goddess. She
takes special note of Greek mythology and the story of Arachne. Arachne is the
fantastical figure from antiquity whose extraordinary talents at weaving lead to an
extraordinary encounter with fate. As the tale unfolds, she is an especially gifted
young girl whose capaciousness includes a remarkable kind of daring. She is so
thoroughly impressed with herself that she challenges Athena, the patron
goddess of weaving, to a competition. This begins to draw Arachne into an
extremely perilous position, eventually incurring Athenas murderous wrath,
which leads to Arachnes demise and reincarnation into a spider. The spectacle
of Antoni working at her giant loom after her hidden drama of a bizarrely wired up
night of sleep subtly hints at a kind of present day version of the latter-day legend
involving a disturbing progression of events.
While the allusions to mythology do describe aspects of the evocative
power of Slumber, the dominant element of the fantastical does not comport with

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the real materiality of Antonis work. Moreover, Antonis choice of referring to
dreaming without illustrating the content of dreams or providing elaborate
imagery suggesting dream-states leaves such fantasy entirely to the viewers
imagination. In Slumber the primary visual cues related to fabled accounts of
weaving come down to Antonis presence as a woman and the way the loom setup is the dominant physical structure of the installationit literally looms large.
At the same time, the reference to weaving as traditional craft and the stuff of
legend is reinforced by the element of stark contrast between the manual wooden
loom and the metal box gadgetry representing modern science. Without the
presence of this contemporary technology, the piece would flatten into a purely
whimsical or merely picturesque tableau.
The plot thickens, so to speak, when we regard the bed and the loom as
separate but complementary workstations. The comparison is all the more
emphatic with the juxtaposition of the modern machines output displayed in a
heavy accumulation of paper advancing in one direction along the wall, and the
thick folds of a constantly growing blanket bunched up along the floor between
the bed and the loom. Each point of production reveals a distinct yet related
product resulting from Antonis quite disparate labors: there are the white streams
of paper etched with a raw form of scientific data churned out of the power-driven
machine, while the same linear formation of that data reemerges in another

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context as a highly textured and colored version of a contrasting design
incorporated into the weaving of the blanket. These are literally parallel
operations tracing through the subconscious inflections of eye movement that
represent Antonis dream activity, along with the deliberate inscription mimicking
the same pattern through her conscious activities at the loom.
A different kind of plot twist returns us to the context of Greek mythology.
In a sense, Antonis presence most resembles the incipient phase of Arachnes
tragic trajectory when the mythological figure is still nurturing her grandiose
ambitions prior to the deadly dnouement involving Athenas rage. At the same
time, Antoni appears in a kind of compromised position of her own design as part
of the nocturnal portion of Slumber. Some photo-documentation of the actual
scenes of slumbering has her appearing less like a spider and more like the
spiders prey entangled in the polysomnograph machines modified web of wires
and sensors. Perhaps Antoni is most like a spider-woman in relation to the
configuration of hundreds of threads emanating from the loom; their appearance
in a kind of fanned out suspension over the bed does bear a faint resemblance to
a spiders web of nightmare proportions. However, the web of intrigue is thicker
than simple references to mythology and womens craft traditions. Perhaps it is
due to the behind-the-scenes aspect of the artwork that the nighttime phases
more dire allusions do not dominate the piece, but there is another kind of dark-

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side, which is not specifically about any spider imagery. At least one photograph
of Antoni apparently asleep on her spare cot of a bed and connected by wires to
the box full of knobs and lights conjures an image of mind-control experiments or
procedures. It may also serve as the image of a paranoid or possibly clairvoyant
dream of new forms of surveillance. Slumber is a particularly clear example of
Antonis approach to art as a kind of genuinely open-ended experimentation,
whereby her strivings to create a particularly evident kind of experience for
herself often produce a wide array of interpretive possibilities.
Antonis Slumber is a representative example of the heterogeneity of her
larger body of work, which generally appears to be a collection of new inventions
with each pieceeven when similar materials are used. Her art does not
constitute a narrowly defined style, at least not in the commonly understood
sense that would apply to a Monet or a Modigliani. In fact, this issue is often
couched in terms of painting or the pictorial arts, as in the case of famous
appropriation artist Sherrie Levin with her comment: A picture is a tissue of
quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture (Harrison 1067).
Slumbers cyclical narrative of sleeping/dreaming/dream-weaving creates its own
multi-layered picture in a similar sense. Levins words are from her 1982
statement categorized under Ideas of the Postmodern as part of The Critique
of Originality in the voluminous Art in Theory 1900-1990. The quality of Antonis

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work in offering generous possibilities for different readings also relates loosely to
Levins variation on Roland Barthes from The Death of the Author: A paintings
meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must
be at the cost of the painter (Harrison 1067). Rather than offering a coherence
of individual expression appearing through the unconscious mark assumed by
connoisseurship, Martha Buskirk provides the proper perspective on Antonis
unique approach: The touch or mark is not simply a vehicle for creating an
aesthetic effect; rather, recognition of the mark itself and its relation to the body
of the artist is central to the message of the work (Contingent Object 7).
Style may not apply in the more traditional sense, but Slumber is a
signature effort with regard to its singular but dually integrated conceptual and
performative approach. Antoni creates installation pieces, on-site performances,
videos and even ostensibly two-dimensional works as all basically suited to the
category of her own kind of performance art. This category may be generally
characterized not only as process-oriented, but by the way in which her bodily
engagement and actionsincluding everything from submersion imprints to more
indirect traces of her activityserve as essential and integral aspects of her
work. Within this larger category, Antonis approach to performance is usually a
backstage affair, as it is with Butterfly Kisses. However, in the case of Slumber
Antoni combines both live action and a behind-the-scenes process of

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performance into a kind of essential connective tissue that also becomes part of
the meaty substance of the piece.
Slumber is also an especially vivid example of other unique aspects of
Antonis art. Antoni works almost exclusively with non-art materials and
techniques, but she often goes on to distinguish herself from other artists who
also strive to create in similarly intensive and unusual ways, including in
performance. At the same time, there is a way in which comparing Antonis work
with more traditional forms of art is more enlightening than one might expect.
Arthur Danto locates pivotal movements in art history within the
possibilities and ultimate limitations of painting. He claims that numerous
experiments within the implicit space of the picture plane began with
Impressionism and gradually culminated in the abandonment of painting as the
central form of artistic expression (Danto, Art Over the Edge 15). He describes
how the real revolution takes place after artists moved outside the picture into
forms of production quite unprecedented, such as happening, performance,
installation, and much more. However, an examination of some of the
developments in painting, or the pictorial in broader terms as related to Antonis
work will demonstrate the inadequacy of accounts rendered in simple terms of
moving outside the picture (15).

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On the one hand, Antoni is clearly among those whose art primarily
inhabits this space outside the picture. However, in Slumber she incorporates
the two-dimensional aspects of traces of her eye moments in ink on paper and in
the weaving of a blanket. At the same time, in doing so Antoni turns these flat
surfaces into emblems of another dimensiontime.
In contrast to Dantos narrative, art historian Norman Bryson describes
painting as an embodied process for both the painter and the viewer. It is
remarkable how Brysons account resembles aspects of Antonis work:
The aesthetic value of the trace resides precisely in
what can be inferred about the body from the course
of the trace: the brush strikes the paper in media res,
and as it lifts from the paper its energy is not yet
spent; the viewing subject is constructed
gymnastically, as an organism whose somatic
memory understands the origin and the insertion of
the stroke as it understands the origin and insertion of
its own musculature (from the inside): two real-time
processes, of the trace and the glance, meet at the
interface of the picture plane (Bryson 117).

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The picture of embodied experience is also rendered by its negation, with a
contrary example described in Brysons discussion of perspective and the epoch
of the vanishing point. There is a shift in pictorial space transforming the
subject into object:
[L]ike the camera, the painting of perspective clears
away the diffuse non-localised nebula of imaginary
definitions and substitutes a definition from outside.
In its final form...the only position for the viewing
subject proposed and assumed by the image will be
that of the Gaze, a transcendent point of vision that
has discarded the body of labour and exists only as a
disembodied punctum (Bryson 107).
Clearly in Antonis case there is an intrinsic perspective that is live and inclusive,
and the body of labour is a central feature of the work as part of her process
and the viewers imagination.
Experience in relation to Antonis work is implicated in her choice of
materials or medium, if you will, and its intrinsic significance in relation to process
and to performance, more specifically. The practice of painting would begin to
integrate the artists experience in important ways with the advent of
impressionism. The evidence of paint as such and its manipulation come into

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clear view on the canvasthe mark of it making is an integral feature of the
painting. In The Painting of Modern Life, T.J. Clarks discussion of Pisarro
includes a new look of the world for the painter with its dance of likenesses
guessed at or half glimpsed, and always on the point of disappearing into mere
matter. For it was matterpaint itselfwhich was the key to any authentic
likeness being rediscovered (Clark, Painting of Modern 21). In Slumber the
picture frame surrounds a tableau vivant and the imagination of the viewer.
However, in this case, the mark as in paint is also a matter of motion, a trace of
the bodythe matriel of laborit appears on the same trajectory as the
painting of modern life.
Arnold Hauser explains, another aspect of the impressionists embodied
perspective as part of their unbourgeois view of life and their attempts to arrest
the fleeting hour, their surrender to the passing mood, as the highest and least
replaceable value, their aim of living in the moment, of being absorbed by it
(Hauser 185). This kind of approach would expand with the practice of action
painting, for example. (Antonis Loving Care makes reference to action painting
in her own way.) This same practice of painting is also related to the kind of
performance piece, which leaves out the painting as an object altogether.
Antonis work offers a special example of the kind of artistic practice that cannot
be strictly assigned to either category of object or performance art. Slumber is

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somewhat unusual for merging the categories in a more literal sense through a
presentation of vividly discrete components of object art and live performance
brought into unity within the larger structure of the piece.
In terms of the history of performance art, the general approach to
incorporating aspects of quotidian existence or acts associated with everyday life
may be described in contrast to related efforts by Antoni; her performances and
performance related objects uniquely contextualize the everyday as experience
in specific ways. Moreover, if impressionism, as Hauser describes it, was once
part of a revolt against the routine and discipline of bourgeois practice (Hauser
185), Antonis Slumber includes references to those same characteristics of
modern life that continue into the present day. For example, her machine
monitored sleep suggests that even our nightly reconstitution can be likened to a
taskespecially as it relates directly, and in this case, rather literally to the task
of the following day. Both the bed and the loom, and the echoes of repetitive
form and action suggest the routine and discipline of individual workstations.
Antonis special focus on her labors at the loom in connection with the process of
sleep as self-renewal also references a world based on commodity relations. In
this context sleep becomes part of the reproduction of labor-power, that very
personal commodity consumed during all other forms of commodity production.

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This combination of sleep and machinery also refers to the automatic progress of
abstractly measured bodily activity alluding to alienated labor.
On the other hand, the light of day brings a more hopeful sense of renewal
when the gallery opens and the installation transforms into a site of public
engagement, as Antoni returns to the live dream weaving portion of the piece.
During her activity at the loom with the ongoing production of her dream chart of
a blanket, the emphasis is on the conscious force of creativity and the potential of
overcoming. A sense of animation returns to scene, while the table of
instruments and the frozen cascade of paper stand as an inert reminder of the
previous nights scientifically annotated slumber. It also becomes the occasion
for Antoni to utilize a waking perspective with regard to whatever she may
remember about the experience with her bedtime electronic overseer by
interacting with the audience. Nancy Spector writes: Interaction with the
audience is very important to [Antoni]; she believes it prevents her from being
objectified within the artwork, and, perhaps most importantly, it transforms the
sculpture itself into a living entity (Spector 14-15).
Antoni only interacts with the machine during the actual sleeping phase of
Slumberat least to the extent that this may be understood as a type of
interaction at all. However, even in relation to the watchful eye of another alert
and embodied consciousness, a dedicated observation of the event of something

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like a full course of natural sleep only seems really feasible under the conditions
of a special kind of laboratory setting. Under any other circumstances the nature
of normal sleep it is not something that anyone steadily witnesses throughout, let
alone those who become part of an art gallery audience. Andy Warhol did have
a camera serve as a real-time witness of the several hour event for his film
Sleepwhich is simply thata film of someone sleeping. There is a way in
which Antonis Slumber cannot completely avoid the association; actually, it
readily appears to involve an element of quotation in relation to the Warhol
piece. Indeed, the very absurdity of Warhols film becomes the point in at least
one sense: it is a reminder that the experience of sleep is something the sleeper
herself can never fully knownot the real-time experience of it. In this way,
Antonis undercover sleep performance is logically hidden and merely
represented by the remaining props of the bed and machinery.
On the other hand, the element of mystery that arises with regard to
Antonis bedtime scene might also provoke speculation regarding what the
impact would be of displaying her sleep performance as part of the public
exhibition. The recorded image of Antonis relatively inert and unconscious form
on view for the audience would also objectify her in a way that does not happen
by having the simple display of objects represent the nocturnal portion of the
piece. In another sense, it is still a measure of the richly suggestive quality of

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Slumber that it may prompt a curiosity about variable conditions for the exhibition.
In this case, the scene of a person lying in a less than conscious state while
being attached to machines may now be considered a familiar object of spectacle
associated with serious infirmity or dying within a hospital setting; it would almost
certainly transform Antonis Slumber into a different kind of work if she were to
draw closer attention to the live circumstances of her overnight stay in the gallery.
However, Antonis particular choices for this piece as they are, including her
characteristic focus on embodiment, still arouse a sense of wonder, and even
anxiety about the apprehension of the body. Given Slumbers specific reference
to the body as a scientific specimen, art historian James Elkinss related insights
are worth considering. In The Object Stares Back, he describes how the impact
of some of medicines sophisticated technological interventions change our
perception of the body:
As a sick person succumbs to her illness, she recedes from
us and becomes more a part of the apparatus of life support.
The body, in effect, becomes an analogic machine. Eating
becomes a matter of intravenous drip, and breathing
becomes the oxygen mask. In some intensive care wards,
the body disappears in favor of its sign, which appear on
electronic screens in another room.... For a visitor, the

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feeling of the bodys suffering becomes diffused; it loses its
anchor in the body itself and grows into a general abstract
awareness. At last, the body becomes invisible as such:
literally hidden under the sheets and behind the mask and
accessible only through disembodied metaphors (Elkins
158).
Ultimately, the fact that Antonis leaves her nighttime scene largely behind the
curtain, so to speak, minimizes specific associations with more dire encounters
between the body and the apparatus of science. Indeed, in some sense, Antoni
uses scientific measure against itself by appropriating the line registering her
phases of REM sleep in the manner of decorative patterns in her design and
practice of weaving. In this sense her misuse of the data refers to how the
experience of dreams as a matter of terror or delight, insight or anxiety cannot be
adequately accounted for through a zigzagging line as the measure of a
physiological process. Moreover, considering the overall scheme of Slumber,
there is another kind of wittiness to the way the piece itself begins to resemble
the logic or illogic of a dream narrative. This dimension of the piece becomes
that much clearer by imagining the basic description of its actual elements and
events in terms of a first-person account, which would likely read as follows:

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I dreamed that my bed had been transported somehow to a
place of public exhibition, though I was able to remain asleep
in it and hidden from viewor so I hoped. Strangely
enough, I found myself attached by wires at my temples to a
machine tracking the dream behind my eyelids. The next
thing I knew, I was awake and seated before a huge canopylike structure of threads connected to an enormous loom. I
was suddenly on public display as I sat at the loom weaving
an endless blanket, which included strips of my nightgown
being woven into the same pattern as the jittery line tracing
my dream-state through a machine. This kept going on until
my nightgown was completely unraveled.
Antonis slumber story resembles another kind of narrative, which often
unfolds like a dreamthe fairy tale. As Nancy Spector recalls during her 1999
interview, Antoni has a sense of ambivalence or irony about this: Antoni claims
that she is trapped in [her] own fairy tale (Spector 13). However, in a more
poetic instance, another writer uses the metaphor of a fairy tale as a kind of
epigram for Slumber: Becoming her own Rumpelstiltskin, Antoni set out to
transform not straw into gold but sleep into art (MacRitchie 109).

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Lick and Lather
Janine Antoni's 1993-94 installation Lick and Lather features fourteen selfportrait busts, each initially crafted from a single life cast of the artist. The figures
are classically styled, but they consist of materials that are not similarly
traditional; seven of the busts are molded in chocolate and seven are made of
soap. At the same time, based on the sense of sight alone, the chocolate busts
with their motley patina of tint and shade may initially resemble clay or heavily
corroded metal, while some of the soap busts strongly suggest figures carved out
of stoneespecially white marble. But the unusual material substance of the
figures in canonical pose on their white cylindrical columns only accounts for
some of Antonis departure from the properly historical art to which it refers.
After casting the initial molds, she utilizes a radically non-traditional approach for
her variable reconfigurations of these duplicate busts; she regularly washes with
the soap figures and licks extensively over those made of chocolate.
Both soap and chocolate versions of Antoni's likeness began as a precise
mold of her body. In an interview with Amy Jinker-Lloyd in 1996, Antoni
describes the process of submerging herself in alginate, a material especially
suited for creating an exact replica of my body, even my hair, so there is no
sculpting in the initial form; the goal is to have the licking and washing be the
ultimate form of sculpting (Jinkner-Lloyd 3-4). She also describes the ordeal she

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endures simply to make enough soap for each bust of this kind. The production
starts off from scratch with lye, fat and water and five hours of stirring in a large
pot. As Antoni notes, her homemade mixture is inexact, so they all come out
differently; there are temperature changes and other things. Chemically, its
pretty complicated (3-4). This initial phase is the complex project of creating the
relatively raw material for the soap busts. At the same time, the completed
duplicates of the soap molds become another kind of raw material for Antonis
five-hour lather sessions in the bathtub. These lengthy periods of washing
herself with herself, in a sense, are her method of transforming the busts into
different versions of the original likeness. Antoni also describes it as the most
beautiful process in the worldlike washing a baby (Larson H35).
The creation of the chocolate busts involves melting the material down for
the initial molds. The first step, as Antoni explains it, entails procuring Ambrosia
chocolate from Wisconsin. This is the cheapest chocolate you can buy, so its

really sugary, like Easter-bunny chocolate. It also has the longest shelf life,
while other kinds of chocolate melt so quickly in the mouth, it would break too
easily to exist in the world (Jinker-Lloyd 4). In this case, the durability of the
chocolate is more important than the taste; it must maintain the degree of
integrity required to withstand the licking process. However, the true strangeness
of this process is something Antoni sums up rather effectively with her terse

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comment, To be alone in the studio licking yourself is really frightening (Larson
H35).
Apart from its more disturbing aspects, Antonis technique teasingly
mocks the sense of sober regard and even reverence appropriate to the genre of
portraiture she references. However, as oddly non-art-like as her approach to
modeling is, it is precisely appropriate in relation to her decidedly sensual
materials. In this case, Antoni commits herself to her medium with a remarkable
degree of intimate bodily contact as a necessary aspect of her subversive
sculpting process; her approach is inherently related to her materials in a way
that would never compare with the aloof work posture of hand carving with stone,
for example. She confronts these life molds of her own face and the rest of the
bust formation with a closeness and intensity that is more like strange and
exaggerated versions of eating and bathing than a method associated with
making art. These extreme experiences are also an integral part of the work,
leaving a palpable sense of her actions in the objects she creates.
While Antonis process is directly reflected in the marks and shaping of the
busts, she deliberately leaves the scene of her production out of view. Lick and
Lather involves an off-site performative technique, rather than a live
performance before an audience. In this case, she insists that no one see her
engagement in the process of licking and washing the objects of her likeness.

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Antoni is clear about her approach: Its important that its left to the viewers
imagination, that the viewer reconstruct that from the residue (Jinker-Lloyd 4).
On the one hand, this hidden aspect of her artistic process offers a unique
opportunity for the viewer to empathize with Antonis activities through a minds
eye reconstruction of his or her own. At the same time, the behind-the-scenes
aspect of her production is consistent with the usual conditions of creation carried
out in the artists studio. However, Antonis objects are invested with the peculiar
presence of the artist and her method in a way that is unlike examples from the
traditional ateliereven in the case of more conventional self-portraiture. Yet,
Lick and Lather s special objects of performance stand alone at the point of
reception, leaving out the actual presence of the artist and the real-time
performance normally associated with performance art. This piece challenges
both the mystique of a private sanctuary as the site of the artists mastery and the
given value of a live production. Antoni trifles with the hermetic mystery of artistic
creation associated with studio productions, as well as the transcendent realness
of onsite performances. However, the off-site execution of this piece refers to
other elements of the realnamely, the assumption of privacy within the
womans toilette and the guilt-inspired secrecy of compulsive eating.
Just as Lick and Lather includes elements of mystery regarding Antonis
process, it also refers to matters of mystification involving both art and gender.

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The strangely sculpted works and the irony of their art historical allusion projects
a mockery of the idea that prodigiously artistic hand crafting is a primary and
universal fact of art; Antoni presents a challenge to this canonical mystique of
the artist's hand with this piece. At the same time, her special treatment of the
art object is different from a simple denial of the hand through reliance on some
sort of mechanical manufacturing exemplified in many minimalist works. In this
case, the difference lies with her high-touch versus high-tech method of crude
rubbing with the soap figures and her almost infantile or animalistic acts of licking
the chocolate busts. Antoni always leaves at least traces of residue of herself
with the molded image of her own face as she soaps away (a parodied feminine
version of the artists touch), or swipes with her tongue (denying the refinements
of the hand altogether), not in keeping with a certain proper pose and
perspective for artistic creation. Her labor is not only of a more common sort
than the kind associated with higher forms of art, such as paintingit is
strangely much more intimate. Indeed, the usual stance of remote scrutiny
during an artistic endeavor is evoked by its absence in Antonis process. She
does not stand apart from the work as she would with the use of more traditional
art materials requiring the interface of specialized tools. For example, the
extension of hammer and chisel places the artist in a relatively distant position in
relation to the progress of sculpting with stone. By contrast, Antonis work is an

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especially up-close and personal product considering the unusual kind and
degree of bodily contact that characterizes her process.
Lick and Lather not only trifles with a traditional narrative of the male hand
of greatness, it also toys with an enduring notion that art requires a serviceable
female as model or muse. This work presents a challenge to the idea of the artist
as master in relation to the model. Antoni addresses this matter directly in an
interview with Kay Larson about Loving Care, her live performance piece where
she paints the floor with her dye-soaked hair. Larson describes how this piece
emerges in part from her musings on the French Neo-Dadaist Yves Klein, who
used nude women as paintbrushes. She quotes Antoni: Klein said that rather
than paint the model, I wanted to paint with the model...Loving Care is about
trying to be the master and the model at the same time (Larson H35). Lick and
Lather has a strong association with conventional self-portraiture, whereby the
role of model is conferred on the artist almost by default, as a feature of the task
to be accomplished. However, Antonis pre-fabricated molds of herself serve as
a kind of raw material for her real sculpting by licking and soaping, with the
variable results of dissipation and distortion as the busts appear ever less in the
form of her likeness. In this case, the usual set-up of artist and model takes an
interesting twist. Antoni technically is her own model in the initial step of creating
the life cast; however, she is very much less like a model, since the process of

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casting does not require a study of ones own image in order to create a likeness.
Actually, this approach has more in common with her general habit of leaving
impressions and traces of herself and her actions in her materials as an essential
aspect of her work. Once the molds are made and she begins to engage in her
process with them, her role as the master unfolds as the undoing of her role as
model through the gradual undoing of the busts as self-portraits. While the
unusual physical closeness of her process might initially resemble an unusual
study of her own image, this type of direct knowledge of her likeness actually
involves the consumption and variable dissipation of that image. Ultimately,
imagining Antoni intimately engaged in the intense actions of licking and washing
replicas of her own head does create a startling image of her trying to be the
artist and the model at the same time.
The broad range of senses put into play by Antoni with Lick and Lather is
an aspect one can experience live in a way that can never be conveyed by
photographs or descriptions of it. Indeed, the in-person viewer has more to guide
her or him in puzzling through this installation than the sense of sight alone. The
lick of the title corresponds to the actual tongue swipes visible in some of the
dark half of the wildly unconventional yet vaguely old-fashioned busts. At the
same time, the definite aroma of chocolate gives an even clearer sense of the
licked over chocolate essence of those figures. And, of course, the piece virtually

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compels the viewer to imagining the texture, taste and overall experience of
Antonis licking. The slightly murky white busts also give off a touch of scent,
while the lather of the title is at least a bubble of a clue about the soap contents
and their sudsy process of transformation. Moreover, as it is with the chocolate
works, in their own way the soap figures conjure a sense of how it might feel to
continuously rub with water over the slick and slippery surface of a solid soap
replica of ones own head and face.
A quick first glance at Lick and Lather might reveal only vague
irregularities in the otherwise familiar appearance of classical portrait busts.
However, what may from a distance appear to be quirky variations of facial
expression, closer inspection clarifies as something that is often much more
bizarre. Antonis licks and lathers alter these figures quite significantly. From
cranium to collar bone and all points between the busts range in variation from at
least a subtle reshaping of features and, at most, the profound effect of forms
that are literally effaced. Antonis surprising and performative method, along with
the sometimes shocking results portray a marked disruption of the usual function
of such busts as a strictly visual and static spectacle of the feminine ideal.
Moreover, there is a suggestive way in which the viewers acquaintance with the
material substance becomes part of an awareness of the distortion andin some
casesthe complete obliteration of the original surface appearance of the busts.

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In a strangely literal reference to the idea of more than skin deep, surface and
substance are identical; the former does not mask the latter and the impact of
manipulation is all of a piece. Carol Kino of ArtNews responds with yet another
impression of Lick and Lather:
In the soap sculpturestallowy white with the translucence
of marblethe stuff of the person seems simply to have
evanesced. The chocolate ones have been more obviously
licked and mouthed, to create a shiny, melted surface that
carries more flagrantly sexual overtonesas if to imply that
the woman had been actively consumed and erased by the
act, if not her own desires.
Kino further describes the impact of each bust as all the more impressive in the
fuller context of complete piece. She notes how these works become most
powerful when considered en masse: as a long corridor, dark heads facing off
against the pale ones, that echoes with allusions to art-historical feminine
idealsEgyptian profiles, chipped and lopped-off antiquities, Brancusi-esque
reductions (Kino 156).
The corridor of busts might also resemble a museum display of historical
figures more often associated with great men. However, most conventional
historical exhibits consist of artifacts made of much sturdier stuff than the material

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Antoni uses. The literal impermanence of her creations might refer to the more
ephemeral status of importance granted to women and the absence of feminine
profiles, in terms of gracing hallowed halls. In Lick and Lather, the molds of
Antonis head are blurred out, so to speak, in the formation of her ghostly white
and smeared brown busts, suggesting that the record of historically significant
persons has rarely been focused on the female figure. Moreover, the older form
of memorializing through art alluded to with her classically styled busts was
practically invented to honor important men, such that the halls of greatness are
male by default. In the official record of Western history, conferring greatness
upon women has not been the usual habitnot surprisingly, there is relatively
little evidence of the honorary carving of a womans likeness in stoneother than
to honor her feminine charms, that is.
Clearly, there is evidence that Lick and Lather is a project accompanied by
a good share of ambivalence and contradiction. On the one hand, the process of
creating this piece is a matter of essentially tender gesturesespecially in the
way it contrasts with the biting aspects of Gnaw, involving the huge chocolate
and lard cubes. Antoni explains in an interview with Susan Sollins: Both the
licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts, but whats interesting is
that Im slowly erasing myself through the process. So for me its about that
conflict, that love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance

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(Sollins 17). Another contradictory aspect of her process arises with her acts of
licking that is somewhat surprising. The physical composition of Lick and Lather
with its fairly rapid rate of deterioration requires regular re-making in order to
have it continue in exhibition. Over time, the seemingly more pleasurable
process of licking becomes unpleasant, even grueling. It also takes much longer,
owing to the fact that she is only able to do a little at a time. It turns out that the
tongue sculpting process is not as smooth and tasty as it might first appear.
Through her process Antoni produces irregularly modified copies, which
she places atop plain cylindrical pedestals facing one to the other in a kind of
funhouse series of reflections. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth describes these as selfportrait busts in different stages of disfigurationarranged to confront one
another. She offers more detailed insights regarding Antonis piece beginning
with a remark about how the structure of Lick and Lather
evoked an invisible architecture, the marble and terracotalike busts standing there like some dilapidated remnants of
an absent interior. One is reminded of eighteenth-century
halls decorated with the bust of Great Men into which women
as an image rarely made an entryLicking and lathering, the
artist modified not only the physical body but also the
symbolic capacity of the portrait bust as a genre that secures

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an intelligible and meaningful image of the self. The
different, unflatteringly altered versions of Antonis face
undermined the idealizing effects of self-portraiture (seven
heads referring to the ideal modus of classical human
proportions) and, even more, its very powers of
resemblance, its claim to physiognomic truth, and through it,
to any other kind of truths and historically gendered values,
such as greatness (Antonis Difference 2000: 56).
Indeed, the eighteenth-century raised physiognomic truth to the status of a
science, with significant implications for the artistic production of the time, as well
as the conduct of daily life. Though some of the ideas extend as far back as
Aristotles Physiognomica, the work of Johann Caspar Lavater (17411801)
would render this form of understanding human variation quite persuasively,
creating a foundation for wide pubic acceptance and practical application.
Francis Haskell writes in History and its Images, one English journal claimed
that a servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the descriptions and
engravings of Lavater had been consulted, in careful comparison with the lines
and features of the young mans or womans countenance (150-1). In his Art
and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery Richard Leppert

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describes Lavater as the founding father of physiognomics as psuedo-science,
offering details of this dubious practice:
Lavater studied and measured the face in order to
understand the supposed inborn, natural character traits
assigned in the most essentialist waysof every diverse
group of people then known to inhabit the planet. Lavater
and his myriad followers sought archetypes, and they found
them in abundance. They measured human heads with an
obsessiveness that is difficult to overestimate, filling
countless pages of large volumes with engravings of noses,
lips, eyes, foreheads, and so on, each duly typed, labeled,
and associated with internal character, and each having a
distinct moral componentsome lips, for example showing
the greatest affinity to genius, and others appropriate to a
degenerate race (Leppert 206).
Leppert also notes, [physiognomics] was not only widely practiced as social
science, it was as well an art project about bodies (206).
In the same historical context, Lajer-Burcharths comment on Antonis
evocation of the eighteenth-centurys socio-cultural space of male prestige
obviously raises the issue of gender and differential recognition. However, she

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also identifies Antonis broader critique of a specific aesthetic convention, which
may be seen in relation to the contemporary mindset of physiognomics. Thus,
while the obsessive focus on the face and head in Antonis Lick and Lather is
certainly suggestive of an excessive preoccupation with and striving for feminine
beauty in our own time of consumer culture, it might also refer to a similarly
consuming and arguably more pernicious concern with head and facial
characteristics of earlier times. Physiognomic practices flourished in the
eighteenth-century and enthusiastically reappear in the nineteenth-century; and,
as Richard Leppert notes, even the Third Reich would find the measurement s of
physiognomics useful as they eventually helped provide a scientific basis for
justifying genocide (207). Antonis neat rows of strangely distorted busts may be
seen to mockingly recall the bizarre codifications of this psuedo-science and its
evaluation of human beings based on their physical appearance. There is an
alien or humanoid quality to some of Antonis busts, whereby they may appear as
a jumbled collection of the schematic images showing physiognomic variations
from the standard classical ideal to animality or the brute.
Antonis peculiar line-up of identical but variously re-worked heads may be
seen as an array of types evoking a kind of updated version of physiognomics
that is part of todays general media-image landscape. However, while the
openly systematic and deterministic claims of the earlier pseudo-science at least

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offer a clear target for critique, todays preoccupation with appearance and
evaluations based on physical types is more insidious: it is perhaps most vividly
present in advertising and other forms of popular culture. Certainly, the interface
between commerce and consumption that is marketing is most interested in
finding the quickest and most recognizable image types to maximize campaigns
for various products. Antonis procession of busts might also allude to a
projection of self or selves in the products lined up on rows of store shelves that
merchandizing campaigns strive so strenuously to cultivate. Indeed, her objects
recreate a sense of the extremes of both damage and desire conjured forth in the
full circle of commerce that is part of the production of the selfin this case, with
special emphasis on the feminine self. Ultimately, Antonis manipulations appear
to confound modeling and mutilation as part of the same process.
Another allusion to popular culture and consumerism present in Lick and
Lather is reflected in this comment from George Melrod: the very title is a
humorous jab at consumerism, adopting the chirpy language of a housewife in a
TV commercial (Melrod 19). The fuller social context relating to Melrods
comment also points toward a few overlapping associations such as: the
domestic sphere of production; products emerging from an assembly line gone
haywire; as well as processes identified with an artists studio. Antoni melts
down chocolate in order to pour it into the mold for one set of multiples, while the

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soap begins as a stovetop concoction to be similarly transferred and shaped by
the same mold. Her creative process cross-references techniques for the
creation of artistic statuary, factory output of consumer items, and the
homemaking tasks of domestic servants and housewives. Martha Buskirk
explains how Antonis use of chocolate and soap...shares a reliance on the
potential for transformation from liquid to solid with the process of casting used
for any of the traditional metals. At the same time, she points out: These
materials are also formed into their familiar guises as consumer goods by a
version of casting, just as her actions upon them [licking and washing] are similar
to what commonly happens to those consumer goods, but exaggerated and
arrested before the process of consumption is complete (Buskirk, Contingent
Object 140, 142).
Vis--vis Buskirks references to consumer goods and the process of
consumption, Lick and Lathers extreme signs of manipulation of the face as the
emblem of self also refers to the obsessive concerns both created by and
reflected in mass culture and the assertions of advertisers. Moreover, the
chocolate and soap, along with Antonis consuming process are linked to desires
based in fact as well as fantasy: from health and hygiene to glamour and
romance. The aspirations of critical art making and the hope of self-renewal and
satisfaction promised by the correct consumer choices are related, though

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primarily in terms of contradiction. Antonis art focuses critically on the latter case
involving social norms, false promises and genuine hopes. Lick and Lather
disrupts ordinary expectations and the normal look or sense of otherwise real
things, suggesting that the appearance of natural facts cannot always be taken
at face value. By contrast, marketing and advertising, as both reflecting and
contributing to developments in popular culture, exploit the persuasive
possibilities of face value appearance to the fullest extent. They seek to portray
the desire for certain products as totally natural or expectedthe only question is
what pitch will produce the most salesincluding claims of magical
transformation. In Lick and Lather Antoni pushes the transformative process to
the point of creating distorted and sometimes disturbing images of the self. The
general deformity of Antonis figures stands as an inversion of the claims of the
beauty industry, while the embodiment of her process refers to the real intensity
of drives and ambitions for both producers and consumers. Also, the fascinating
freakishness of Antonis busts is clearly not a realization of artistry following from
a notion of art as a simple statement of beautiful form. At the same time, the
artists overall process and resulting figures are part of a self-critical stance,
whereby her distorted forms and bizarre technique literally include aspects of
herself, partially implicating her within the realm of desires and concerns being

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called into question. In this sense, Antonis art is not a kind of lecture addressing
her audience from some illusory point outside of the problems she addresses.
Lick and Lather includes other elements of ingenious ambiguity, as her
figures of desire and destructive impulses evoke a range of images and
references. Some of Antonis more pronounced distortions result from her acts of
licking off or washing away individual features on the busts. Melrod describes
Antonis erasures in terms of different, generic humanoid images: a
Neanderthal, a fetus and, finally, a faceless blank (19). On the other hand, this
same process of subtraction creates the appearance of something added when
in an encounter with one chocolate likeness he notes, she licks lines down the
chest, into the triangle between her neck and her breasts, as if applying a
mahogany tan (Melrod 19). Another impression of addition resulting from the
same process of subtraction turns the unevenly brown surface of the chocolate
bust into a marked sign of aging, while the wrapping of tongue swipes suggests
the multiple bindings on a corpse preserved through the millennia.
When Antoni refers to Lick and Lather in terms of that love/hate
relationship we have with our physical appearance, the phrase also relates to
certain conditions of ambivalence we may have regarding embodied existence in
general. While one or more chocolate busts may suggest the figure of a mummy
as a disturbing image, this also refers to an ancient process intended to reassure

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the living that the remains of the deceased will be prepared for a journey to the
realm of immortality. It is also the case that Antonis experience of her process
with this piece alternates between pleasure and discomfort, intensity and
tenderness. In a way that comports with Antonis sense of the tender qualities of
her process, the reference to mummification concerns a caring ritual of honoring
the dead involving preparation of the body for reunification with the soul in the
afterlife. At the same time, the licking is apparently a more taxing and
disagreeable process than the washing, which produces the mummified image in
the chocolate busts. Some of the whitish soap figures suggest a ghostly quality,
but the typically finer articulation of tongue traces creates an effect more
consistent with the appearance of a binding technique. However, just as the
tender act of licking often creates an unpleasant experience for Antoni, such a
sense of closely attending to a bodily formperhaps especially when the body is
not animated by lifeis negatively charged in a particular way. In turn, there is
the obvious association with mummification and the specter of the undead as
an icon of terror long associated with horror films. This intermingling of allusions
emerging from Lick and Lather includes a ritual to honor the dead expressed
through devotional attendance to the body, with that of the bodily revulsion and
dread of post-mortem confrontation. The contradictory amalgam of suggestive
imagery and sensation in Lick and Lather creates a sense of the shifting

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perceptions of lived experience and its multiple dimensionsthis is Antonis
uniquely performative work.
Lick and Lather alludes to even more contemporary experiences of
popular culture. The extreme results of her unusual sculpting methods applied to
self-portrait busts may refer to the type of encounter with living flesh that is a
staple of reality TV programming known as the extreme make-over. There is
a great deal of fanfare surrounding the make-over dramas featured on such
programs. The participants, who long to be more attractive and worthy of
happiness through what is billed as a life-altering journey of sorts, appear to
willingly submit to rather drastic procedures, including major plastic surgery.
These shows noisily tout the triumphs of individual transformation, which, in the
case of successfully undoing glaring deformities may indeed seem glorious.
However, every case is treated as a kind of life saving operation; the simple and
automatic equation of physical appearance with profound life improvement is
always at least a little disturbing, especially when the viewer manages to step
outside of the hypnosis of the TV moment. It may be that some of the drama is
exactly the subtext of a kind of freak show; the surgically altered human
specimen emerges like an empty mask of drastically reconfigured flesh, while a
sense of the individual personality appears to be nipped and tucked away.

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Antoni uses the sometimes scalpel-like actions of her tongue and her
bathtub surgeries to leave behind evidence of a similarly extreme journey of
transformation. Most often an unnatural reshaping of the head, or at least one of
her individual features succumb to near or complete obliteration. In relation to
the extreme make-over programs, the sense of abnormal fixation and extreme
treatments in Lick and Lather refer to their unwholesome preoccupation with
physical appearance and the severe solutions included in their so-called
beautification process. Moreover, just as the reality TV shows lay out a full
drama of the steps along the way to a surgically realized goal of ultimate life
improvement, Antoni leaves obvious evidence of her technique as a primary
feature of the processed transformations. Just as those who aspire to be
extremely made-over submit to the ordeal of not one, but often several surgeries,
the evidence in her work attests to Antonis own ordeal involving the extremes
she puts her body through. Ultimately, it is not only the images themselves, but
also a vivid sense of the actions they embodythe performative dimension
which accounts for the evocative power of Lick and Lather. Martha Buskirk
elaborates in a related remark: Antoni has acted out a process of compulsive
repetition in a manner that redirects the actions, forcing consideration of the
uncomfortable boundaries between gratification and pathology (Contingent
Object 142).

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While Antonis process suggests a range of experiences between
satisfaction and suffering, Lick and Lather is not simply about a form of acting out
or a portrayal of behavioral abnormalities, such as obsessive-compulsive
disorder or exaggerated narcissism, as some critics have suggested. Moreover,
whatever sense of the pathological this piece creates, it goes beyond a matter of
individual deviance. The clearly less than pretty busts stand as totems of
defiance in a world where models still not past their teens have their tiniest facial
creases digitally excised from their photos. In relation to such phenomena,
Antonis figures may wear the relative incoherence of their features as a sign of
refusal. In view of the current mania for erasing the slightest hint of a flaw in the
female face, the most outdated aspect of the following passage may be the
somewhat archaic turn of phrase:
Nothing is so much set against the beautiful as disgust, just
as nothing sinks deeper beneath the sublime than the
ridiculous. On this account no insult can be more painful to a
man than being called a fool, and to a woman, than being
called disgusting (Kant 83).
This brief articulation of gender aesthetics in philosophical terms appears in
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime by Immanuel Kant first
published in 1746. Given Antons reference to neo-classical statuary and ideals

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of proper femininity, her work could be an appropriately disgusting illustration.
Lick and Lather teases against the grain of another part of the same text, which
advances a notion of women as having a strong inborn feeling for all that is
beautiful, elegant, and decorated, as well as, a very delicate feelings in regard
to the least offense (Kant 77). In Kants formulations women also may be given
their due in terms of special achievements, as long as they dont involve
laborious learning or painful pondering; this is described in one of the most
striking points in relation to Antonis work: To the beauty of all actions belongs
above all the mark that [women] display facility, and appear to be accomplished
without painful toil (78). In viscerally suggestive opposition to this idea, Antoni
asserts her strategy of creeping into the viewers imagination with her arduous
and unladylike labors, and the uncouth results of her images.
In more contemporary terms but no less gendered terms than these,
Anthony Iannacci over-emphasizes the pathological in his response to Antonis
work when he writes: Antoni pushes viewers to the limits of interpretation as she
uncovers the dysfunctions within the administration of beauty and presents a
disquieting vision of the evolution of the female psyche (Iannacci 17). Iannacci
pushes the limits of interpretation himself by reaching out on the limb of the
evolution of the female psyche. This characterization of psyche suggests the
development of pervasive psychological damage simply resulting from the

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application of too much rouge and mascara, as in dysfunctions within the
administration of beautyat the very least, his exaggeration suggests that a
preoccupation with make-up is more of a cause of abnormalities than a symptom.
Iannacci also tends to generally associate repetition-compulsion too closely with
the specifically pathological eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and
bulimia (18). Even Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, finds that some
repetition compulsion in adults is not always a neurotic symptom, just as the
childhood compulsion to repeat (his famous fort-da anecdote) is part of an
actively creative process of development; he also identifies it as an attribution of
organic life noting, repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is
clearly in itself a source of pleasure (Freud 30). The point here is that Antonis
activities cannot be reduced to, nor should they be described as, merely the
recreation or enactment of psychological disorders or afflictions.
On the other hand, the realm of pleasure surely is not the only focus of
Lick and Lather. Antonis ordinary productive types of activity become
extraordinary in terms of excessive proportions and odd circumstances; such
exaggeration or estrangement of simple tasks may be part of either play or
workspecifically when the latter takes the form of wage labor. The suggestion
of work compulsion in this instance relates to a scheme of social production
whereby people perform labor as an abstract quantity, rendering all forms of

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labor commensurable in quantifiable terms. Antonis licking of the chocolate
busts is not about consuming food in the normal sense, while her excessive
scrubbing with the soap busts goes beyond the actual requirements of basic
hygiene. Among other references, her activities suggest a form of production for
productions sake that is a definitive aspect of the capitalist mode of production.
In this sense, the idea of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterizes a form of
social pathology, rather than an individual psychological profile.
The valence of disorder shifts to the individual female psyche for Anthony
Iannacci. After explaining how Antons presence is literally at the center of Lick
and Lathera presence specifically identifying her as both artist and
womanhe claims that she subsequently calls to mind a vision of herself as
both bulimic and obsessive/compulsive (Iannacci 20). While there is a striking
literalness and sense of materiality to Antonis work, literal-minded interpretations
should not necessarily follow. Iannaccis appropriate recognition of the
significance of gender in this piece is marred by his particular emphasis on
pathology. He continues along similar lines with his next comment: This work
underscores [Antonis] participation in the narcissistic impulse that often creates
the artistic process and illustrates distorted female stereotypes and obsessions
(Iannacci 20).

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Ewa Lajer-Burcharth offers another perspective on narcissism in Lick and
Lather as Antonis subject of inquiry related to the body: If it is a narcissistic
body, narcissism is thus referred to not as pathology but as a necessary stage in
the psychic development of the subject... (Antonis Difference 2000: 62). She
follows her observations about narcissism with a related formulation:
The process of identification is thus envisioned by Antoni as
both productive and destructive of identity, securing and
undermining its stability. The deformed faces testify to
violence and alienation as integral parts of this process. But
they also suggest sensuous pleasure and play. Recharting
the symbolic contours of her self, Antoni does not simply
illustrate a specific psychic process but mobilizes the psyche
as an instrument of resistance to culture, an agency of
productive self re-definition (Antonis Difference 2000: 62).
In yet another sense, George Melrod refers to the issue of narcissism by
comparing Lick and Lather to a piece by Barbara Bloom:
In its mocking celebration of self, Lick and Lather recalls
Barbara Blooms 1989 installation titled The Reign of
Narcissism, which presented an entire neoclassical salon
occupied by relics and likenesses of the artist. Like Bloom,

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Antoni satirically addresses the artist as celebrity and the
idea of culture as a projection of ego. But Lick and Lather
attempts to transcend the preoccupation with self by
obscuring the very image it presents (Melrod 19).
However, unlike Antoni, Blooms objects are not relics of the kind of
performative process that is a primary feature of Lick and Lather. Melrod refers
to this process in terms of a certain sexual connotation: Though unseen, the
concept of the artist licking and washing herself with images of her own body is
delectably autoerotic (Melrod 19). Indeed, there is something quite
extraordinary about the idea of Antonis activities, but I see this as going beyond
a facile sense of self-gratification. Antonis intimate involvement with partial
replicas of herself suggests a more profound instance of recreating the self as
other. It is at least as delectable, for example, to consider how this experience
provides an opportunity to imagine how ones lover experiences oneself.
Martha Buskirk quotes Antoni: Narcissism is often discussed with respect
to Lick and Lather, but I also think of Pygmalion (Contingent Object 140). In this
case, what comes to life is the palpable sense of Antonis intensive acts of
creation. Moreover, her process is more self-reflexive than focused on a
preoccupation with her own reflection.

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Gnaw
Antonis Gnaw is an installation piece consisting of three works included in
her first solo exhibition in 1992. In an essay entitled Parts and Whole Dan
Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York,
devotes special attention to this work. He identifies Gnaw as the work that is
most responsible for Antonis initial public recognition as an artist, as well as
claiming that it is likely one of the most thoroughly scrutinized works made by an
American artist in the 1990s (Cameron, Part and Whole 26). Although Antonis
powers to provoke began very early in her career, she is not simply driven by
chaotic impulses; rather, she gradually develops each one of her
sculptures...through a highly instinctual sequence of choices (24).
Cameron also describes this work in terms of a narrative that seems to be
embedded within the materials themselves (Parts and Whole 26). In the case
of Chocolate Gnaw and Lard Gnaw, the materials are embedded in the titles as
well; however, both the literal weight and deeper texture of the work extend
beyond these titles. Poised in all their girth on individual marble pedestals, these
works are the remains of two 600-pound cubes cast in chocolate and lard,
respectively. Though artists have been known to produce abstract works that fill
large rooms and rise to over a story in height (the works of Tony Smith and
Ronald Bladen are exemplary in this way), Antonis two-foot cubes appear

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colossal in relation to the materials of which they are comprisedthe relative
enormity of the blocks consist of foodstuffs normally found in far more dainty giftbox or mixing bowl portions. Remarkably, these formidable objects also bear a
dense pattern of textured marks and indentations around the edges as a result of
Antonis lengthy and diligent efforts at biting and chewing over the massive
cubesin some cases gouging out major portions of the lard and chocolate.
Though this piece does not include a live performance, one writer reports
learning that Antoni nearly vomited while biting into the lard cube and suffered
from blistered and swollen lips after gnawing repeatedly at the chocolate (Taylor
85).
Antonis arduous and plainly evident process is a deliberate element of
contradiction in her works otherwise clear allusion to minimalisman artistic
approach historically characterized by the absence of any sign of craft or
techniqueas she ironically marks the minimalist figure of the cube with her
peculiar form of craft. So too, the quite malleable and organic material she uses
are in contrast to the usual metal and glass boxes most often associated with the
primary objects of the sixties and seventies. Indeed, in the case of Antonis
cubes, the hard and clean rectilinearity of minimalist forms is consciously and
rudely denied by the effects of her rather extraordinary bouts of gnawing. In the

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process, Antoni does not consume the edible substance of each cube, but chews
on them and spits out the extracted contents of her bites.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the subject of eating disorders would be
raised in response to this piece, though Antoni never intended to have this topic
be the exclusive focus of her work. While she does acknowledge the suggestion,
Antoni expresses some dismay with regard to the way some critics cannot resist
dwelling on the point with undue emphasis. Dan Cameron, who has written quite
extensively on Antonis work, makes only a passing reference to eating
disorders, while Simon Taylor insists that even a brief discussion of Gnaw
requires a detailed account of bulimia as an elaborate social metaphor (Taylor
57). In the space of one relatively short piece on Antonis work, Anthony Iannacci
directly refers to bulimia no less than three times, with anorexia nervosa and
secret overeating thrown in for good measure. On the other hand, Judith
Findlays comment on Gnaw, There is a tension, a friction if you like, between
what attracts and what disgusts (Findlay 15) is the closest she comes to
anything remotely resembling the topic of eating disorders. Simon Taylor at least
acknowledges some of Antonis frustration (a feeling she shared with me, as well,
during an interview) concerning the overriding interpretation related to eating
disorders. In a fuller quote she adds, This says more about societys relation to
eating than about my original intention for the work (Taylor 57). On the other

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hand, raising the issue does give her a chance to offer some general points of
clarification, which she shares in an interview with Ann Wilson Lloyd in Art New
England. Here she also addresses her fear of being too closely identified
personally with bulimia or other kinds of extreme and unmanageable behavior:
Thats something I worry about in working from piece to
piece. I try to create a knowledge in the viewer that I am
self-conscious of what Im doing, that its an imitation of a
gesture. Its not that I cant control myself. This obsessivecompulsive behavior takes a kind of discipline and
commitment rather than a lack of control (Lloyd 13).
Antonis overall careful and conscious crafting of the Gnaw installation includes
the dizzying number of remolded objects and elaborate presentation for the final
piece entitled Lipstick Display. This last phase of the production offers another
example of the discipline and commitment her work requires. Leaving behind
the chisel marks and molds of her teeth and chin on the colossal cubes, she
collects the accumulation of chewed remains for the creation of Lipstick Display.
Antoni goes on to mold the chocolate portions into heart-shaped candy trays,
with the processed lard being added to a mixture of beeswax and pigment to
create 300 bright red lipsticks. (The trays are actually molded copies from a cast
of the inner packaging that normally serves as an articulated container for the

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various pieces of candy inside the candy box.) The presentation of the trays and
the rows of shiny lipsticks is worthy of a Fifth Avenue boutique, appearing in the
glittering display of a mirrored showcase as the by-products exhibit. Dan
Cameron describes this culminating project of Antonis carvings as
object/accessories that bring the peculiar logic of consumption full circle
(Cameron, "Parts and Whole" 29).
This literal logic of consumption plays out in various ways. The logic of
the larger installation connects the notion of a basic feminine preoccupation with
consuming fat and chocolate to the production of other feminine consumables in
the form of romantic gifts and make-up. These apparently very different forms
the roughly hewn chunks of relatively raw material and the fancy display of far
more refined objectsboth refer to the construct of femininity. The logic also
involves a complex interplay of desire and repulsion, complicity and resistance.
Antoni creates her gigantic candy and fat chew cubes in order to engage in the
less than polite or feminine acts of aggressively gouging at them face first. Just
as she appears to dramatize a response to the nearly ubiquitous voice of
advertisers with their urgings to consume mass quantities, she violates traditional
standards of feminine comportmentnot to mention the prohibition against foods
such as fat and chocolate intended to guard against losing ones girlish figure.
However, her consumption is not of the normal kind as she chooses to spit

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instead of swallowing the irresistible bites. And while Lipstick Display may
initially look like some special tribute to merchandized femininity with its teeming
array of shiny and apparently delicious items, the actual saliva infused contents
ruins any sense of these as actually consumable products.
Indeed, given the initial look of things, Antonis Gnaw has its moments of
eeriness. The giant hunks of chocolate and lard are not quite recognizable as
this specific organic material at firstespecially before knowing the title and
experiencing their distinctive odors. However, even in the flesh, so to speak,
they might yet resemble the stuff of nightmares, with the bizarre cubed forms of
quasi-nourishment symbolizing some kind of anxiety about the body. Actually,
more than a few writers have expressed unsettling thoughts and images conjured
by Gnaw. Simon Taylor has this comment about Antoni: By describing her
artistic process as gnawing, she deliberately conjures up animalistic
associationwhat Georges Bataille has called the violent meaning of the
mouth (its devouring function). Infantile regression, oral fixation, fetishism and
repetition-compulsion are deliberately suggested in this work (Taylor 85). He
goes one step further to betray a certain paranoid attitude when he identifies
rows of teeth marks as evoking primal fears of vagina dentata (85). In an
essay focusing on women artists and food, Susan Kandels comment is a bit
edgy: Food is suspect. The body is a trap. Janine Antoni gnaws on a 600-

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pound block of chocolate, its velvet surface transformed into a horrifying vision of
scarified flesh (Kandel 22). Anthony Iannaccis comments depend on a slightly
altered title for Lipstick Display. Phenylethylamine is a chemical found in
chocolate that is also produced in the brains of people in love, thus inspiring an
alternate titleLipstick/Phenylethylamine Display. Iannacci notes: The potent
presence of the chewed chocolate and lard and the perfectly molded hearts and
lipsticks with their telling title, underscored an idea of artificially induced desire
and outlined a connection between secret eating and desire for romance
(Iannacci 22).
While the more frightful references such as scarified flesh are somewhat
plausible, Gnaw should not be reduced to the superficially sensational. Clearly,
the rich suggestiveness of this piece invites various readings, but the formidable
cubes ultimately appear as literal monuments to Antonis intensive labors. Judith
Findlays experience of these works includes the comment, I can imagine the
sensation of chewing on 600 lbs. of chocolate or biting into a piece of lard. The
sheer physicality of the work alone leaves a distinct impression. Findlay
continues:
Literally, touch is our most fundamental sense. It is a
mixture of the body and the world. It is our most intimate
sense. To touch is always to be touched. We can imagine

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what Antoni has put herself through to make them exist in
the world. In our minds we are getting close to Antonis body
(Findlay 15).
At the same time, Antonis work suggests to me a more complex sense of touch.
The emphatic evocation of intimate contact and somatic awareness might as
readily suggest an overwhelming and disturbing experience of touch, smell and
tastesensation as estrangement.
At some moments the blocks of foodstuff in Gnaw do appear as
monuments to estrangement, possessing a thing-like quality somehow at odds
with their sensual content. A related form of reification is reflected in a rather
different setting for image-making operations, which emerges vividly in a
particular narrative about marketing food products. Food stylists are charged
with the tasks of creating images of food suitable for commercial advertisement.
An interview with one of these specialists, a woman named Deborah Gordon,
appears in a volume first published in 2000 entitled Gig: Americans talk about
their jobs. Her account may be seen as the kind of discomfiting scenario for food
with a similar sense of culinary surrealism to Antonis Gnaw. The interview
opens with an epigram from Gordon: You know how ice cream feathers when
you scoop it? Crisco does the same thing. She goes on to describe a specific

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behind-the-scenes glimpse of her experience of food in relation to her efforts to
render it optimally photogenic:
It really has nothing to do with food. You arent concerned
with how things taste, just how they look.The whole time
you are working with it you dont even think about eating it.
At the end of the day youd never eat it, youd never want to
even touch it....Most of it isnt even food at all. Pretty much
everythings fake except for the product. Because legally, if
youre shooting Rice Krispies, they have to be Rice Krispies,
but everything else in the shot can be fake. So the milkits
actually hair tonic. If you were to use real milk, youd have
about two minutes to shoot, if that, before everything turned
to glop (Bowe 256).
Antonis strange relationship with foodstuffs lends a sense of absurdity to Gnaw
consistent with this narrative of enticement created through an experience of
objectification and revulsion.
Antoni layers in a combination of foreign and familiar aspects related to
both art making and daily life with Gnaw. The shape and size of the cubes refer
to the abstract art of minimalism, while her actions of chewing around these
blocks focuses on the concrete particularity of their substance and complicates

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the art historical allusion. At the same time, while Antonis actions of biting and
chewing seem related to the actually digestible materials of her work, her
decision to spit out and collect the extractions transforms these acts into a most
difficult series of unappetizing, abstract, and strangely repetitive tasks. In their
function as a form of sculpting, Antonis bites make some concrete sense; but in
relation to the daily process of eating and obtaining bodily sustenance, her
chewing resembles a form of abstract laboran estranged accumulation of
bodily expenditure.
The materials Antoni uses call to mind multiple associations, both for what
they resemble and for the way they become the starting point for the articulation
of her own concerns (Buskirk, Contingent Object 143). One of the more obvious
instances is the association between the crude substances of chocolate and lard
with romantic gifts of chocolate candies and perfumed soaps, respectively.
Chocolate may be more easily identified with molded forms and figures, though
less often with serious works of art; while lard may be even less commonly
imagined as an art material. Nonetheless, at the level of objective materiality,
both these substances in certain applications are readily associated with women
and femininity. In Gnaw, however, Antonis initial use of chocolate features it as
a raw material object at the center of a brutal physical process. Eventually, at the
other end of this ordeal, it undergoes a transformation into a more familiar girlish

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guise. The tortured tasks Antoni carries out in this manufacture of objects of
feminine sensibility and its standardization emphasize that as such, femininity
does indeed involve significant forms of culturally specific artificeunless one
truly believes that the desire to eat fancy chocolates and wear lipstick is inherited
via the XX chromosome. The Gnaw installation provides an opportunity to
consider various contrivances about gender, including the contradictions. In this
way, not only do we trace Antonis body through this piece, but the work maps
out gender as a construct in a wryly literal sense.
We may follow the progress of lard in a similar way in this piece, though
it requires a bit more processing, or dressing up. Nonetheless, another
reference apart from soap and cosmetics surfaces through the image of the
factory filtered fat product. The mass of relatively unadulterated fleshy substance
might appear with the weight, consistency, and even the whitish color of a
material more commonly associated with sculpturemarble. Dan Camerons
consideration of this suggestive quality in relation to Antonis special brand of
sculpting and the nature of her process is worth examining in detail:
Beginning with two otherwise similar-looking blocks of raw
material, chocolate and lard, Antoni enacted the traditional
process of carving, using her mouth as a tool. Taking
performance as its immediate point of departure, the work

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emphasizes the quality of duration as a function of the
artists own physical limits. Chewing at each of the blocks
(on separate occasions) until she exhausted herself, Antoni
displaced a portion of the raw material by removing it and
spitting it away. What is left behind are the same blocks, but
with corners of each one apparently eroded, the artists teeth
marks vividly punctuating its otherwise smooth surface.
While clearly intending that the viewer recognize the
similarity of this manner of carving to the act of eating, Antoni
makes an equally explicit reference to the techniques of

beaux-arts modeling, as this culminates in the sculpture of

Rodin. The gradual removal of chunks of material is,
according to this pre-modern tradition, a way of seeking the
form one is after within the mass of undefined substanceto
remove, as it were, the extraneous portions so that the
hidden inner artwork can be revealed (Cameron, Parts and
Whole 27-8).
In fact, long before Rodin and his famous thinker, this notion of an artists
romancing the stone, so to speak, takes on nearly epic proportions through the
exalted example of Michelangelo from a standard history text:

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Thus, Michelangelo, who has described the anguish and
glory of the artists experience more eloquently than anyone
else, speaks of his liberating the figure from the marble that
imprisons it.. In order to get a firmer grip on this dimly felt,
fluid image, he was in the habit of making numerous
drawings, and sometimes small models in wax or clay,
before he dared to assault the marble prison itself, for that,
he knew, was the final contest between him and his material.
Once he started carving, every stroke of the chisel would
commit him more and more to a specific conception of the
figure hidden in the block, and the marble would permit him
to free the figure whole only if his guess as to its shape was
correct. Sometimes he did not guess well enoughthe
stone refused to give up some essential part of its prisoner,
and Michelangelo, defeated, left the work unfinished, as he
did with his St. Matthewwhose every gesture seems to
record the vain struggle for liberation (Janson 10-11).
Antonis treatment of the massive cubes might indeed refer to the idea of heroic
or monumental art forms. However, the marble in this case is actually a
material related to the marbling, in culinary terms, found in a quality cut of

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beefsteak. And Antoni certainly doesnt appear to be trying to free the figure
inside a prison of lard. If there is a dimly felt, fluid image to be imagined here, it
would more likely be that of the artist in her own contest with the material. This
suggests a mock performance of the legend of Michelangelos drama of creativity
as part of the founding myths of art historical discourse. Antonis gnawed cubes
might be monuments to the essence of the unfinished, without a search for the
masterpiece hidden in the material.
Another aspect of Antonis choice of lard for one of the cubes and its more
voluptuously suggestive quality in relation to a sense of the body, is that her
selection also involves a disproportionately large quantity in relation to the
individual creator. Chocolate is a bit sturdier and lard rather unstable, making the
large volume of the latter harder to contain. Indeed, the more common
association with such exaggerated dimensions is of a mass of the earth extracted
for the sculptors use. However, in this case, and perhaps especially in
proportion to the artists relatively diminutive form, the material for carving with
her teeth is an unusually massive collection of refined fat more closely associated
with an industrial scale of production. The image of Antoni laboring against the
grotesque mass that is her Lard Gnaw evokes a sense of undifferentiated
corporeality seeming to loom up as a threat to the sophisticated articulation of the
human body. Moreover, the reference to industry, including its objectifying labor,

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creates the sense of a homogenizing standard for fleshly being. The strange lard
nature of Antonis cube of animal essence, as well as the idea of its
transformation into lipsticks, bears a comparison with the irreality of a particular
factory scene from Upton Sinclairs The Jungle:
And so Stanislovas went down a long stone corridor and up
a flight of stairs, which took him into a room lighted by
electricity, with the new machines for filling lard cans at work
in it. The lard was finished on the floor above and it came in
little jets, like beautiful, wriggling, snow-white snakes of
unpleasant odour. There were several kinds and sizes of
jets, and after a certain precise quantity had come out, each
stopped automatically, and the wonderful machine made a
turn, and took the can under another jet, and so on, until it
was filled neatly to the brim, and pressed tightly and
smoothed off. To attend to all this and fill several hundred
cans of lard per hour there were necessary two human
creatures, one of whom knew how to place an empty lard
can on a certain spot every few seconds, and the other of
whom knew how to take a full lard can off a certain spot
every few seconds and set it upon a tray (Sinclair 88).

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The idea of a narrative of artistic production including a 600-pound block
of lard as part of a sculpture group, blistered lips as the result of long hours in the
studio, and artistic molds fashioned from a mixture of chocolate and saliva
these hardly seem to comport with age old images of brooding geniuses
endlessly sketching in their ateliers in preparation for the production of great art.
Indeed, the hushed and delicate discussion of the way in which art is made in
H.W. Jansons History of Art seems far removed from Antonis world. Her work
may be read as a direct response to such descriptions as the following:
Needless to say, artistic creation is too subtle and intimate
an experience to permit an exact step-by-step description;
only the artist himself can observe it fully, but he is so
absorbed by it that he has great difficulty explaining it to us.
Still, [a] metaphor of birth comes closer to the truth than
would a description of the process in terms of a transfer or
projection of the image from the artists mind, for the making
of a work of art is both joyous and painful, replete with
surprises, and in no sense mechanical (Janson 10).
My purpose here is not simply to dismiss Jansons narrative as false, but to
examine it as a historical artifact in the context of Antonis work. This excerpt is a
nearly perfect encapsulation of a commonly understood myth of timeless art and

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the mystery of artistic creation. Actually, in Antonis case, whatever experience
she has during the process of artistic creation is central to the impression she
wishes to offer to the viewer. The matter of having great difficulty explaining it
is beside the point, since the given assumption is that there is always something
beyond explaining; the point is for all concerned to partake of their own
experience of the work. The metaphor of birth as a way of referring to the depth
of personal artistic struggle and excitement is ultimately banal. As far as how art
making is defined as being in no sense mechanical, this bears comment if for
no other reason than Antonis work suggests examining the implications of the
mechanical as a bodily experience.
The manner in which the creation of the Gnaw pieces instrumentalizes
Antonis body in a thoroughgoing way seems to mimic a component of industry.
Her technique (similar to many other examples of her work) is unlike the
eye/hand coordination of drawing, for instance, which usually indicates a
deliberate and more balanced mastery of mind and body, deployed toward the
needs of the self-directed task of producing a graphic image. Even the art
strategies that seek to do away with calculated results, such as automatic writing
and improvisation still begin with a conscious choice to allow the subconscious
and chance occurrences to guide the work. The expressionistic gestural brush
strokes and the willed accidents of drips and splatters are actually contrivances

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to accommodate spontaneity or randomness. In such cases, the artistic
technique is arguably about the mastery of labor through a kind of
transcendence. Antonis methods are very often more suggestive of the
animation of an industrialized body, which is dominated by its labor.
Antoni frames the body in relation to history in various ways. The massive
raw cubes of homogenized food refer to both mass production and consumption,
while the glut of identical products on display in Lipstick Display elaborates on
this with historically specific symbols of femininity. Antonis saliva as an
ingredient of the lipsticks and candy trays is an emulsion derived from the body
suggestive of the congealing of objectified labor in commodity production. Her
labor is also abstract in its very fragmented and repetitive form, while it is only
tenuously identified with its concrete use valueingesting and digesting food.
Ultimately, the whole scheme of materials, processes and products as they are
related to both femininity and labor do not represent some timeless truth about
either of these. Gnaw implicates the body as more than merely a given biological
factit is a construct of history.
Antonis focus on the body is also bound up with her art historical
references. In the case of Gnaw, her widely acknowledged reference to
minimalist art (which will be explored rather extensively later in this study) has
relevant socio-historical implications for the body. Hal Foster observes, the

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seriality of minimalism and pop is indicative of advanced-capitalist production and
consumption, for both register the penetration of industrial modes into spheres
(art, leisure, sport) that were once removed from them. He elaborates on the
point with a quote from economist Ernest Mandel:
Far from representing a post-industrial society, late
capitalism thus constitutes generalized universal

industrialization for the first time in history. Mechanization,

standardization, over-specialization, and parcelization of
labour, which in the past determined only the realm of
commodity production in actual industry, now penetrate into
all sectors of social life (Foster, Return/Real 66).
Mandel introduces the point and Moishe Postone elaborates on it through his
reinterpretation of Marxs critical theory, whereby the very condition of
commodity production is that of society. The following passage from his Time,
Labor, and Social Domination is a sample of how he constructs his argument:
The modern opposition between the free, self-determining
individual and an extrinsic sphere of objective necessity is,
according to Marxs analysis, a real opposition that is
historically constituted with the rise and spread of the
commodity-determined form of social relations, and is related

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to the more general constituted opposition between a world
of subjects and a world of objects. This opposition, however,
is not solely one between individuals and their alienated
social context: it also can be seen as one within the
individuals themselves or, better, as one between different
determinations of individuals in modern society. These
individuals are not only self-determining subjects, acting on
the basis of will; they are also subjected to a system of
objective compulsions and constraints that operates
independent of their willand in this sense, are also
objects. Like the commodity, the individual constituted in
capitalist society has a dual character (Postone 164).
Antonis art embodies some of these conditions and effects in a literal sense.
She performs art work resulting in emblematic objects of that very work. Her
process and the evidence remaining of that process are bound together in selfreferential objects of performance.

Chapter IV
Janine Antoni and Joseph Beuys

This chapter will focus on a comparative analysis of Antonis art with that
of the late Joseph Beuys. In his time, Beuyss work, which like Antonis includes
a diverse range of media and methods from drawing to live performance,
challenged the idea of discrete artistic categories or genres. In fact, in keeping
with the era he helped to shape, Beuys imagined a glorious potential for art. In
1973 he proclaimed:
Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be
possible for art and activities related to art to provide
evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary
power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive
effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along
the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL
ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART (Beuys, Energy Plan 21).
However, regardless of his radical efforts and ideals, Beuys's work has since
received solid recognition to the point where he has a firm place in a more
recently developed and accepted catalog of artistic achievement. The presence
of his work and ideas in art historical and critical discourse, including its
controversies, is well established.
156

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One of the largest and most recent exhibitions of Beuyss work is the
retrospective Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, presented in the
Menil Collection in Houston from October 2004 to January 2005. From Houston,
it traveled to the Tate Modern in London, closing May 2, 2005. Much is revealed
in remarks by the museum directors from the foreword of the exhibition catalog:
At this point in history, it is essentially impossible to organize
a true retrospective of Beuyss art because so many crucial
works are permanently installed in museums around the
world. It might even be fair to add that Beuyss output is so
varied it has essentially outlived the retrospective format in
the posthumous phase of his career (Rosenthal 6).
Indeed, Beuys has actually developed into a larger-than-life figurean art legend
of sorts. One of the more recent works on Beuys is the 2001 publication Joseph
Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, attempts to sort through some of the controversies
and shifts in the discourse surrounding Beuys and his work. It includes both
praise and sharp criticisms, but the ultimate impression is that the force of
Beuys's artistic influence is not to be denied. Pamela Kort, who contributes an
essay to this volume, writes: The cultural legacy of Joseph Beuys (1921-86) is a
crucially defining element in contemporary art and criticism (19). In Kim Levin's
contribution to Mapping the Legacy, she describes some of the general problem:

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Inquiring into someones inheritance is never quite polite, and it is especially
impolite in a culture that has collectively inherited the primal myth of modern art:
the myth of genius (176). She identifies Beuys as one of the most complex and
influential artists of the second half of our century; however, she is troubled by
the general unquestioning acceptance of his pronouncements and theories, the
cultlike attitude of reverent faith (178). On a different occasion Levin makes the
point: With Beuys, the modern myth of the artisthalf-crazed visionary, half
surrogate godthat began with Van Gogh and ended with Warhol, reached its
peculiar peak. She later added: His effect on the art of our waning century is
incalculable (Levin, Energy Plan 5). In After Modern Art: 1945 2000 David
Hopkins labels Beuys the artist-hero (86). In an essay on Laurie Anderson,
Sean Cubitt claims, the cultural capital acquired from attending one of [Beuyss]
performances is astronomical (239).
In relative terms, Beuyss legendary status may be an intimidating factor,
which inhibits those writers who have compared Antoni and Beuys from probing
more deeply into how these artists works are related. In a 1995 issue of Art New
England, Ann Wilson Lloyd notes parenthetically that Antoni and Beuys have a
shared interest in body fat, later remarking that she sees Antoni as continuing
the tradition of performer/artists like Joseph Beuysand other Fluxus and
Happening artists whose process-oriented performances resulted in a product...

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(Lloyd 13). Amy Cappellazzo compares Antoni with Beuys in her essay entitled
Mother Lode, but does little more than refer to their common interest in using fat
as material for their work. As a final flourish to her review of Antonis work, Ellen
Berkovoitch remarks: Like Beuys, whom she obviously reveres, Antoni is a
missionary with an occult gleam (143). These instances do little more than flag
the two for possible inclusion in similar art historical categories and point to their
shared interest in fat for art-making purposes. There is surely no hint of the
critical differences between their works, let alone how these may become
apparent through an examination of the similarities.
Janine Antonis voluminous and thoroughly impressive exhibition record
only began developing in 1990. Remarkably, however, this was a little more than
a year after she had earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and
she was the recipient of a MacArthur genius Grant only about ten years later in
1998. Antoni has achieved a good deal of recognition and critical acclaim in her
relatively short career, though obviously, the fact that Beuys was born much
earlier gives him the edge as an art historical figure, so to speak. The rather
large tome Art in Theory; 1900 1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood, identifies his work and ideas under no less than three conceptual and
categorical headings: Attitudes to Form, Political Aspects, and Ideas of the
Postmodern, under the added sub-heading, The Conditions of History. At least

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one other large volume, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, features
him under two separate headings, Process and Performance Art. It is not
hard to imagine a similar fate for Janine Antoni and her work in the art historical
archives of the future. One of the basic and unique points in common for Beuys
and Antoni is their quite extraordinarily disparate array of approaches and wideranging use of mediaespecially the variety of non-art materials. Both artists
have produced works which appear to dissolve or reinvent the categories for art.
Another basic commonality related to the diversity within their bodies of work is
that both artists seem to have an implicit understanding of how their art is not
only about the world but of the world in all its manifest dynamism.
However, accounts of Beuyss worldespecially during his youthcreate
a vividly distinct picture from that of 1990s America and into the twenty-first
century. Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany on May 12, 1921. A few months
later, the family moved to the industrial town of Kleve near the Dutch border, but
they were forced to move again in 1930 when their dairy cooperative foldedthis
was a time of worldwide economic depression. According to a detailed
chronology in the exhibition catalogue Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines,
Environments, it was after the subsequent move to nearby Rindern that Beuys
began developing his primary interests and talentsnatural science, music, and,
or course, art. He remained in Kleve to attend school when in 1933 the

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appointment of a new mayor marked a significant shift: National Socialism soon
regulates and controls every aspect of life in the city (Rosenthal 150). The
catalogues narrative is careful to point out that at this time, Beuyss membership
in the Hitler Youth organization was an obligation enforced by law. He continued
to pursue his interest in art, though a year before graduation he ran away to join
a traveling circus as a roustabout...putting up posters and looking after animals
(150). His parents eventually caught up with him in the Upper Rhine Valley and
brought him home.
Beuyss early exposure to the dairy business might explain what would
later become an abiding interest in the use of animal fat as a sculptural material.
At the same time, his fathers involvement in the industry did not lead him to
explore a related occupational opportunity: Although his father wants to take him
out of school and send him to apprentice in the local margarine factory, Beuys
went back to school and started playing in the school orchestra (Rosenthal150).
In 1940, Beuys took his final exams and briefly considered studying
medicine. Instead, he and a friend decided to make their move before receiving
a draft notice by volunteering for the Luftwaffe. After graduation the following
year, he began his military training as an aircraft radio operator. Beuys explained
that his decision to join the military was a matter of denying himself any sense of
privilege and exemption: Cooperative behavior was natural for me. It was

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natural that I would not be an exception (Rosenthal 152). During that same
year, he attended Posen University where he decided to seriously consider a
career in the arts over a scientific profession. Beuys would later refer to his
discovery of the work of the German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who was
declared a degenerate by the Nazis, as a revelatory experience, which
compelled his decision (152).
Confusion and controversy persist surrounding Beuyss version of events
in mid-March 1941. Beuys claimed that his plane crashed on the Crimean Front,
killing the pilot and seriously injuring him. Over the years, skepticism has been
growing about the details of his story. The Rosenthal catalog presents some of
the standard quotes from Beuys about his rescue by locals and the efforts that
sustained him until he could be transported to a military hospital to complete his
recovery. Beuyss main points were: Had it not been for the Tartars I would not
be alive today...They covered my body in fat to help it generate warmth, and
wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep the warmth in (Rosenthal 153). Kim
Levin claims that information from authoritative sources indicates that at the time
of the famous plan crash, which Beuys inexplicably referred to in my interview
with him as a car crash, there were no longer Tartars in the Crimea: Stalin had
relocated them all to Siberia. But now it seems that even the date of that
relocation is in dispute (Levin, Mapping the Legacy 178). The truth may never

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be known, but even the discrepancies seem to be incorporated into the Beuys
legend and mystique. More often than not, the event was cited by Beuys and
continues to be noted in relation to his recurring use of fat and felt in so many of
his works. This is an example of how the narrative is spun: Beuys will later refer
to this wartime experience in an imaginative way, creating a mythic tale of death
and survival woven around the long lost nomadic life of the Tartars, then
collaborating with the German army, which would highly inform the iconography
and material symbolism of his work (Rosenthal 153)
Following his recovery, Beuys was sent back to continue his participation
in the war effort. In May 1945, he and his division were captured and imprisoned
by British forces until their ultimate release a few months later. Hoping for a new
lease on life, Beuys was encouraged to pursue his artistic ambitions. In 1948, he
joined a regional artists league and began to participate in exhibitions. Ten
years after completing his education as a master pupil at Kunstakedemie
Dsseldorf, he was given a position there as professor of monumental sculpture
in 1961.
The early sixties brought Beuys into contact with more radical artistic
trends and influences. Joan Rothfuss takes note of this with a quote from Beuys
in turning down an invitation to exhibit at Rolf Jhrlings gallery: In two years Ive
been working on forms that produce no images and no sculptureFLUXUS

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(Rothfuss 40). Indeed, at Dsseldorf Beuys met Korean artist Nam June Paik
who introduced him to the Fluxus group, which was an almost immediate draw
for Beuys. Fluxus was a loosely knit international and multidisciplinary group
committed to experimentation and a radical expansion of the definition of art.
Rothfuss points out one of the key points that attracted Beuys: He found in
Fluxus a peer group that, as he later recalled, showed him that anything could be
art (41). Beuys had not started doing performance pieces (he preferred the
term actions) before he met Paik; and, as Rothfuss explains, it can be argued
that it was this early contact with the Fluxus group that stimulated the
development of his actions. However, in 1964 Fluxus and Beuys parted ways;
at that time they considered his work unacceptable for being very symbolic,
expressionistic, and traditional (Rothfuss 42).
Apart from the fact that both artists received formal training, it seems that
Antoni and Beuys have virtually nothing in common in their personal
backgrounds, and indeed, there are also occasions when the distinctions
between them as artists are simultaneously particularly sharp and particularly
illuminating. These instances occur most clearly in the case of works involving
live performanceBeuyss Coyote, I Like America and America Likes Me and
Antonis Slumber may be the best examples for comparisonperhaps all the
more so when considering their similarities.

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Both Antoni and Beuys have been willing to submit themselves to intense
bodily extremes and experimental risks in their work. Usually, Antonis
productions involve more acutely taxing and exaggerated activities, while Beuyss
actions entail extremes of duration. However, in the case of Slumber, Antonis
piece resembles Coyote in terms of duration. Specifically, this is an instance in
which both artists arranged to spend day and night in the gallery as part of the
performance.
Coyote concerns Beuyss relationship to the U.S., as the full title suggests.
Even though Antoni was born in the Bahamas, she has long since settled in the
U.S., which is also the place where she spent most of her school years through
graduate study. Though she is not actually an American citizen, Antoni is often
identified as an American artist. Obviously, the case is very different for Beuys,
not to mention the fact that, as Kim Levin diplomatically remarks: The
circumstances of history had put Beuys on the wrong side of a monstrous war
(Energy Plan 4). But while Beuys fought for the enemy in World War II, he
refused in protest to visit the U.S. while troops were deployed in Vietnam. Beuys
never made more than three visits to this country and his first trip was not until
January 1974. Five months later, he returned to perform Coyote, I Like American
and America Likes Me, which Joan Rothfuss notes, must have been titled with
more than a touch of irony (Rothfuss 51). It seems consistent with his personal

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background that Beuys often appeared to be emphatically addressing himself to
the world or the cosmos in his work in a way that is quite different from Antoni
world events did impinge on his life in a particularly emphatic way. It is certainly
not the case that Antoni is shrinking away from the world with her art, but the
difference is that Beuyss approach was self-consciously and insistently didactic.
The performance of Coyote took place in New York at the Ren Block
Gallery on West 57th Street in 1974. Beuys had set himself up to have an
experience with an actual coyote, a strategy that seems to resemble Antonis
approach. A large cage was built in the gallery as both a staging area and an
indoor habitat where Beuys and his wild coyote would spend a week together.
The space was supplied with straw and piles of Wall Street Journals specifically
chosen to accommodate the animal and its need to urinate. For some of the
unscripted man-and-coyote drama Beuys insulated himself within an enormous
wrap made of his trademark grey felt, while occasionally making use of a
wooden walking stick and a musical triangle. Linda Weintraubss account
describes Beuyss purpose as one of communing with a representative of the
animal realm, though it also involved aggressive behavior to antagonize the
coyote as a way of emphasizing the nature of human/animal duality (Art on the
Edge 182). Further agitation was stirred up by the periodic roar of a turbine
enginethe deafening sound of human achievementblasting from a tape

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recorder. The luxurious and sophisticated surroundings of the neighborhood are
also noted as part of the scene. Exemplifying the material affluence of Western
civilization, the context served as the ideal backdrop for a work that pitted human
reason against animal instinct, civilization against nature (Weintraub, Art on the
Edge 182). Beuys chose to play this out by provoking the animal in order to learn
how to protect himself against attack, while ultimately becoming more like the
coyote.
In another account of Coyote, Beuys arrived at JFK airport from
Dsseldorf and was transported by ambulance directly to the gallery, wrapped
from head to foot in felt with the walking stick jutting out of the top. In this case,
Beuys is described as having talked to the coyote as he walked up and down
ringing the triangle. He sought to perform a kind of shamanic ritual as he
engaged with one of the principal animals regarded as divine by American
Indians (Davvetas 199). The ambulance is interpreted as representing the
Western situation whereby Man today is generally acknowledged a wounded
being which is a de facto condition of America (198). This particular narrative
about Beuyss Coyote performance is summed up as follows:
The central idea of Coyote suggests transformation. It
entails a metamorphosis of ideology into the idea of ferocity;
a metamorphosis of language into an energetic practice; a

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metamorphosis of the monologue of will into a dialogue
between those concerned and a metamorphosis of distrust
into communal and creative coexistence (Davvetas 199).
It seems likely that Beuys would have approved this interpretation of his work.
Those of us who were not there to witness the performance of Coyote will
never know how convincing it was. While this is always be an aspect of those
works that are precisely about a rarified moment that will never occur again, any
sense of how the work may have been experienced seems to linger just barely
beyond that moment. Even though the discourse that has accumulated about
this piece since 1974 renders it nearly impossible to have any innocence
awareness of it, the relatively faint substance of the work may not allow much
possibility for wonder in any case. However, it seems that Coyote requires
Beuyss mystique and all the intrigue of the various accounts that have built up to
this point to have any real sense of it. The symbols and the message seemed to
be in place before the performance ever would have begun and it is hard to
imagine the piece as more than an illustration.
By contrast, Antonis Slumber maintains a focus on her productive process
through actual traces of her activities; the effect is one of ongoing provocation by
sustaining a sense of what is produced and how it unfolds. In this case, she also
sets up a concrete relationship between the workings of modern science and

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traditional craft that remains in dialogue, so to speak, throughout the
performance/exhibition and beyond. In addition, her approach allows the
audience to have its own relationship with the work without being told what to
think through heavy-handed symbolism and mega-narratives of Man and Nature.
On the other hand, something of the humor or playfulness of Beuyss
piece may have gotten buried in the thickening archives and the sheer volume of
words that have piled up over the decades since its performance. Thankfully,
photographs of this piece seem to have a life of their own. Thinking of the title, I
Like America and America Likes Me while viewing the image of Beuys struggling
to tear loose of the coyotes grip on his giant felt security blanket of sorts provides
some levity with at least a hint of self-mockery. At the same time, David Hopkins
notes that by presenting himself as a shamanic figure Beuys ultimately set
himself apart from ordinary humanity. He too, assumed a divine status (86).
Hopkins emphasizes the point with his remark, Beuyss arrogation of superior
telepathic powers reached its high point in Coyote (90). By comparison, Antoni
comes across as unassuming and literally more accessible in Slumber, by
allowing the audience to interact with her at her loom. It is also the case that
though both Coyote and Slumber require an unusual degree of physical
involvement on the part of the artists in the way of sustained engagement or
endurance, there are important qualitative differences. In one sense that is more

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stereotypically gendered, Beuyss piece is destructive and violent, while Antonis
is peaceful and productive. Of course, the situation is not so simply: Beuys
eventually makes peace with the coyote and Antoni destroys one object (her
nightgown) in the creation of another (the blanket). But the differences may also
be described in terms of the way each artists production unfolds through the
articulation of events. Beuyss piece essentially follows the single occasion of his
encounter with a coyote. The contrivance of his works sets up the conditions for
a rare event, tracing the more linear flow of a sustained contest from conflict to
resolution. On the other hand, Antonis piece follows more of a circular process,
which charts and literally marks off the cycle of daytime and nighttime
experiences in distinct but related ways. Antoni stages the quotidian in an
extraordinary way, while Beuyss strategy is more on the order of setting the
stage for an extraordinary event.
Beuyss approach in his 1967 ten-hour action entitled Mainstream seems
closer to Antonis work. Caroline Tisdalls account includes a description of
Beuys as the anonymous fatdweller in his Fatspace (142). In this piece, he
inhabited a large room with white-washed walls and a rust-colored floor,
apparently alternating between despondent and playful behavior as he interacted
with fat. All along the perimeter of the room there was a kind of curb of butter
resembling the concrete demarcation of spaces in a parking lot. As he acted out

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with the fat, he jealously guarded his territory, keeping the audience at distance
while they observed this life in and with fat (Tisdall 142). Tisdalls discussion of
this piece includes an account from German art critic Eduard Beaucamp, which
offers a better sense of the moment. His sentences are quite long and the
description seems to run on and on without prioritizing any one moment or
gesture over another, in effect matching the feel of the piece. The following
passage from this narrative includes speculations about the viewers experience
of the piece along with descriptions of Beuyss actions, which he refers to as the
Happening:
Each [viewer] was left to his own imagination and the free
play of associations and this was how the Happening kept its
attraction through deliberate absurdities and contradictions
which frustrated simple interpretation of it as allegory. The
recurring rituals of this inhabitant were cleaning and wiping,
hopping and sliding on the fat-soaked floor. He played with
lumps of fat, stuck bits on himself and ate pieces, then
stretched out in a place demarcated with shapes of fat and
was afflicted with cramp-like spasms as if on a Procrustean
bed. Then he sprung up, held an antenna to his ear and
listened intenselydesperately (Tisdall 142).

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Later, bitten lumps of fat from the performance exhibiting Beuyss teeth marks
were collected and exhibited. In this case, it is difficult not to think of Antonis
Gnaw, with the by-products of Beuyss actions appearing like the collected bites
of her work in process.
In a discussion of Antonis Gnaw installation Martha Buskirk remarks: It
would not be possible for an artist to use lard without bringing to mind Joseph
Beuys and the role it played as part of his myth of rebirth, as a substance vital to
sustaining life, and as a highly malleable solid (Contingent Object140). Beuys
used fat time and again in his art making, but his 1977 piece entitled Tallow is the
most extreme example in terms of scale. The installation consisted of five truly
imposing abstract forms made entirely of tallow fat. The largest of these was
roughly 78 x 78 x 118 inches. It stood as a mammoth feat of fat sculpting.
In order to make Tallow Beuys chose a most unusual structure to use in
constructing a cast for this piece. He found an outstanding example of
architectural folly (Tisdall 248) at the site of a concrete underpass to a university
auditorium. Beneath the access ramp, he found a dead corner, a deep wedgeshaped acute angle in which nothing but dirt could collect. Caroline Tisdall also
describes how his aim was to question the underlying motives behind urban
planning which produces concrete deserts. Once the cast was completed, the
operations moved to a concrete factory outside Mnster. There twenty-two tons

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of mutton fat granules combined with a few drums of beef fat for firmness were
melted down over a fire day and night. As Tisdall explains: Vat after vat was
poured into the reinforced plywood mould some 5 metres or 16 feet high, which
was buttressed with beams under the pressure of the molten liquid. The scene
represented a giants kitchen or the preparation of a monstrous Trojan horse
(Tisdall 248).
As is the case with Antonis Lard Gnaw, Beuys created absurd proportions
for fat, though Tallow dwarfs her two-foot cubes by comparison. In Tisdalls
Joseph Beuys, there are black and white photographs of Beuys in the factory
attending to the production of Tallow. The shots are somewhat faded and the
slightly muted images resemble stills from a newsreel. One of these pictures
captured Beuys taking inventory of his supplies in the background, as some of
his crew of assistants are peering into the giant mold from the scaffolding around
it. In another shot he stands over a giant vat of molten fat folding in a shovel full
of fresh white globules for melting. In the Ink Tree publication Janine Antoni,
there is a black and white photograph of the artist being assisted while pouring a
bucket of melted chocolate into the mold for Chocolate Gnaw. The use of black
and white photography gives the chocolate a glistening black appearance as the
negative substance, implying a complementary image of the lard pouring.
Spliced next to this is a smaller full-color shot of a large pail displaying irregular

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lumps of white lard inside. This latter shot reveals the contents of the pail from
above with a major portion of the Antonis lard cube appearing nearby in the
upper left corner of the picture. The pail of lard is framed on the right by a white
drinking cup sitting on the floor beside it, providing a sense of physical
proportionsa sense that the lumps of lard in the pail are bite-sized. Between
the two projects by Antoni and Beuys, the scenes of production are separated by
an ocean and roughly fifteen years, yet they seem related when viewed
alongside one another. On the one hand, the obvious point would be that the
process of creating Gnaw is more personal, smaller scale and closer-to-the-body
than the production of Beuyss Tallow, which literally brought the mold of a large
public space into the factory for a kind of revision. And yet, historical shifts have
altered the relationship of public and private, as well as that of labor and the
body. Both works register some sense of the irreality that has been created
under the regime of commodity relations through their manifest absurdity:
Antonis edible cube would not fit on anyones plate and Beuyss giant tallow
forms could not hold up an overpass. The common material substance of fat
connects the two works and their common references to a kind of embodied
alienation and the distorting effects normally hidden in the "natural" course of
everyday life.

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Beuyss piece cross-references not only domestic and industrial
production, but public works and private greed as well. Tallow has the
appearance of concrete without the same durability. It suggests that many
astronomical scale structures and grand architectural projects endure only to
become monuments to apathy. Perhaps if they were made of such less sturdy
stuff they would receive more regular attention and remaking, creating a greater
awareness of changing needs and purposes. The towering blocks of animal
substance seem to stand as emblems of an insistent animal presence or need in
the face of waning concern. In the case of Tallow, the truly gigantic scale and
concentration of fatty substance appear to stand for aggregate human labor and
accumulation of bodily expendituremassive chunks of the daily grind. The
tremendous forms also call attention to their making by their improbable
presence and sheer absurditythey are made of natural stuff, but this is no
spontaneous natural phenomenon.
Tallows giant abstract sculptural forms are reminiscent of minimalism,
though quite like the case of Antonis Gnaw, the materials used indicate a
significant deviation from the stereotypical metal and glass box productions. The
work of Beuys and Antoni actually create bookends in relation to minimalism.
Antonis art emerges during a time long after minimalism and even postminimalism became established art historical categories. In the case of her

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Gnaw pieces, she is conscious of the reference to minimalism, while she plays
against it at the same time, choosing to literally chew on the infamous minimalist
cube. In Beuyss case, he seemed to be already in the process of undermining
minimalism before it came to be called a movement. In the most striking
examples Beuys created Fat Corner (1960) and Felt Corner (1963) before Robert
Morris produced his Corner Piece in 1964. One way to think of these works is as
art that sits in the corner and takes up space. All three pieces consist of a
triangle or wedge form literally filling in the right-angle corner between two walls.
The primary difference between the works of the two artists in this case is in the
materialsMorriss version is made of painted plywood and Beuys's examples
consist of fatotherwise they are nearly identical. Apart from the general
tendency of artists to disdain labels, this might have been another reason for
Beuyss irritation at described as a minimalist. After all, at least with these
corner piece examples, Beuys may have imagined that he had discovered
minimalism for himself and moved on just as it was becoming an official category.
The surfaces of Beuyss 1957 piece Rubberized Box may be a little too
sticky and greasy for minimalism. In addition, as Beuys explained, "softening the
rigid form of the box...has nothing to do with minimalism" (Energy Plan 119). His
piece consists of an open pine box that has been thoroughly coated with a
mixture of rubber and tar, eliminating its hard edges. Antoni could actually fit

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most of one of her cubes from Gnaw into the roughly 40 x 40 x 20 inch interior,
though she couldnt hide it there. However, only space occupies the interior of
Rubberized Box, and the repellent coating does not suggest a receptacle.
Beuys has stated: The outward appearance of every object I make is the
equivalent of some aspect of inner human life (Energy Plan 119). His idea of
Rubberized Box was that the darkness of the tar represented an experience of
crisis, while the rubber was about a kind of insulation. He felt that it displayed an
equivalent of the pathological stateand expresses the need to create a space
in the mind from which all disturbances were removed: an empty insulated
space. Beuys later conceded that though he had not intended it, Rubberized
Box is suggestive of prison or a padded cell; and, that it might refer to extremes
of isolation, as in the practice of prison control today (119-20).
While the two artists have references to minimalism in common, a
comparison of Beuyss discussion of his Rubberized Box and an interview with
Antoni where she explains her 1990 piece Wean reveals some important
differences:
Wean is the first piece I did out of graduate school. What
youre looking at are negative imprints on the wall. The first
image is my breast, the second is my nipple, the three after
that are latex nipples [for baby bottles], and the last is the

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packaging those latex nipples come in. For me it was a
really important work because it mapped out an evolution
thatfrom this point onall my work deals with. And thats
this movement that begins with the body and traces its way
into the culture. The important moment here is the moment
between the real nipple and the latex nipple. Im interested
in objects like the latex nipple: objects that replace the body,
objects that come into intimate contact with the body, and
how those objects define the body within the culture
(Jinkner-Lloyd 2).
Beuyss object is more self-contained, standing on its own as a symbol, as
representing feelings and ideas in a more abstract sense. In Antonis case, she
presents objects in absentia as effects, and as a set of relations to be explored
this movement that begins with the body and traces its way into culture. Even
in an apparently more static piece such as Wean, a process is implied.
In 1993, Antoni again creates a testimonial object of the extremes of her
bodily involvement with the use of lard. In this case, she exploits its evocative
quality in relation to flesh-formed experience by having herself literally immersed
into a bathtub full of lard and carefully raised out of it to leave the deep imprint of
her body on display in the white fatty mold. Her installation includes an

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enormous block of soap formed with water and lye added to the lard displaced by
her body. The soap becomes another bit of evidence of the artists process with
its rounded corners exhibiting the results of its repeated use in washing herself
with traces of herself. The title of this piece is Eureka, making an obvious
reference to Archimedes's exclamation in his discovery while using his body as a
tool for measurement. Here again, Antoni returns to perform another distorted
application of a scientific technique. Her variation on the scene of scientific
revelation transforms the original experiment from deploying the body as the
incidental tool for determining an abstract quantity to the body as concrete
measure of itself in the process of self-reproduction. It might also suggest the
daily project of reproducing a feminine body.
In another sense, the scene of the banality of bathing in the Eureka piece
suggests a quasi-religious ritual. Of course, according to some advertising copy,
this is exactly the level of experience claimed for the use of certain bath products.
Here Antoni's work evokes traces of familiar consumerist culture in the
eccentricity of her objects of performance. In this instance, the piece conjures up
the scene of a decades-old run of TV commercials featuring a woman
submerging herself in a bath in a kind of ecstatic trance murmuring, "Calgon take
me away." Calgon is the bath product that promises to allow the bather to be
transported. Antoni's ghostly imprint reveals how she was taken away, in a

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sense, only to return to reinvest the materialsincluding residue of herselfin
another ritual of bathing. This piece might also be seen as a pun on the selfreferential object, which in this case refers to the self of the artist. It is further
produces a possible reference to an impure striving for puritya comment on the
absurdity and utopian gesture of pure form for itself.
Beuyss Fat Chair offers a compelling opportunity for a comparative
analysis with Antonis work. The 1963 piece consists of a plain wooden chair
with a substantial wedge of crudely textured animal fat occupying the seat in
place of where a persons posterior would normally fit. The uneven consistency
of Beuyss material is rather unlike the industrially processed, relative
smoothness of the lard used in Antons Eureka, the piece that most invites
comparison with Fat Chair. Antonis work displays the animal substance as more
than a vaguely geometrical abstraction suggesting human presence; the shape of
the imprint left in her lard-filled tub is the result of her actual body having been
submerged directly into it. She offers a version of her entire body as having been
fully instrumentalized to become the primary tool for her production, while it also
replaces or displaces the artists hand. Perhaps Antoni reappropriates her
bodys ephemeral object status, as it may be configured in traditional feminine
terms, into a measure of her literal and substantial presence. At the same time,
the mark she leaves behind is fairly nondescript in terms of gender and the void

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of negative space might be about a vanquishing of that version of the body
historically consigned to model and passively accommodate the spectacle of
aesthetic femininity.
The animal presence in Fat Chair is far less marked in this way than in
Antonis Eureka. The suggestive quality of corporeality in formal terms is
positive in Beuyss piece versus Antonis deployment of negative space.
Moreover, as might generally follow from these opposite formal strategies,
Beuyss work is as additive as Antonis work is subtractive. Kenneth Baker
describes Fat Chair as giving "physical form to a key feeling of embodiment: a
conjunction of the central sensations of hardness and softness we associate with
flesh and bone" (116). But it appears that in this case, Beuyss crude material
and more raw fashioned rudimentary design might also convey a far greater
sense of dehumanizing objectification.
Each artist in her/his way appears to refuse the historically exalted status
of the artists hand, i.e., the virtuoso hand of artistic genius; however, Antoni
complicates the gesture with concrete elaborations on the use of these flesh-andblood, definitively human instruments in a manner that goes beyond anti-art.
Antoni denies the use of her own artists hand with the literally hands-off
rendering of her ghostly outline in lard, only bringing her domesticated digits back
into service toward the everyday task of making a giant cube of soap from the

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bathtub overflow. She goes on to commit her hands to the otherwise
unremarkable ritual of bathing, though the scale of the cube makes the rounding
down of its corners by repeatedly washing herself with the monstrous fatty hulk
resemble a sculpturing technique. Ultimately, she rubs away at the deliberately
preposterous soap to bathe herself with the traces of herself deposited over the
entire course of her process of production. The oddly configured cycle of
production and consumption portrayed in this work suggests that for all her
eventual manipulations, she may never really come clean. The piece can be
seen to mimic the model of social production, which naturalizes a counterintuitive commitment to production for its own sakethe ever-dynamic operation
of capital. Moreover, the special performative dimension of Antonis piece
uniquely comports with the nature of what it suggests.
Beuyss Fat Chair is a far simpler piece with its relatively humble
production developed as such through his literal manipulations. Even if tools
were deployed, Beuys would have manually collected the fat and placed the
gristled mass on the homely chair in a far less extraordinary fashion than the
complex contortions of Antonis displacement operation. But, of course, as is
generally the case with her work, for Antoni the labor and production process are
the main points of Eureka. More often than not, her art would be a completely
different thing without evidence of her process and the way the objects are

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produced. At the same time, Antoni also leaves her mark, so to speak, on
Beuyss work retrospectively, in the way that an imagined sense of Beuyss
scene of production is more likely to seem relevant and to inflect the image and
presence of his objects, however subtly.
Beuyss clotted amalgam of blubber is somehow both disagreeable and
fascinating. The crude fat is a nasty substance, yet it is presented in an oddly
tidy fashion. Beuys seems to have made every effort to situate it in as orderly a
fashion as possible, such that it is not just a large bumpy splat on the seat of the
chair. The fat conforms somewhat neatly around or within the edges of the chair,
appearing to have been deliberately scraped or sliced to form a substantial
wedge. Or perhaps his technique may have involved a bit of patting or
smoothing by hand. In any case, since Antoni our awareness of how the action
might have played out in the making of this piece may be heightened, as it
suggests something between abjection and tenderness. Perhaps a thought of
the gentle patting of a babys butt, or a sexual caress or fondling comes to mind.
The ugly, unrefined substance of the fat suggests a sense of animal warmth and
human form because it is placed in a chair. At the same time, it alludes to life as
an abstract calculation, a simple collection of material. The chair also might have
come from an old schoolhouse classroom, which now displays the remains of a
frightened or humiliated child, having truly shrunken into her seat. And is it then

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unavoidable to relate this same image to the very real terror of utterly brutalized
humanity? Or it may be that an organic sedimentation of the very same had
been offered a seat and fitted squarely into a space of banality.
Antonis major departure from Beuys seems to lie within the depth and
substance of her process. Both artists re-present in the way of art, but Antonis
strategy is more presentational. Her objects do not so much stand in for
something as they produce a testimony of their production. There is an actuality
to Antonis work that stands out in more concretely presentational terms than the
symbolic representation apparent in much of Beuyss art.
At the same time, Beuyss efforts resist being summed up quite so simply
in terms of symbols and substitutions. Beuys stated that his hopes for Fat Chair
were to stimulate discussion. He imagined the volatility of the fat would be a
part of an almost direct provocation of responses from people based on instinct
and related to inner processes and feelings. He looked toward the
development of a dialogue about the potential of sculpture and culture, what they
mean, what language is about, what human production and creativity are about.
So I took an extreme position in sculpture, and a material that was basic to life
and not associated with art (Beuys, Energy Plan 125).
Some of Antonis stated intentions and ideas about her work seem
peculiarly related to Beuyss claims and thoughts in the above passage. When

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Laura Cottingham inquired about Antonis process and her use of materials such
as soap, lard, chocolate and hair dye, the artists response reveals both points in
common with Beuys, as well as the special quality of distinction in her
formulations:
Im interested in everyday body rituals and converting the
most basic sort of activitieseating, bathing, moppinginto
sculptural processes. Even in doing this, I imitate basic 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 the material, I use materials which are
appropriate to the activity. Those materials, soap, lard,
chocolate, and hair dye, all come in intimate 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 (Cottingham, "Biting Sums Up" 104-5).
Cottingham then makes a point about Antonis body to inquire if it is the
foundation of your process? Antoni answers:
"I work differently from a lot of conceptual artists that begin
their process with an idea: I begin with the idea of an

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experience I want to give myself. The meaning reveals itself
to me through the experience, through the process" (105).
Though there are differences in these two sets of remarks of Antonis and the
ones above expressed by Beuys, there is a way in which Antoni seems to be
stating some similar ideas, albeit from a more concrete and materialist
perspective.
Another point of comparison between Antoni and Beuys involves the
conscious degree of political investment and implication each artist claims for
their work. Beuys clearly envisioned art in revolutionary terms as a "politically
productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history" (Beuys,
Energy Plan, 21). Antoni's approach is far less programmatic, though she has
explicitly identified herself with feminism. She has felt herself especially drawn to
the legacy of feminist art and artists from both the 80s and the 70s. She admits
to being influenced by artists such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Jenny
Holzer, but she is most emphatic about the efforts of earlier artists. In the same
interview with Laura Cottingham in Flash Art, Antoni explains how my strategy
has more to do with the feminist artists of the 70s their humor, the process, the
emphasis on performance, the intensely visceral quality of their work ("Biting
Sums Up" 104). This would seem to identify her work more closely with Beuys
and the way his own art strategies fit with the 70s, though they would differ in

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terms of the contemporaneous aspect, which would include the much older
Beuys and exclude Antoni, who was born in 1964. Each artist would have a
different relationship with history to some degree, obviously. Antoni further
describes how historymore specifically, the art historical canon and most
particularly, minimalisminfluenced and defined me as an artist. However, she
also expresses a particular ambivalence, as she appears to situate herself
somewhere between an attitude of scorn or resentment and one of homage.
Cottingham raises the example of her 1992 Gnaw pieces and wonders how
Antoni began with something quite like the minimalist cube, which she then
submits to a process of chewing. Antoni responds:
I was interested in the bite because its both intimate and
destructive; it sort of sums up my relationship to art history. I
feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it: it
defines me as an artist and it excludes me as a woman, all
at the same time (Cottingham, "Biting Sums Up" 104).
As noted earlier, Janine Antoni expresses a far more ambivalent attitude toward
minimalism than Beuys. And, in at least one respect, her work is comparable to
minimalist efforts for its absence of, or at least resistance to the kind of figurative
semantics and abstract symbolism that is a characteristic feature of Beuyss
work. Antonis art also has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality not so unlike

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minimalist art. However, the specificity of Antonis objects, in contrast to Donald
Judds specific object, for example, follows more on the order of what-you-seeis-how-this-got-herethe actual scene of objectified labor.
And herein would seem to lie the key to Antonis differencethe matter of
labor and the labor that matters. In her interview Cottingham asks Antoni about
why it seemed that there was a trend for younger artists in the U.S. pushing them
toward what she described as refashioning, disrupting, and in other ways
utilizing and deploying the last movement of late high modernism: minimalist
forms ("Biting Sums Up" 104). The interviewer emphasizes form, while in her
response, Antoni notes the minimalists introduction of fabrication. She
describes her relationship to the forms in terms of her process: My cubes are
poured, chewed, spit out, melted down, and recast by me (Cottingham, "Biting"
104). But this is in fact what the minimalists had left out with their methods of
fabrication, which was then left to Antoni to recast in the way of turning back to
the body and the performance of labor. Minimalism was imagined to be a point,
as Donald Judd would have it, of summarily dispensing with relics of European
art (Battcock 118). But with the supposed triumph of their machine-made steel
forms over anthropomorphism in sculpture and fidelity to the flat surfaces of the
picture plane over illusionary space in painting (119), where had the body gone?
Had art been enlisted to contribute to the illusion of a modernist resolution for the

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body and the problem of laborespecially as it is situated under the regime of
capital? Beuys deployed his own artistic strategies toward confronting such
"illusions," but his predilection for symbolism distinguishes his work from Antoni's
more concrete and uniquely performative approach. Antoni certainly benefits
from Beuys's example, but her more materialist strategies do not simply bring the
body back; her work reintroduces the body in its historic specificityshe reopens
the question, with more to follow.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The Art of Janine Antoni:

Labor, Gender and the Object of Performance

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Performance Studies

By
Stephanie Ann Karamitsos

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

June 2006

Volume II

Chapter V
Antoni, Gender and Feminist Discourse

Janine Antonis work is richly suggestive and provocative in a wide variety

of ways. Her references include the stuff of art history and mass culture, myth
and science, private fantasy and the social imaginary. However, gender is a
persistent theme or issue throughout Antonis body of work. Her art addresses
many related concerns, including the role of gender in art making and the
manufacture of femininity. Antonis focus on the body and how it traces its way
into culture, as she has described it, often includes artistic deployments of
markers of femininity such as, lipstick and mascara, chocolate and hair dye. She
also uses traditionally feminine crafts such as weaving and sewing, but even if
she were to turn sharply away from such methods and materials now, she would
continue to be identified as a woman artist. In fact, Antoni is also identified as a
feminist, but it would be difficult for any woman who is a practicing artist today to
avoid addressing issues of gender and feminist critical discourse. This chapter
will first consider how Antonis body of work is situated, somewhat uneasily, in
contemporary feminist art criticism, along with a related examination of the
history of feminist art, including a special focus on the work of Judy Chicago.
The purpose here is to examine some of the historical legacy and trajectory of
feminist art practices and the ways in which Antoni both participates in and
significantly departs from them. A number of examples will emerge in discussion,
190

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but I will treat two of Antonis works in particular to an in-depth examination:
First, perhaps her most explicit expression of gender and its potential
malleability, her 1994 photographic piece Mom and Dad; and second, a piece
called Cradle whose references to femininity and the maternal is perhaps both
her most subtle and most surprising. I will then compare Antonis collaboration
with Jasper Johnss Target (Do It Yourself) with the seminal collaborative work of
Judy Chicago and her students, Womanhouse. Overall, my argument is that
Antonis work, through a uniquely performative approach, casts gender not as a
simple matter of positive truths or eternal verities, but rather as culturally specific
and historically contingent. She situates femininity or stereotypical feminine
concerns both materially and metaphorically as the product of continually
renewed, intense, even frenzied, labor. Throughout Antonis work, gender is a
kind of laborious performance.

Antoni amid the feminists

Setting aside for the moment the more extreme views by both her
detractors and admirers, Judy Chicago is clearly an important and pivotal figure
in the history of feminist art. Arguably, both her own artistic production and her
pedagogical efforts drew attention to issues of gender as worthy of more serious
consideration by various sectors of those concerned about art, including artists,

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academics and audiences. Indeed, Chicago contributed to bringing the struggles
of women artists to the fore.
Chicago's work is associated with a different historical period and she is
certainly of a different generation than Antoni. However, I will argue from the
perspective that it is precisely because Chicago seems so easy to dismiss and
her work may be considered pass that present-day versions of the same cultural
feminism are allowed to appear new and radical. Here the point is not so much
about drawing specific comparisons between the works of these two artists as it
is to establish a baseline historical example of art arising from feminist
essentialism. More often, the focus in this case is on a reexamination of the
past, which will help to clarify the extent to which Antoni's approach is distinct.
Lucy Lippard was an established art critic before she encountered
Chicagos work, which she initially resisted. However, even the title of Lippards
1976 publication From the Center: Feminist essays on womens art refers to one
of Chicagos basic ideas regarding female imagery. At this point Lippard fully
embraces the artist's work as her writings in From the Center clearly indicate,
including an entire chapter devoted to an in-depth interview with the Chicago. A
decade later, in Women Artists in History: From Antiquity to the Present Wendy
Slatkin writes: The history of a contemporary feminist art is generally traced back
to 1970, the year Judy Chicago founded the first feminist studio art course at

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Fresno State College in northern California (Slatkin 250). In her 1993 volume
entitled The Pink Glass Swan: Selected feminist essay on art Lucy Lippard
returns to place Chicago in a privileged group of feminist artists in her
introduction. Though she has yet to recognize Antonis efforts specifically, she
describes tendencies in more recent work in relation to early pioneering figures
such as Chicago:
The vilest misogynist cant deny that a whole new crop of
very diverse bad girls (a phrase that tends to appeal to
seventies rebels but is less popular among the young) has
emerged to warm the hearts of feminists of all stripes.
Emerging artists are making some lively, aggressive,
intelligent, and provocative art. But the work is not always
developed, and sometimes it feels as though the wheel is
being reinvented by those who dont know the feminist art
history of transgression. The bad girls front line was held
by Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and
Anita Steckel, among others (Lippard, Pink Swan 15).
However, as this chapter will demonstrate, Antoni does manage to both reinvent
the wheel, in some sense, while still being clearly aware of the feminist art
history of transgression.

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By 1994, both Chicago and Antoni appear in Norma Broude and Mary
Garrards anthology The Power of Feminist Art: The American movement of the
1970s, History and Impact. Given the title and the years covered, Chicago
naturally receives more attention than Antoni, though it may still come as a
surprise that fully one quarter of the over 300-page folio-sized volume would be
devoted to her or projects involving her. Antoni appears in the final chapter by
Laura Cottingham The Feminist Continuum: Art after 1970, and the last two
pages feature a large photo documenting her Loving Care performance. For all
the effusive praise of Chicago in The Power of Feminist Art, it almost appears as
if Antoni has the last word.
In his 2001 edition of Movements in Art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith
notes that the influence of feminism and feminist art is
certainly an important theme in the art of the 1980s. The
sequence begins with what is certainly the most ambitious
feminist artwork of them allJudy Chicagos The Dinner
Party. This huge installation is one of the very few artworks
made since the beginning of the 1970s which enjoys the kind
of iconic status so readily given to Pollocks Blue Poles or
Warhols Marilyns or Roy Lichtenstensteins Whaam! (195).

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Feminist artist and writer Martha Rosler acknowledges Chicagos
importance as recently as 2004 in Decoys and Disruptions. Rosler clearly finds
Chicagos Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts of special significance: The fact of
the programs existence was very important to American women artists
everywhere (102). On the other hand, in Whitney Chadwicks 2002 edition of
her acclaimed study Women, Art, and Society, Chicagos importance is
measured in both positive and negative terms. Chadwick takes note of the less
than encouraging response to the biological determinism in Chicagos art, while
still praising aspects of her iconography: [C]entral core imagery remained an
important part of an attempt to celebrate sexual difference and express pride in
the female body and spirit (3rd ed. 358). However, almost twenty years earlier,
Rozsica Parker and Griselda Pollock are more insistently critical in Part II of
their volume entitled Old Mistresses, which plays off the term old masters.
They do acknowledge Chicagos importance, but are less sanguine than
Chadwick about her female imagery. In one instance, they express a marked
skepticism about the merits of Chicagos Female Rejection Drawing, which
clearly refers to the form of the female genitals (Parker 130). At one point, they
elaborate on their deeper concerns in the form of questions:
But what determines the connotations of woman as body, as
sexual, as nature? What places woman as the antithesis of

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mind, culture and masculine plentitude and power? At what
level do we have to place our analysis? What kind of work
begins to rupture these ideologies? (Parker 130).
These questions remain open to this day. The rhetorical register here seems
more consistent with Antonis works. Rather than simply reversing the terms of
masculine and feminine, her art appears to problematize the construct of gender
itself.
Antoni and Chicago receive equal billing in the 2001 volume edited by Uta
Grosenick entitled Women Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century. The
alphabetized order of the entries for each artist does not privilege any one over
the other. The contents page identifies each artist with a photograph, though a
few are revealed in self-portraits. Chicagos image appears in a more
conventional glamour-pose type of headshot, while Antonis face is almost
entirely obscured in a close-up of her head to the floor performing her Loving
Care piece. Relatively few publications include both Chicago and Antoni, though
another example is Nancy Hellers 2003 edition of Women Artists: An illustrated
history. There are also more recent volumes that acknowledge Chicago, while
leaving out any mention of Antoni. Two examples of these are Hillary Robinsons
massive 2001 anthology Feminism-Art-Theory and David Hopkinss After Modern
Art 1945-2000.

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Indeed, the list of publications making at least some kind of reference to
Chicago and her work could go on at some lengththe point is that she remains
an important figure in the history of art. This chapter includes an extensive
treatment of Chicagos Womanhouse project and the underpinnings of her
pedagogy and programmatic approach. An examination Chicagos feminist
ideology will be part of a larger inquiry into both aesthetic and socio-historical
terms of the construct of gender, including art historical examples offering other
perspectives on gender and femininity. The Broude and Garrard anthologys
focuses on Chicagos narrative and the Womanhouse project as matters of
tremendous historical significance. Indeed, it is difficult to ignore Chicagos story
when she is identified as being among those who launched what became a
national Feminist Art movement (Broude 32). Today even the term movement
has become a relic of the past, along with old style consciousness-raising and
manifesto writing. But it is bad riddance when what is now considered over
becomes a closed subject dressed up in new terms of female identity and
difference. Chicagos example is important because in whatever other ways
she and her art may be assessed, she becomes a pivotal figure for tracing
certain received ideas about the relationship of gender and art. Therefore, her
case becomes a critical component in an analysis of the challenges raised and
new perspectives created by Antonis work.

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One of the ways Antonis approach differs from that of some cultural
feminists is that while she personally and passionately opposes the
consequences of institutional gender bias, she does not participate in any sour
grapes denigration of male art. For example, she is not discouraged by Laura
Cottinghams question about her reference to minimalism in Gnaw cubes simply
because men are historically overrepresented among those to receive
recognition as minimalist artists (as in so many other areas of artistic production).
In fact, Antoni actually collaborates with the enemyin this case Jasper
Johnson a piece entitled Target (Do It Yourself.) This chapter includes a
lengthy analysis of this piece in order to examine Antonis treatment of issues of
gender in direct relation to modern canonical works and ideas. Beyond the often
ponderously abstract references to female consciousness or subjectivity in some
feminist writings on art, Antonis work creates opportunities for interrogating
assumptions about gender and related ideas in more concrete terms. In addition
to a concentration on concerns raised by the Johns piece, other feminist works
will figure into this analysis, along with a focus on strategies of defiance and
appropriation.
A comparison between the different artistic strategies of Jasper Johns and
Antoni naturally arises in relation to the collaborative piece Target (Do It
Yourself). In this case, the analysis will also involve their similarities and

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differences in relation to the categories of minimalist and conceptual art. Leaving
aside any direct description of the original Johns target piece for the moment, it
is general similar in principle to his famous Flag painting (1954-5), which while
obviously painted, otherwise literally matches the flat rectangular shape and
design of an American flag. It is a literalist object in this senseto use the term
critic Michael Fried prefers over minimalist. David Hopkins remarks: Quite
simply, it is impossible here to separate out the representational content of the
image from its insistence on functioning as a flatly abstract Modernist painting
(58). In a similar sense, Antonis cubes in Gnaw are literally what they are
unusually large cubes of foodstuffs, with one cast in lard and the other in
chocolate. In addition, as the titles indicate they have literally been gnawed. The
difference is the evidence of production in Johnss Flag is precisely that of the
artists hand, while Antonis evidence of labor offers combined references to
sculpting and the stuff of everyday life. On the other hand, in the case of Johns
original Target (Do It Yourself) there is certainly no evidence of the hand of the
painter. It does suggest that some future action may include a form of not
particularly artistic or sophisticated painting; and, Antoni realizes this potential
with a most unusual hands-off action.
Though she may be best known today for her feminist writings on art (she
prefers to be identified as a writer rather than a critic), Lucy Lippard has not

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always exclusively focused on feminism in her writings about art. Indeed, one
indication of the relevance of conceptual art to the case of the Johns/Antoni piece
may be found in Lippards unusually personal narrative about the conceptualist
approach: I came to [conceptual art] as did most of my artist colleagues, through
what came to be called Minimalism (Six Years viii). Lippard comments that
there had been a lot of bickering about what Conceptual art is/was, which she
claims to have missed. Though it is, in fact, not so unlike the definition of many
others, Lippard makes a special point that she feels no compunction about
relying on her own personal definition: Conceptual art, for me, means work in
which the idea is paramount and the material form secondary, lightweight,
ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or dematerialized (vii). Johnss target
piece, prior to collaboration, fits this list of criteria quite closely. Antonis
collaboration with Johns and her larger body of work are significantly related to
this idea of conceptual art, both in terms of similarities and differences. The
material forms of Lard Gnaw, Lick and Lather, and Eureka are all ephemeral
in that they are subject to relatively rapid decay and dissipation; and lard, soap,
hair dye, mascara, and even the kind of chocolate Antoni uses are all relatively
cheapespecially considering what a similar amount of some art materials, such
as oil paints and brushes would costnot to mention marble and bronze. In
Antonis case, a certain lack of pretension seems obvious, just as in the

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conventional sense of aesthetic objects, many of her material forms seem
secondary. In her collaboration with the Johns piece, her material, as I will
describe later in this chapter, is basically free.
However, these similarities actually form the basis for a significant
difference: Antonis material forms or material (often close to the same thing as
the form) are actually primary when compared with the paints and other
materials for some kinds of painting. Paints may be used to create just about any
kind of image, which in that sense may render them relatively incidental. By
contrast, Antonis use of lard and chocolate, for example, precisely relates to her
activities and its relationship to her bodythe material, the form, and the process
are all the idea. But Antoni is hardly a mere minimalist or a purely conceptual
artist. The Johns collaboration and the relation of her work to his recalls
significant aspects of these artistic approaches, yet, if there ever was any artistic
product that fit the description of pure minimalism or conceptualism, the time of
such rigid categorization has long since passed. Of course, it is also the case
that Antoni is not a neo-classical sculptor nor an action painter, though she
clearly makes reference to these artistic methods as well. Indeed, the
corruptibility of these earlier purist art forms is something Antoni uses to her
advantageespecially in the way her particular art historical allusions are related

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to issues of gender. This is especially evident in the case of the Jasper Johns
collaboration.
Indeed, the expansive nature of Antonis art is reflected by its inclusion in
very diverse types of categories and discussion. The 2000 exhibition Outbound:
Passages from the 90s includes Antoni among the ten artists whose work
resonated across the last decade; the catalogue takes note: Theexhibition is
not didactic; these ten artist do not try to save the worldjust invite us to change
it (Friis-Hansen 11). In another instance, Antoni is included among forty-five
mostly emerging artists (defined as artists who began exhibiting in the 1980s
and 90s) in a 1999 discussion on contemporary American installation art and
new compelling themes or trends (Somers 53). The essay characterizes some
of the major categories of new developments associated with the work of Antoni
and others as Formalism to Materialism, Neo-conceptualism, Expressive and
Evocative, and Identity (The Construction of Self and Culture) (53).
Among the different themes that arise in discussions involving Antonis
work, feminism appears with some regularity, though in a range of contexts and
with varying degrees of emphasis. In 1999 Stuart Horodner notes: Janine
Antoni emerged in the early 1990s as an artist capable of reconciling
performance with the object, and empowered feminist thinking with post 80s
artworld ambition (48). In one 1996 exhibition that included Antonis work, the

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curator Laura Cottingham chose to re-do that seventies feminist artist thing, by
staging an all womens show described as a decisive and direct response to the
current climate, which acknowledges the need to look at that which seems to
have been dismissed or relegated to an historical abyss (Reitmaier 8). The
exhibition includes Antonis work among those chosen to attempt to actualise a
tension, a dialogue in an effort to better understand the articulations of gender
The curator also describes Antonis work as more formal and conceptual and
less about forcing the dialogue (8).
Works by Antoni are part of Charles Carpenters important collection of
modern and contemporary art; he comments on Butterfly Kisses in an interview
with ArtNews: Theres more to these works than just a feminist postureThey
have a nervous, crackling energy, as if she were trying to illustrate the Big Bang
Theory (Landi 82). On the other hand, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth finds something
quite emphatic about Antonis moves in her performance of Loving Care: Antoni
seemed explicitly to follow Helene Cixouss famous feminist injunction: Write
your self. Your body must be heard ("Antonis Difference" 1999: 138). In Body
Art: Performing the Subject Amelia Jones identifies the same performance piece
with numerous 1990s feminist projects rearticulating [the 1970s] critique (100).
By contrast, in that same article which includes Antonis work in a special survey
of American installation art, the issue of feminism is briefly noted with the

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comment that she concedes, her interest in feminist body art (Somers 61), as if
there is some doubt, hesitancy or embarrassment about such an admission.
It seems curious that though Edward Lucie-Smith chose not to include
Antoni in his most recent 2001 edition of Movements in Art Since 1945, he did
recognize her in his 1999 collaboration with Judy Chicago, Women and Art:
Contested Territory. This is a large, handsome volume filled with lush
reproductions; its written portions are carefully divided to distinguish the sections
authored by Chicago from those by Lucie-Smith. Lucie-Smith includes Antonis
Loving Care piece in a discussion of works done twenty years earlier by artists
involved in Chicagos project Womanhouse. Chicago herself never directly
addresses Antonis work. In a chapter entitled Household Vanities, Lucie-Smith
remarks: The action of scrubbing has always been a favorite theme in feminist
performances, describing Antoni as the woman, condemned by society to scrub
the floor, uses the action of scrubbing to produce a work of art. She herself is the
scrubbing brush (Chicago, Women and Art 167). In the Exploring Identities
chapter, he compares Antonis work to a performance done by Japanese artist
Shigeko Kubota in 1965 at the Perpetual Fluxfest in New York:
Like Janine Antonis much later Loving Care, Vagina
Painting is a critique of what some people have perceived to
be Jacksons Pollocks abstract expressionist machismo.

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Kubota squatted over the floor and painted red strokes on its
surface with a brush attached to her underwear (Chicago,
Women and Art 171).
Lucie-Smith has no comment on the obvious differences between these works,
but he clearly identifies Antoni as a feminist artist.
In a 1993 interview with Antoni, Laura Cottingham begins: Your work is
so much indebted to feminist art of the 70s: the autobiography, your use of your
own body as both process and subject/object, your reliance on the specificity of
female experience as content, the performative work that accompanies your
process ("Biting Sums Up" 104). Antonis initial response is that it was
necessary for 80s feminist to exist before she recognized her affinity with earlier
artists. She mentions women such as Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer for
being historically important and influential, but that her strategy has more to do
with the feminist artists of the 70sthe humor, the process, the emphasis on
performance, the intensely visceral quality of their work (104). Antonis directly
materialist artistic approach is consistent with her immediate response to the
more concrete aspects of the work being discussed, rather than to its theoretical
underpinnings, as Cottingham might have it. Nevertheless, feminism and
feminist ideas about art remain relevant to the discussion of Antonis work.

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In her 1994 anthology New Feminist Art Criticism Katy Deepwell observes:
Feminism is not a singular approach but a broad umbrella term for a diverse
number of positions and strategies amongst women involved in the production,
distribution and consumption of art (1). Nonetheless, she finds that the
breakdown of essentialist versus anti-essentialist views serves to characterize a
general point of contention the between feminist art critics. In the first essay of
the same volume Janet Wolff offers a related point that the eighties issue of
theory versus experience is not quite dead ("The artist, the critic" 14). She
describes this opposition by beginning with the example of arguments for and
against the art of Mary Kelly. Wolff uses the term scripto-visual to describe
Kellys work. Often referred to as both conceptual and feminist, her art is known
for its incorporation of text and images based around Lacanian psychoanalytic
concepts. On one side there are those who defend Kelly in terms of the
importance of a theory of representation in art criticism and practice, while Wolff
notes the objections of one critic who raises the "old...point about access and
elitismwho can understand Kelly or her commentators?and affirms the value
of celebratory work of artists like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro against work
which eliminates the possibility of experience from a womans physical, bodily
point of view ("The artist, the critic" 14-15).

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In the face of these debates, Wolff tries to assume a somewhat balanced
stance. She identifies Chicago and Schapiro as humanist, and prefers not to
dismiss such an approach outright, while noting that it is just as illegitimate to
generalize about theory and dismiss theory-based work and criticism out of
hand (Wolff, "The artist, the critic" 16). For her the question is what is at issue
at a particular moment, and what is the appropriate strategy. Regarding the
accessibility issue, she has no patience for either false populism or
obscurantism (17). Finally, she is very much in favor of inter-disciplinary
projects and integrated critical art studies (18).
Griselda Pollock is less equivocal than Wolff in her approach. She
questions the possibility of even taking the term women for granted (Pollock 8)
and believes we should no longer think of a feminist art history but a feminist
intervention in the histories of art (17). For Pollock: Feminist interventions
demand recognition of gender power relations, making visible the mechanism of
male power, the social construction of sexual difference and the role of cultural
representations in that construction (9). However, her earlier writings in
collaboration with Rozsica Parkerparticularly in discussions of actual artists
and artworksallow her to create more of a sense of why these ideas should
matter. In fact, one passage describing surrealist Meret Oppenheims famous

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fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon entitled Djeuner en fourrure brings Antonis
work to mind:
There is the shock of the unexpected, the dislocation of
elements from their roles in daily life, the transformation of
objects by being placed in an unusual context, not only a
teacup and piece of fur in an art exhibition, but fur in the
kitchen, luxury on the surface of the commonplaceHad not
some of the object a vague, discomforting sexual undertone?
(Parker143).
Although this is not an account of one of Antonis works, it captures something
fundamental about her own disruptive strategies. Moreover, it manages to
describe an art object by a womanan object that resonates strongly with some
of Antonis ownwithout insisting on a connection to some essential femininity.
The same cannot be said for another instance from a lengthy essay devoted to
Antonis work by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth to Antonis work:
Engaging in a dialogue with the women artists of the 1970s,
Antonis work restages her relation to her aesthetic mothers,
representing them as the figures of that from which she both
emerges and needs to separate. The aesthetic restaging of
this process of emergence/separation allow the artist to

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develop her own distinctly feminine voice (Lajer-Burcharth,
"Antonis Difference" 1999: 143-4).
The language may be a bit updated, but if the reference to the 1970s did not
appear in the text, it might be mistaken for part of a presentation given in one of
Judy Chicagos classesin fact, it was written in 1998 for an academic journal.
It is one thing to use the term aesthetic mothers to refer to Antonis
predecessors, but the metaphor is carried to essentialist extremes in this case.
These and other ideas on feminism and gender will be explored in this chapter.

Gender Illusions: Mom and Dad

In tracing the development of new opportunities for women over the past
century, art historian Anne Middleton Wagner notes: The invention of the
camera itself was no small aid to womens becoming educated and skilled in
artnot least, the art of photography itself (21). Antoni uses the camera for her
own kind of invention in Mom and Dad. A 1999 essay in Afterimage includes a
reproduction of the work, but there is no discussion of it in the text itself. This
may be seen as a kind of compliment, implying that the substance of the article
culminates in the image of Mom and Dad on the last page, as though after this
there is nothing more to be said.

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In the same article a reproduction and discussion of Catherine Opies
1991 piece Chicken reveals a similar strategy to Antonis. Chicken is a precisely
centered, extreme close-up of an Asian womans face cropped between her midforehead and the bottom of her chin. Her hair is extremely short and she sports
false facial hair in the form of a heavy black FuManchu. Various devices
indicate the authority of the evidentiary photograph, such as the frames
engraved brass title. The article continues: The artificiality of these details
suggest that the sign of gender (the mustache, the hair, the pose) and the
photograph as an index of gender is counterfeit. Yet this parody is enabled by
the fact that we lend credence to the photograph to begin with (Bowen 14).
Antoni uses a similar approach in Mom and Dad, but she raises the stakes and
broadens the implications of it considerably by using her own parents as models.
Between 1993 and 1994 Antoni produced the full-color photographic
triptych entitled Mom and Dad. The title is the one plain statement of fact: this
work actually does depict Antonis own parents. However, these three pictures
deviate markedly from the normal standards of portraiture. In each of them, at
least one parent is disguised beneath heavy prosthetic make-up and wearing
clothing designed to create as much resemblance as possible between him or
herself and the other parent. There are two pictures of the couple together with
one made up as the other, and a third central image in which the two are posed

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together impersonating each other. In other ways, the images are framed within
the usual conventions of the genre. In each composition the figures fill out much
of the frame from about the waist up in a simple and similarly balanced fashion.
They are seated upright though fairly relaxed in a side-by-side manner, in front of
a tasteful, dark gray background. Dressed in relatively formal but understated
attire, the couple gazes directly at the camera with little or nothing in their
expressions to indicate an awareness of anything unusual in the situation.
After gazing back at these images for a time, little things become more
noticeable. Subtle differences in dress become more apparent in the two shots
where each parent is made up as the other, while seated next to the undisguised
mom or dad. It is tempting to see the attire of the impersonators as somehow
not quite right, even though there is actually nothing that is out of place. They
are also carefully posed in very similar ways. Antonis undisguised mother
appears to be an absolutely poised and handsome middle-aged woman as she
gazes out confidently from the right of the frame. Her countenance seems to
indicate that she is very accustomed to being photographed, sitting at a slight
angle with her graceful fingers interlocking around her look-alikes arm. The folds
of what appears to be a black tunic-style dress sweep perfectly around her
shoulders and torso, gathering neatly under the crook of her elbow at the waist.
Her make-up is subtle and her shiny, auburn, shoulder-length hair is neatly

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combed back creating a nearly flawless frame for her face. She seems so
dignified that her husbands drag costume and make-up appear a little ridiculous
and unsightly one moment and sweetly comical the next. Though skillfully
applied his heavy make-up and prosthesis are clearly apparent. He sports a very
good wig, though it lacks the soft luster of the mothers hair. The dad-as-mom is
wedged into the left corner of the frame, his one arm almost completely
obscured. His dress is a deeper pitch of black, which probably helps to diminish
his size. There is also a touch of poignancy to his feminine guise, because it
gives him an even gentler appearance than his wife. Moreover, it provides some
sense of how the two may have come to resemble one another a bit more after
so many years together.
In the opposite picture, Antonis mother is a slightly more convincing
imposter. Her husband may be a little older than she, though he is also a
confident and attractive man, and his face seems somewhat more open and
friendly than hers. Both figures are dressed in black suits with identical white
shirts and similar looking ties of black with splashes of bright lavender and violet.
However, the imposter dads suit displays the added flourish of white pinstripes
with more touches of pink in the tie. The mother-as-father has her own
convincing wig, though it lacks the sheen of the real fathers white and silver-grey
hair. Antonis mother appears to have a very subtle smirk to her expression and

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the extra padding under the suit gives the tiny hint of a shrug. Perhaps it is also
the higher arch of her fake grey brow that creates the impression she might be
ready to say: Well, you would expect me to be a bit of a dandy now, wouldnt
you?
Finally, after a close examination of the other two compositions, the
portrait of the two together in drag as each other seems oddly normal. Here
they seem more comfortable and more like themselves somehow; they are no
longer in competition. In this case, though both have drastically altered their
appearances in order to switch genders, a sense of the individual personality of
each is sustained.
Mom and Dad suggests that assumptions surrounding gender identity are
not always reliable. There is a certain sexual suggestiveness to the "drag"
images here that contributes to both a sense of taboo and playful perversity in
relation to the tradition of the family photo. But because Antoni includes her real
parents, her personal involvement in revising their images may be that much
more startling. A composite photo documenting the process of their
transformation in Janine Antoni provides a vaguely unsettling glimpse of the artist
manipulating and objectifying her parents. Antonis special restaging is perhaps
more pointedly improper because it violates what is often considered the most
important parental duty beyond safeguarding and nurturingthat of being proper

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gender role models. Mom and Dad interrupts the image of parental partnership
as an emblem of a primordial truth about gender and sexuality that is
embedded in personal historyor perhaps pre-history. Antonis re-worked
presentation of a familiar family pose undermines the assumption that gender
simply exists as part of a natural and pre-given reality, and in an oddly literal way,
it does so at its source.
The impact of the Mom and Dad piece is related to its medium beyond the
way in which it plays upon and perverts a familiar form. Antoni exploits still
photographys reputation for verisimilitude to allow her to tease the audience with
an actual or true picture of something falsely contrived; the unnaturalness of the
piece is effective in a way that would be impossible if it were drawn or painted.
The old adage the camera never lies becomes true at the same moment in
which it is enlisted to produce an array of obvious impersonationsa special
performance of gender as masquerade.
There is a structure of reversals built into Mom and Dad: The child is
engaged in creating her parents as she pleases, even altering their primary
identity as man or woman. This perverse creation and elaboration seems to
parody the idea that to claim any special accomplishment on the part of a female
artist is inherently prodigious and requires extra scrutiny. Germaine Greers
comments in her introduction to The Obstacle Race include this observation

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regarding the reception of womens artistic efforts in previous centuries: Any
work by a woman, however trifling, is as astonishing as the pearl in the head of a
toad. It is not part of the natural order, and need not be related to the natural
order (Greer 4). A certain irony may be found, as well, in the way portraiture
was considered a relatively safe and proper occupation for female painters in the
sixteenth century: When Amilcare Anguissola allowed his daughter to paint
portraits for the public eye, it was precisely because portrait painting did not imply
an unbecoming breadth of experience (251). The surprising ways in which
Antoni uses her body in her process, often eschewing the hand, ironically echoes
another of Greers points about past attitudes towards female artists: Their work
was admired in the old sense which carries an undertone of amazement, as if
they painted with the brush held between their toes (3).
Earlier in this study, there is a reference to Vasari granting a special
exception for Sofonisba Anguissolas talents, while most women in this sixteenth
century context were rarely recognized for possessing more than the mechanical
skills to produce competent copies. At a time when assessments of superior
talent were reserved for men almost exclusively, Vasari determined that
Anguissola could actually prove her ability to make "things of her own and with
proper invention (Jacobs 97). On the one hand, it would seem that Antoni rather
emphatically renders an example of improper invention; her odd staging of the

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reinvention of her parents ends up as something more like bad copies. At the
same time but in the opposite way, Antoni might also be proving herself worthy
in the face of an ongoing modern/post-modern requirement, committing artists to
produce ever-greater challenges to proper invention toward the development of
important art. But Antoni chooses to complicate matters with her emphatic and
combined focus on both gender and art as matters of invention.
While Antonis work explicitly points to the ways in which gender is
constructed and perceived both as social fact and within representation, even
questioning its status as a discrete or primary category of human identity, Judy
Chicago earnestly set her sights on establishing new forms of aesthetic
codification for womens art as essentially distinct from that of men. Her project
is based on an assumption of irreconcilable difference. In her 1975
autobiography Through the Flower: My struggle as a woman artist, Chicago
recounts her efforts to engage in a historical investigation of womens artistic
production in relation to her own work. The following passage includes some of
her findings:
I had first searched out the work of other women who had
made abstract art, looking at it, reading whatever I could
about the artists, I examined the work of Barbara Hepworth,
Georgia OKeeffe, and Lee Bontecous, each of whom

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worked in a different historic milieu, but who, in my
estimation, had something in common with each other and
with me. They all seemed to have made a considerable
amount of work that was constructed around a center, as I
had done. There also seemed to be an implied relationship
between their own bodies and that centered image. In my
work, I felt a body identification with both the images I made
and the surface on which they were painted. I felt myself to
be both the image/surface and the artist working on that
painting simultaneously. Barbara Hepworth said body
experience . . . is . . . the center of creation. I rarely draw
what I see. I draw what I feel in my body (Chicago, Through
the Flower 141-2).
Although Antoni also emphasizes bodily experience in her development and
method as an artist, in her case the experience of the body is rather more literal
and less gender specific as an aspect of natural femininity. Her objects become
about a process of objectification as a production. Antoni does feature an
impression of her actual breast in Wean, but it is included in a line-up with other
impressions of industrially produced nipples and bottles as molds made in the
same wall. Here, nature and culture are not discrete and opposite domains but

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part of a broader construct, a fabric of fact and perception that will not be so
readily unwoven. The piece presents the female bodily experience as specifically
situated within a specific culture, rather than as an inherent, timeless and
universally shared knowledge.

Feminine morphology, mythology and Antonis Cradle

Judy Chicagos narrative of art and self-discovery, women artists and their
work, seems to portray women as defined by nature, while men are part of an
impinging, even deforming force of culture. Most of her formulations at least
imply that such a foundation underlies gender difference. These ideas are basic
to her notion that women artists are naturally drawn to art-making preferences
that are rejected as such by a male-dominated culture (Chicago, Through the
Flower 59). For Chicago, the art of women revealed a peculiarly feminine
tendency that was both a source and expressive manifestation of the special
powers and virtues of womanhood. She believed that the evidence for this was
revealed in the specific formal properties of female imagery. At one point, she
writes of how this became most demonstrably clear to her and her friend and
colleague Miriam Schapiro through an examination of abstract works by women:
From our experiences as artists, we both had an
understanding of how to look for the hidden content in

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womens work. What we discovered in our studies and later,
in our studio visits overwhelmed me; and reinforced my own
early perceptions. We found a frequent use of the central
image, often a flower, or abstracted flower form, sometimes
surrounded by folds or undulations, as in the structure of the
vagina. We saw an abundance of sexual formsbreasts,
buttocks, female organs. We felt sure that what we were
seeing was a reflection of each womans need to explore her
own identity, to assert her sense of her own sexuality, as we
had both done (Chicago, Through the Flower 143).
Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin expresses sympathy for Chicago and her
colleague Miriam Schapiro in their ideas about supporting the work and the
working lives of women, but, on the other hand she notes, I strongly disagreed
with their assertion that there was an innate feminine style, signified by
centralized imagery or circular forms (Nochlin 136). Despite myriad such
objections, and despite her own sometimes off-putting flamboyance and the
continuing controversy over the idea of exclusively female imagery, Chicagos
legacy lives on. Some of the old vocabulary has fallen by the wayside, but the
substance of essentialism is now maintained under the new rubric of feminine
experience. The assertion in the introduction to The Power of Feminist Art

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(1993) that feminism created a new theoretical position and a new aesthetic
categorythe position of female experience is not simply about a development
of the past; the idea of the self-conscious and universalizing female voice in
artself-conscious in articulating female experience (Broude 11-12) is alive in
present discourse. Some begin from the position that feminist theory is
fundamentally experiential (Keohane vii), while still essentializing experience in
terms of female consciousness. In one case, the assertion comes with a
warning that if female consciousness were denied reality or legitimacy, the
consequence for this would be that we [would] fail to be true to womens lived
experience in history (Keohane x). This is not explained but asserted as a selfevident fact. Lucy Lippard finds it necessary to announce: I am convinced that
there are experiences I share only with other womenThere are some aspects
of femaleness (if not femininity) that simply escape men (Lippard, Pink Glass
Swan 270). Lippard is certainly entitled to her feelings (similar to what many
women have expressed, no doubt), but can this be the basis for a general theory
concerning gender politics in art or anything else? Yet, such notions of unique
feminine consciousness or experience are sometimes used as a test for
determining if a female artist is properly woman-identified. This maneuver is
best exemplified in a statement published as recently as 1997 by Mira Schor
about one of the major figures in the history of womens art: Georgia OKeefes

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vehement denial of the sexual content of her images is a classic example of her
wish to pass (Schor 58).
Antonis 1999 piece entitled Cradle might qualify as properly womanidentified, since it is basically constructed around a center. In this case, Antoni
situates several items in a pile of sorts, one nestled into the next, according to the
size and shape that allows each to conform to the other. Each component is a
tool for scooping and containing, but there are no soft folds and the only curves
are made of cold metal. The original material for this piece is a giant scoop from
a construction tractor that is cut in half. One half is melted down to be cast into
the other parts, while the remaining portion becomes the enormous rusty mouth
that will contain the rest. The list of items, each cradling the next from large to
small is as follows: a construction bucket, agricultural bucket, escalator bucket,
snow shovel, garden shovel, fireplace shovel, serving spoon, soupspoon, and a
baby spoonand each piece was formed from the same heavy metal mother.
Amy Cappellazzo writes:
If English were a gendered language, the words for bucket,
shovel and spoon would all be female. There is a seeming
matrilineage to these formseach is a vessel of one sort or
another. Their respective jobs are to carry, hold, give, serve
and feed. The function of these tools closely parallels the

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role of the female body during motherhoodto carry, hold
give, serve and feed (Cappellazzo 114).
Cradle calls to mind Antonis comment to Cottingham that her chewed
cubes express an interrelated sense of intimacy and destruction. Here too, the
innermost implements of hearth, home and comfort are enveloped within the
larger forms associated with movements in the larger world. The graduating
levels of the interlocking elements thrust forward like both an offering and a trap,
resembling a huge gaping mouth with several layers of tongues passively waiting
to be fed but prepared to devour aggressively.
Cradle does not display the same inflected markings, the evidence of
Antonis laboring body found in other works; however, little of the process seems
hidden in the final composition. The straightforward configuration tracing an
activity of arranging recast and related objects together, still refers to the process
of its making. At the same time, the ultimate object created out of these useful
instruments renders them useless as long as the arrangement is maintained in
the permanent fixture of an art object. Cradle may appear as an odd symbol of
developing civilization or human speciation, with infant nurturance represented
at its smallest point, and the advancement of great earthmoving techniques at the
largest end. There may even be a reference to the myth of progress whose
viability depends on a mutually supportive social structure. However, in this

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case, the "advanced" machinery now reduced to a neat collection of parts isnt
moving anywhere. Finally, if one wishes to find a reference to female genitalia in
this work in terms of an interior cavity, one of the deepest parts exposes a set of
fierce looking teeth.
Judy Chicago had already established herself in her starring role as artist
and feminist fighter by the time she struck a pugilistic pose in a photograph to
promote one of her exhibitions. A 1971 issue of Artforum displayed this image in
an advertisement, which features the artist clad in boxing costume with gloves
glowering at the camera as she propped her elbows on the rails near a corner of
the rink. Her expression and body attitude are defiant and matched by those of
the woman posing just off to the side and behind her in the apparent role of
trainer. Chicagos belligerent stance is a colorful reaction to the reality of the
struggling female artist, but her broader agenda of intractable difference based
on gender is far less convincing. A glance through the pages of her
autobiography Through the Flower offers numerous examples of her mindset:
Men had constructed their community on the basis of their
interests and needs as men. I realized that men (and
women invested in the male community) could not respond
to my work the way I wanted them to. There was no frame
of reference in 1970 to understand a womans

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strugglesAnd even if the male world could acknowledge
that struggle, could it ever allow it to be considered
important art, as important as the art that grew out of mens
lives? (Chicago, Through the Flower 65).
The one materially grounded idea buried in this passage concerns the real
conditions of exclusion and gender bias that female artists faced during this time.
However, Chicagos assertions are all couched in terms of entirely discrete and
coherent realms of male and female worlds set in almost complete opposition to
one another. In effect, it reduces the problem to a simple antagonism between
men and women, rather than a condition of history and society. But there is no
one simple site or location for the woman problem, as Griselda Pollock and
Elizabeth Cowie explain:
[T]he term woman and its meanings are not given in
biology or in society but produced across a range of
interrelating practices. Of course this does not mean that
people of the female sex do not really exist. It merely means
that woman equals the significance attached in our culture
to the fact of being non-male; it is constructed by concrete
historical, social practices(Pollock 31).

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In this way, it makes no sense to consider the "woman" problem outside of this
matrix of relationships.
At one point, Judy Chicago articulates her sense of gender bifurcation in
terms of the abstract formal properties in art, related to the idea of female
imagery. These preoccupations are part of her own strategies of art making.
Chicago poses the problem in the form of questions: How can I make a hard
shape soft? I asked. How can I fit a soft shape into a hard framework? I had
been educated in the tradition of male art, and while some of that education was
important to me, much of it was restrictive (Through the Flower 94). Here it
seems that she is so determined to assert a strict male/female dichotomy that it
limits her own imagination to stereotypes of feminine and masculine forms.
At the same time, her scheme of a shared feminine world did not prevent
Chicago from finding fault with other women. While she generally observed that
audience response toward the collaborative art project Womanhouse broke down
along gender lines, she found that certain members of the female audience did
not receive the work appropriately. She remembered that while Many women
immediately felt comfortable in a reality they intuitively understood, nonetheless,
Some women, particularly those who had accepted certain masculine values
having to do with toughness, lack of emotional expression, and the idea that
womens experiences are inherently trivial, were hesitant in their responses

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(Chicago, Through the Flower 115). Of course, one wonders how she knew that
some of the women were responding precisely along these lines; any disapproval
or less than enthusiastic response from female members of the audience could
be automatically and conveniently disqualified as inauthentic.

Collaboration: Target (Do It Yourself)

Around the same time of her production Mom and Dad, Antoni takes
another kind of opportunity to trifle with a copy through her subtle and
sophisticated reworking of Jasper Johns's Target (Do It Yourself). In 1995,
Antoni participated in a project started by Stuart Horodner and Paul Romley (of
Horodner Romley Gallery in New York). Over a period of several years they had
been collecting copies of the Johns piece, which had initially been published in
1971 by the Museum of Modern as an invitation to the public to complete the doit-yourself target. Described as a curious piece (Rubinstein 110), the work
measuring roughly ten by eight inches is an offset lithograph of a target in simple
black outline on a white background. It is a typically deadpan signature creation
by Johns, in this case featuring the target with three disks of watercolor pigment
in primary colors and a small paintbrush attached below. As the reviewer
Raphael Rubinstein went on to report, Horodner and Romley proceeded to follow
up the call to act in their own way by passing out a copy of the piece to nine

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different artists, inviting them to respond with their own versions of a kind of
collaboration. Janine Antoni was chosen as one of the nine.
Antoni decided to bleed the pigments neatly arranged under the target
with a stream of her own urine. She literally inserts herself into the piece with
taboo fluids from her own body, leaving their mark on the work of a "modern
master." The account in ArtNews indicates that she said she did it "with pleasure
and respect" (Rubinstein 110). However, knowing the act involved in her
"technique" renders Johns's image of the target into a particularly irresistible kind
of provocation.
Antonis response is also interesting for the way her method suggests
gestures or activities more commonly associated with the male, such as territorial
marking, or even defacingor perhaps she performs her own version of a
pissing contest. But distance or a straight shot toward the arbitrary center of
the target isnt the point for Antoni; rather, she turns away from the abstract
outline to the substance of paint contained in the three disks. Antoni also takes
her one chance for collaboration in order to create a reaction with the pigments in
this way. Indeed, one way to imagine Antonis response to the invitation to add
her own art making to the Jasper Johns target is as a rival marking of the
territory of a famous male artist. It is also the case that Antoni leaves the line
next to Johnss signature blank, as if to indicate that the application of her urine is

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the signature. In this context, the deliberately blank line next to the one signed
by the male artist might refer to the historical condition of relative obscurity for so
many female artiststhe namelessness of her predecessors.
On the other hand, the mere look of Antonis collaboration, with its freeflowing tracings and diffusion of translucent color, appears to impose a playful
touch of lyricism onto Johnss plainly matter-of-fact object. Ultimately, however,
Antoni produces no clearly identifiable imagery or visible signs of putative gender
appropriate expression; she doesnt intervene with anything like a simple picture
of so-called feminine forms. In fact, she pisses on themthe "circles" of
pigment. It is not difficult to imagine that any Chicago-like applications would
tend to impose too much while offering too little. For example, a vivid overlay of
forms suggesting flowers or female genitalia might simplistically violate the terms
of Johnss piece, or overwhelm his work to the point of obliteration, leaving
nothing behind to counter-pose. By contrast, the only overt element of gender
identity included with Antonis work is the label of her name as part of an
exhibition. In this instance, I would argue that the feminine Janine next to her
collaborative piece with its anonymous stain bleeding into the paint and past the
absent signature becomes more richly suggestive than a wall full of vaginal
imagery paintings. The interrelated concerns between the art-making of Johns
and Antoni are too sumptuous to accommodate what in some cases resembles a

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balance sheet from the positive science of gender. Antoni is not simply aligning
herself with the male enemy, nor does her contribution in this collaboration
reveal an outright rejection of Johnss way of working. Antonis work may not fit
into the box designed for some kinds of feminist art, but this may in fact be part
of its strength.
Indeed, in the case of the "target" collaboration, the force of Antoni's
artistic energies is characteristically difficult to contain. She literally poured some
of herself into the original piece with a strangely personal, one-of-a-kind but
otherwise nameless mark, leaving the rest of Johnss form and concept basically
intact. Johnss only unique and personal mark is his actual signature, while
Antoni has some of herself actually incorporated into the work without any
positive identification. These complementary forms of signature have
significance in relation to the status of the work in the real world, which
inevitably includes the fact of commodification. At first pass, the personal mark of
the Jasper Johns signature is the primary element in terms of market value,
though the signing itself is otherwise a common act almost anyone performs in
everyday life; the second pass of Antonis contribution may create value with the
substance of her approach in the form of her nameless but oddly very personal
mark from the far less refined everyday act. Each artist inserts something that
is literally his or her own (Johnss signature and Antonis bodily fluid), while every

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other aspect of the pieces physical assembly could be accomplished by almost
anyone.
What begins to take shape is a display of complementary methods of artmaking, which interrogates the criteria of art, individual artistic genius, and
notions of the relationship between art and life. Johnss invitation may not be
gender-specific, but this arguably offers less support for a stance of neutrality;
Johns leaves the burden on the collaborator and subsequently, the viewer to
respond as she or he sees fit. The open call to participation suggests that the
audience always helps to produce the art at some level, and that it is possible in
some instances to identify or counter-identify as the truly engaged imagination or
consciousness sees fit. Antoni certainly takes advantage of the opportunity for
direct participation to insinuate matters of gender into the developing layers of the
piece. But whatever the original intent, Johns created a piece/situation that
opens onto a variety of questions such as: those concerning the status of artists
and art objects; the social/individual dichotomy as it emerges through, or is
challenged by art practices; the possibilities and the limitations of art. There
seems to be little in the way of a truly safe refuge or viable space of neutrality to
occupy in relation to this piece, or at least as Antonis efforts demonstrate.
Target (Do It Yourself) appears to be a uniquely public object, available to forms
of collaboration ranging from homage to defilement. Antoni may be seen as

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having drawn from some idea of both extremes and put them into play with her
creation of yet another object of performance.
There is a deceptive simplicity to Target (Do It Yourself). The conceptual
basis of this piece, from its original provocation through Antonis contributions,
figures significantly toward the realization of this artwork. Indeed, the larger
bodies of work for both artists may be characterized in this wayin each case
there is a relationship to the sometimes confusing category of conceptual art or
conceptualism.
In art historian Paul Woods 2002 volume entitled Conceptual Art he
examines some of what conceptualism has come to describe. In a more
general sense, Wood remarks that it has come to stand in some quarters for the
array of contemporary practices that do not conform to conventional expectations
of art exhibitions showing hand-crafted objects for aesthetic contemplation. In
this instance, he notes: Conceptualism becomes a negative catch-all for what
conservatives of various stripes do not like about contemporary art. In another
case, Analytical Conceptual art gets downgraded as the art of white male
rationalist, mired in the very modernism they sought to critique (Wood 9). In
1977, Lucy Lippard had high hopes for its antiobjects in the form of ideas
books or simple Xeroxed texts and photographs, as more democratizing,
compared to the gigantic canvases and huge chrome sculptures costing five

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figures and filling the world with more consumer fetishes (Lippard, Pink Swan
121). Perhaps the most significant claims arises with another one of Woods
examples: Rewriting Conceptual Art has it that such art constitutes the ground
on which early all contemporary art exists, and that in its recent efflorescence,
Conceptualism has become all-pervasive if not dominant in the art world (Wood
9). Johns began exhibiting in 1958, so his work was becoming established just
before what has also been termed concept art was beginning, before Antoni
was even born. Henry Flynt has been credited with coming up with the term
concept art in 1961. In 1962 when Robert Morris was pursuing a masters
degree in art history, he wrote to Flynt:
The problem [with art] has been for some time one of
ideasBut what I mean by new ideas is not what you
might call Concept Art: but rather effecting changes in the
structure of art forms more than any specific content or
formsI think that today art is a form of art history (Stiles
805).
Morriss final comment relates to the works of both Johns and Antoni in
somewhat different ways. The whole notion of Johnss original lithograph as that
which would be continually reproduced, and yet, done over again indefinitely
through collaborations implies that its history is always in the present, always

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residing in the object alreadyand the remaking process lives beyond his
creation of it. For her part, many of Antonis pieces contain art historical
references that might be like a form of art history for the way she processes
such allusions, rather than merely quoting. In the case of the Johns piece, she
seems to confront art history in an especially direct way, as she definitely makes
her mark on a piece of it. At the same time, though she modifies the look of the
original, she stays consistent with Johnss art historical example of effecting
changes in the structure of art forms, in a way that bears on the content of her
process.
Critic and historian Kenneth Baker frames Robert Morriss work in relation
to conceptual art with a description of how his art of the late sixties emerges
against a rapidly changing background of other artists efforts to dematerialize
the art object, a process that stripped the category sculpture of what scant
definition remained to it (Baker 92). Johnss Target (Do It Yourself) does not
dematerialize, though from the onset it exists to be altered in such a way as to
require new kinds of recognition and apprehension. Antonis work is often a rematerialization of the art object into a form that exists to reveal its making; the
process and materials are the object.
Sol LeWitts works are significant contributions to the category of
conceptual art. In a certain sense, a number of Antonis works resemble one of

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LeWitts remarks: Once the idea of the piece is established in the artists mind
and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly (Baker 92).
There is a kind of blind fury to Antonis method, as in the case of her licking
technique during the sculpting of the chocolate busts in Lick and Lather; she
would not have been able to see the effects as she produced themcertainly
not as she could have from the arms length perspective of crafting a figurative
piece by hand. Another obvious example is Antonis Butterfly Kisses, which
involves her method of making marks by blinking against the paper with mascara
soaked lashes; the eye is definitely put to work in this case, but in an oddly
mechanistic way unrelated to facilitating the sense of sight. However, in this
case as well, the relative blindness of her process is a built-in feature, which
becomes part of the work and its conceptual suggestiveness, if you will. Antoni
fussily paints with her lashes, but her specific application limits the usual
artistic possibilities associated with the brush-in-hand technique as an
extension of the eye. Here Antonis efforts resemble a visual pun, suggesting
that art-making is something other than a simple matter of eye/hand coordination
or physical skillcertainly not in the normal sense.
Antonis work introduces inventive and ingenious complications to past art
movements or historical categories (e.g., conceptual art); and, though male
artists are comparatively over-represented in the historical record, ignoring their

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work as being too male or masculinist also ignores some of her achievement.
Moreover, comparative analyses of the works of Jasper Johns and other male
masters with works by Antoni, contrary to certain feminist assumptions about
gender and art, do not detract from Antonis difference as either an artist or a
woman. At the same time, the point is to challenge the notion of absolute and
inevitable differences in artistic production based on the gender of the artist. This
certainly is not the same thing as denying the reality of womens exclusion from
participation and recognition in the public forum and historical archive of art,
especially as practicing artists. But Antonis work creates a context for gender,
which serves to problematize the issue more effectively than any mere statement
about sexism. Beyond this, even the worst gender based assumptions, attitudes,
and biases with all the possible adverse effects to follow and pursue a woman
through her daily existence, cannot merely be summed up as a matter of female
consciousness, which is somehow utterly distinguishable from the mans world.
It is also the case that it would be difficult to imagine Antonis modifications
of the Johns piece as having nothing at all to do with a gesture of disrespect or
defiance. Actually, Johnss piece is itself a gesture toward challenging the status
of the artwork and its origins in terms of the exclusive domain of individual
genius. Antonis collaboration goes beyond the call while remaining consistent
with the spirit of questioning accepted notions about art. Why shouldnt Antoni be

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allowed to appropriate previous developments or outrages from the art historical
archive toward her own purposes? Is the male gender of those most recognized
for the original artwork a disqualifier? Why simply concede ownership to men?
Antoni does something altogether more interesting than simply mucking up the
modern masters piece: she elaborates on the Johns target by contaminating it
(in this case literally) and sterile notions of art with an insertion of the body and
the complications of gender.
However, it does seem that the preferred type of taboo bodily fluid for
women artists is not urine but blood. This can be simulated blood, animal blood,
or sometimes actual menstrual blood. Carolee Schneemann stained white fabric
with menstrual blood in her 1972 piece Blood Work Diary. (Schneemanns work
is vaguely similar to a diary piece Antoni produced using make-up, to be
discussed later in this chapter.) Faith Wildings 1970 installation featured a
mannequin laid out like a sacrificial offering before a type of altar arrayed with
candles and flowers. The belly of the female sacrifice in effigy revealed the
rotting entrails of a cow, while the wall behind the altars cross was covered with
a striped pattern of blood-soaked Kotex pads tacked up with stains streaming to
the bottom.
One of the artists most preoccupied with incorporating actual blood in her
work was Ana Mendieta (1948 1985). Her work is similar to Antonis in its

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repeated use of tracings of her own body, but the similarities mostly end there. In
1984, Mendieta restaged her original 1974 performance Body Tracks, which
combined a mixture of blood and tempera paint to trace the form and movement
of her arms and hands on paper. Indeed, this is the one work that might most
resemble Antonis art. Body Tracks may also have been one of her more subtle
works, while being more striking than the more blatantly bloodied pieces.
Mendieta used a bloody imprint of her body for one of her Silueta series, and her
1973 Self-portrait with Blood is an actual photo of her face smeared with blood.
Susan Stoops describes blood as Mendietas primal paint, along with the
following comment: In the cultural context of the seventies, the material would
be read as an empowering metaphor furnished by the female body and would act
to diminish the conceptual and physical distance between the artist and her art
(Stoops 61). It is not precisely clear how in abstract terms, this kind of proximity
between the artist and her work would be empowering. In any case, literal use of
the body does not in and of itself have the optimum effect. Antoni certainly
inserts her body quite literally into her work on many occasions, but her efforts
are not simply focused on the body alone as its own self-evident reality. There
are significant instances that are about the scene of a process involving her
body, which also address issues of distance and absence related to that same
process. The more sensational effects of using actual blood will sometimes

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overwhelm a piece with its shock value, leaving little else in its wake. Mendietas
Self-portrait with Blood may be a case in point. Antonis non-bloodied art (so to
speak) might read as evidence of the exhaustion of the metaphor.
In a similar way to many of Antonis other efforts the target piece
emphasizes an act or a process, rather than the simple rendering of symbolic
imagery. And, in this case, her approach is literally and rather deliberately offtarget. However, by seeming to ignore the concentric circles of the target and
missing the mark, so to speak, she still honors the integrity of the original piece
with a contribution that does not alter its coincidence of image and object. At the
same time, Antoni manages to stay within these terms of Johnss work in her
own unique way. Although she adds the outside-of-the-lines swirls and smears
of pigment in a way that at first glance might appear to offer an expressively
abstract or extraneous touch, thus introducing a formal contradiction with Johnss
art, the expressionist element does not derive from a typical method of artistic
technique and art materials deployed for deliberate effects, but from applying the
results of bodily processes required for daily animal survival. In this case, there
is a coincidence of image, object and act. Johns provided the target, which
always exists as both image and object; and, the paint with paintbrush, which are
normally used as the medium and tool for creating a third thing with properties
and effects unique to itself. But Johns chose to emphasize the similarity between

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these elements with an arrangement of the artist's implements as objects, whose
forms and symmetry are consistent with the line and circles image of a target.
Antoni comes along with her simultaneous act, object and image (the drizzle of
urine), which perfectly coincide with the original all-at-once image and object.

Collaboration: Womanhouse (or Building the House with the Mistresss Tools)
Moving from Antonis collaboration with the master, we enter
Womanhouse, a much larger scale collaborative project organized by Judy
Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. This tremendously ambitious endeavor was
created in six weeks in 1971 and opened for public exhibition for only the first two
months of 1972. The raw material for Womanhouse was a condemned and
abandoned mansion, scheduled for demolition by the city of Los Angeles.
Chicago and her group were allowed to rehabilitate and rework it for exhibition
before it was destroyed. However, it was indeed demolished and I had no
opportunity to view it for myself first-hand. Arlene Ravens account of this project
in the 1993 anthology The Power of Feminist Art is the most extensive one
produced to date, and what follows is largely based on her re-creation of the
event. Here the story is about so much more than a work of art.

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Womanhouse is written about as an event of affirmation for women artists
consistent with Chicagos pedagogical mission. It would be a learning by doing,
putting into practice
...the psychological discoveries offered by the
consciousness-raising format of the womens movement.
Designed to be a structured conversation, consciousnessraising allowed each contributor to speak about her
experiences uninterrupted and to hear the testimonies of
other women; in this way, women shared life experiences,
instead of remaining isolated by their concerns and fears.
(Raven 50).
The strict goal-oriented thrust of the exercise seemed to urge students to get
with the program as expeditiously as possible. Students were taught to work
cooperatively and the focus on collaboration cannot be overemphasized.
Raven claims that:
[C]ollaboration as form or subject has characterized much of
the feminist art created after Womanhouse in Southern
California. Because the West Coast became a model and
leader for feminist production nationally and internationally,

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the influence of the transitory collaboration at Womanhouse
has been pervasive and lasting (Raven 50).
The initial renovation phase of the project involved everything from unclogging
toilets to re-hinging doors; it was ultimately realized as one by one, the rooms
became clean white cubes and rectangles for the presentation of a radical and
complex contemporary art (Raven 50). Each student then chose a room of her
own to develop as an installation environment.
Beyond the rehabilitation efforts, the highly-touted claim of an ideal
collective collaboration for Womanhouse is harder to support. Why make clean
white cubes, as in exact replications of standard individual gallery spaces?
Each woman had her own room in which to produce individualized work, which
seems no more collaborative than the artistic activities taking place in any
building with separate studio spaces. Of course, the rooms themselves were
intended as individual works of art with a broadly common theme, but there is
little of any substance in Ravens account of how they are related in any truly
collaborative sense. Apart from their having been created under the same roof of
one collectively refurbished edifice, what connects the individual installation
works as collective art? Her narrative does emphasize the premise that womens
experiences as women is of primary significance, (most often characterized in
one way or another as the plight of the suburban housewife), but there is little in

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the way of any rich description or vivid sense of affect peculiar to the work itself,
either in the case of the installations or the accounts of performance events. The
claim for the project is one of restoration of the psyche and a rehabilitation of the
souls of young women. It is supposed to have granted them the opportunity to
find themselves and their personal and artistic power through their participation.
Ravens account stresses the fact that the so-called collective was an exclusively
female undertaking. The assumption for the entire endeavor is that the women
are each naturally and equally endowed with an empathetic capacity to
understand each others experiences as women.
Womanhouse often involved a significant amount of disagreeable and
arduous tasks, especially in the beginning phases. There were no less than
seventeen rooms in the derelict mansion making up the basic material to be
transformed by the twenty-one students in the Feminist Art Program. Arlene
Raven describes the raw material for Womanhouse in terms of its need for major
restoration efforts, even apart from the ways in which the artists would look to
refashion it. She describes the students as largely responsible for the
successful completion of what proved to be a vast creative undertaking (Raven
48).
In November [1971], when the twenty-one CalArts Program
students began work on the house, they had a rude

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awakening. One surprise was the amount of work required
to create the collaborative environment. Another astonishing
realization was the nature of the work ranged from cleaning
to construction, labor that crossed not only class and gender

lines [emphasis added], but that was outside the scope of

art experienced by the rest of the art school (Raven 50).
This project may very well have made physical demands on the students beyond
what they would experience in other classes, but, even at that time, working
outside the usual confines of a classroom or studio was not so far outside the
scope of art. As far as lines of gender being crossed, it overstates the case a bit
to regard the students renovation work in quite this way. It also concedes too
much to presumptive gender stereotypes that women do not do hard labor
especially in an account written in the mid-nineties. Similarly, the claim that the
students crossed lines of class is a mischaracterization of what actually
constitutes class. Class is not something someone wears like a tool belt that
may be taken off or put on. It is a social relationnot a lifestyle choice.
Beyond Womanhouse, Judy Chicago generally made special demands of
her students in her Feminist Art Program. In preparing female students for being
taken seriously as artists, her tactics could be severe. Sometimes her rhetorical
hectoring came in the form of questions such as: Do you want to be an artist?

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and Do you want to achieve something in your life? Those who signed up for
her Womens Class art course were told forthrightly that she was looking for
women strong enough to become leadersto give up makeup, girl stuff and
traditional sex roles (Wilding 34). Yet is it so easy to distinguish between the
despised girl stuff and the idealized essentially feminine experience from which
the women were to draw? Where is the line drawn between traditional sex
roles and the lived experience of women? The members of the class and
project were attempting the cultural production of a kind of cult of womanhood.
Arlene Raven quotes Chicago from her autobiography Through the Flower: my
struggle as a woman artist: Womanhouse became both an environment that
housed the work of women artists working out their own experience and the
house of female reality into which one entered to experience the real facts of
womens lives, feelings, concerns (Raven 48).
It is fair to inquire as to whose real facts these might be, about which
womens lives. Chicagos assumption of women as a coherent, unified, and
basically essentialized subject is the ideological foundation of her feminist
doctrine. At the same time, her programmatic approach of a hard-nosed
concern about the real facts concerning women would translate into a fanciful
kind of feminine aestheticism. Chicago had an oddly detached notion of
exaggerated female culture as a matter of formal innovation. She mused about a

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strangely transhistorical centuries of women embedded in their houses and
busying themselves with activities such as baking and quilting, which had the
effect of expending their creative energies away. Chicago included her
colleagues in writing:
What would happen, we wondered, if women took those very
same house-making activities and carried them to fantasy
proportions? Instead of making a pink-and-white, filmy,
feminine but functional bedroom for ones daughter, the
space might become pinker and whiter and filmier and filled
with more and more ruffles until is was a complete
environment. Could the same activities women had used in
life be transformed into the means of making art? (Chicago
104).
It seems here that house-making activities and the creation of pink-and-white,
filmy, feminine things can be exaggerated as art, while make-up and girl stuff in
personal practice must be completely disavowed by women working to be
genuine artists. But it is not always clear what is meant as parody and what
becomes a matter of affirmation with this program of female solidarity. Where is
the line drawn? Who decides what is proper material for parody and what is
improper comportment for a serious artist? There are certain pieces included in

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Womanhouse that explore the ambiguities rather effectively, but these seem to
be works created in spite of Chicagos programmatic direction.
Chicago has through most of her career focused on gender specificity, not
only as a teacher and director of Womanhouse, but in the creation of her own art
and writings about art. At the same time, the nature of what she (among others)
termed feminist consciousness vis--vis art and the works of women artists
both past and contemporary tends to ignore historic specificity and various social
contingencies in relation to these matters. Chicago wrote about the legacy of
male-dominated society and the damage done to our perceptual powers by the
absence of images of female reality in Through the Flower (136). As part of this
complaint, she expresses a concern for the lack of menstruation images in art
and literature made by women (135). It is difficult to imagine how such imagery
would make sense in every instance of cultural production, even apart from the
fact that one of her main assumptions is that many, if not all women identify with
menstruation and any imagery it may suggest in the same way. From that point
on, the questions and challenges could multiply regarding notions of dignity and
affirmation for women, specifically in relation to art and society.
Chicago went on to produce her own 1972 installation Menstruation
Bathroom, as part of the Womanhouse project. Perhaps, given a certain 1970s
American (feminist) context, the provocation she presented delivered a satisfying

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sense of shock and defiance of proper lady-like conduct; and the ill-mannered
gesture as a statement against expectations of female passivity and conformity
does bear precedence in relation to Antonis rude ways. On the other hand,
there is a one-note simplistic quality to Chicagos menstruation piece that
seems to narrow the subjectivity of women to the experience of their biology.
More recently, there are those who assume that if they can somehow
avoid seeming to endorse biological determinism, then they may escape the
appearance or fact of essentialist thinking. In one instance, Hilary Robinson
believes her interpretation of the ideas of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray offers
special dispensation. Robinson explains that Irigaray insists upon the specificity
of gendered bodily experience while denying there is an essential, or core,
femininity; instead the specifics of female bodily experience are seen as cultural
and social in origin ("Border Crossings" 138). Here she never makes a real
connection with anything broadly and concretely social, but asserts that there is a
better way to identify women as artists in order to rehabilitate the "woman"
qualification for artist. However, after claiming to have discovered that feminine
essence is shown to be in fact a construct, Robinson elaborates on the
implications in an oddly essentializing way:
We find also she-artist. The classification artist, carrying
masculine codings of placing work before all, of the

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overvaluing of the creator and the undervaluing of
procreation, and the codification of genius which is always
manoeuvred to exclude the female, her case needs the
qualification woman. The codes of femininity imply
suppression of desires in favor of others, particularly the
family. According to these codings, the definition "artist"
cancels out the "feminine": the words "feminine" and
"woman" by definition exclude what it is to be an "artist".
The woman artist thus transgresses both what it is to be an
artist and what it is to be a woman. She-artist is bodily,
professionally, of the margins; the (gendered) visuals of her
(gendered) body and of her (gendered) work are by their
existence transgressive; they are on edge, marginalized;
they cross borders (Robinson, "Border Crossings" 139).
Apparently, Robinson's use of "codings" is enough to indicate that her account
adheres to notions of social construction. Actually, her account concedes too
much to the real and imagined sense of "woman" or "feminine" as
disqualifications. It also sets up a kind of straw man argument to be countered
with essentialist claims for how the "female" qualification is its own special and
especially daring amplification of "artist"that is, at least by implication, for those

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women artists who are properly gender identified. Robinson's initial point of
pitting creation against "procreation" takes for granted that all women identify
equally with a sense of the maternal or the capacity to bear children. Moreover,
she assumes too much about opportunities for creative labor, whether for
females or males. How does Robinson's formulation account for those who do
not have the luxury of an elective emphasis on work? It is not difficult to imagine
women who would long to have a chance to overvalue artistic work or some
form of more self-directed and creative laborthis could apply to men too, of
course. In any case, here the unstated assumptions about social conditions of
choice and opportunity are folded into similar oversimplifications about gender.
Ultimately, Robinson stereotypes and privileges the division of gender above all
others, which characterizes her theoretical writings in general as essentialist
regardless of her disclaimers.

Situating gender and femininity

In another time and place, make-up and girl stuff, so to speak, were not
considered obstacles to a female artists success, or a sign of her lack of
seriousness at all. In another context, many things superficially described as
frilly or girly were part of a shared sense of fashion, imagery and sensibility for
both men and women of the privileged classes. This was the world swathed in a

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decorative aristocratic style later labeled Rococo. The style flourished beyond
the domain of the Kings court to include, as Whitney Chadwick notes, the
interests of the urban nobility, as well as important commercial groups. She
goes on to describe this sumptuous aesthetic in terms of curvilinear surface
patterns, lavish gilding, dainty decorations of flowers and garlands, elaborate
costumes and stylized manners as that which gave visual form to feeling and
sensation (Chadwick, Women, Art/Society 1st ed. 131-2).
The Rococo style emerged in an early eighteenth-century, predominantly
French context, though it had international appeal. It arrived at a time of both
striking and subtle shifting and overlaps of developments in formal strategies and
social forms. The Rococo era figures into Arnold Hausers account of the
dissolution of courtly art as prefiguring that which superseded itbourgeois
subjectivism (Social History Vol. 3: 4). Whitney Chadwick emphasizes how this
era became an occasion for vastly improved opportunities for women artists. Not
only were chances enhanced for women to practice art in the first place, many
more women competed in the same arenas as men. The ascendancy was
neither consistent nor permanent. As Chadwick remarks: The fortunes of these
artists are inextricably bound up in the changing ideologies of representation and
sexual difference that accompany the shift from a courtly aristocratic culture to
that of a prosperous middle-class capitalist society (1st ed. 127). But it was also

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the case that for a brief time, what we would call a kind of feminine aesthetic
became a generalized cultural value neither identical nor reducible to an
association with the female gender.
The Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675 1757) may have had her
own preoccupation with the girl stuff of her world. She began her artistic career
decorating snuff boxes and painting miniature portraits on ivory. And while it
may never be known precisely how she arrived at her innovative use of pastels,
Carriera's familiarity with chalk materials appears to have a significant source:
The dry chalk pigments were similar to those used in womens make-up; and
theater, masquerade, make-up, and pastel portraiture formulated an aesthetic of
artifice in early eighteenth-century France, at whose center was a woman artist
(Chadwick, 1st ed. 132).
Carriera achieved major recognition during this time of transition in art and
society. Often identified as the most prominent early eighteenth-century French
painter, Antoine Watteau was enthusiastic enough about Carrieras work to
request of her that they exchange works. For a brief period, women were also
admitted into the Acadme Royale and Carriera gained entry by unanimous vote
in October 1720 (Chadwick, 1st ed. 133).
No woman painter of the century enjoyed as great a
success, nor had as much influence on the art of her

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contemporaries as Carriera. She was the first artist of the
century to fully explore the possibilities of pastel as a
medium uniquely suited to the early eighteen-century search
for an art of surface elegance and sensation (Chadwick, 1st
ed. 132).
Although he does not himself explicitly make the argument, Arnold
Hausers characterization of rococo is highly suggestive of conditions of greater
inclusion that may have benefited women, though not because of any particular
value or emphasis on things deemed feminine. His claim identifies the last
universal style of Western Europe as Rococo. His description is not only of a
style but of a pivotal moment in history in terms of that which is not only
universally recognized and moves within a generally speaking uniform system
over the whole of Europe, but is also universal in the sense that it is common
property of all gifted artists, and can be accepted by them without reserve
(Hauser, Social History Vol. 3: 35).
But the doors of the Acadme did slam shut for women again, as other
changes lay ahead:
In the second half of the eighteenth century a revolutionary
change took place; the emergence of the modern middle
class, with its individualism, and it passion for originality, put

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an end to the idea of style as something consciously and
deliberately held in common by a cultural community, and
gave the idea of intellectual property its current significance
(Hauser, Social History Vol. 3: 35).
My point here is not to idealize a bygone era of equal opportunity for women
(which was not fully being offered, anyway); nor does this narrative of the rise of
the feminine aesthetic necessarily imply a corresponding movement in matters
of social injustice based on gender. Chadwick specifies that in the social context
surrounding the artistic production she examines, class was a more powerful
determinant of status than gender; upper-class women were more closely
identified with men of their class than with women of the lower classes and
paintings emphasize and reinforce the class distinctions (Chadwick, 1st ed. 129).
It is a mistake to think of women as a discrete, coherent constituency outside of
class distinction. In the end, there is no neat, once-and-for-all-times map of the
correspondences between gender, femininity and societyand art is necessarily
situated within this same unstable terrain. And though we have seen how art
may become part of mystifications to the contrary, the point here is that gender
and femininity are historicalnot merely, or exclusively but factually. It is also
possible that another kind of engagement with the aesthetic can be at the
crossroads of this insight.

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Janine Antoni indulged in make-up and girl stuff around the beginning of
her career with one of her earliest installations exhibiting her 1991 work Diary.
The piece features a toiletries case propped open on the floor against the gallery
wall. Lined up vertically on the wall above the case are six trays containing
small, shallow, round containers of lip color. Their placement and arrangement
on the wall suggests both the markings on the grid of a calendar and the literal
traces of daily life; the objects become place-marks of the colors she wore
between August 26 and September 26, 1991. Beneath each small receptacle
where she would have dipped and smudged her fingers to apply the color to her
lips is a written caption. These do not describe the make-up but events, objects,
and experiences that the lip colors seem to punctuate. The diary-like recordings
suggest an equation between compulsive preening, and everyday routine, as
though attention to personal appearance was the unremarkable, mundane fact of
a girls life. At the same time, there are relatively few feminine touches to the
scene, no accoutrements of the vanity table. Situated next to the trays and
toiletries case is a propped open cigar box mounted on a small bracketed shelf.
The boxs interior is lined in pink satin revealing an array of lipsticks designated
for wear at specific major life events and rituals, including a funeral. The piece
seems to break down into separate stations: the larger case and arrangement of
calendar palettes might be the main production area, while a special display of

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more refined beauty products becomes a sign for the type of production to be
carried out. Captions and labels draw attention to the objects as if they might not
otherwise make sense. These little clues of activities and presence create a
greater sense of absence. The primary materials and evidence of their use seem
to stand in place of the made-up subject.
Make-up and girl stuff are the central figures in many paintings by
Audrey Flack. However, in this case, the aperture opens on a different moment
of a similar absence. The startling verisimilitude of her 1974 Chanel is a vivid
example of larger than life images, as the acrylic on canvas piece spans nearly
seven feet wide. The luster of this portrayal of cosmetics and toiletries on a
mirrored surface is almost painful. As is the case with many of Flacks paintings,
the photo-realist works of highly saturated color and exacting technique seem
obsessively devoted to mimicry of surface phenomena and reflection. Flack
appears to have set about capturing all the gleam and glitter of the ladys
dressing table in the way other painters might have studied the effects of light in
the natural world. As with the models and actresses associated with such
scenes, the actual making of the image is hidden without a trace. Flacks
paintings suggest worlds unto themselves; viewing them is a visit to a planet of
girl stuff.

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Historically, Audrey Flacks work was directed toward an apprehension of
the photographic episteme. In an early twenty-first-century digital world of
seemingly daily innovations in imaging technology, Flacks work may have
become somewhat harder to see. In a similar way, direct imagistic challenges
to mediatized portrayals of women and themes of femininity seem to have lost
their force.
Of course, other make-up artists turned to rather different methods.
Martha Wilson used her own face and body as her main medium, putting herself
through various transformations in her 1974 piece, I Make Up the Image of My
Deformity; I Make Up the Image of My Perfection. In this case, she literally
played out a process of creating various versions of herself as alternately
perfect and deformed. She did indeed deploy make-up in this piece, but she
went further by gaining and losing weight in order to produce different images of
herself and in particular, of her face. In her deformed version she seemed to go
out of her way to enhance every quality or flaw that might not have measured up
to fashionable standards. She then gave herself what appeared to be the typical
beauty treatment for the perfect picture. The mere fact that each version is
presented as such, lends a similar mask-like quality to both of them. The fact
that she staged the whole thing and chose the method, result and label for her
incarnations makes them both appear as equally artificially, as just different

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character masks. The lack of a plain or real version creates another kind of
absence. However, the preoccupation in our current popular culture with makeovers and before and after comparisons, on various talk and reality shows is
so common that the initial effect of a re-appropriation seems blunted, perhaps
lost.
So, it would seem that the actual, natural body doesnt automatically
offer a transparent medium, or a truly unmediated base from which to defend
against the threat of cultural mediation. It may even be that the very opposition
of the body and culture is itself a cultural conceit. The logical extension of Martha
Wilsons efforts would be the work of French artist Orlan. Orlan actually goes
under the knife to have her bodily medium refashioned, and has her operations
specially staged for a public performance. A written description alone of her
1993 Omnipresence might be enough of a shock: Orlan has plastic surgeons
slice into her flesh, literally lifting it from the muscles of her face to reconfigure its
contours according to Western ideals of feminine beauty (Jones 226). Antonis
homely arrangement of boxes and trays hardly compares as a transformative
spectacle. But Diary should not be considered a lesser effort for all that. Ewa
Lajer-Burcharth reads Antonis Diary as follows: Turning cosmetics into
material metaphors of the malleability of gender, she embraces performative
strategies in order to envision transformative ends. The stress is here precisely

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on the critical dimension of the imaginary rather than on actual bodily
transformations (Lajer-Burcharth, "Antonis Difference" 1999: 134).
Returning to the historic example of Judy Chicago's feminist art, while
some of Antonis strategies may appear superficially similar to Chicagos, and
although her interest in gender is as passionate, she does not have an explicitly
political agenda. Such a programmatic approach might otherwise inhibit Antoni
from experimenting with an endless variety of forms and media, and implicitly
drawing on the work of all her predecessors, both male and female. The open,
often witty (while still arduous) quality of Antonis practice may suggest more
about the nature of gender trouble than art of the correct political line. Is the
extent of Chicagos strategy of resistance the fanciful valorization of anything
already marked as feminine? Ultimately, the inconsistencies in her political
dogmatism and what I would identify as her female aestheticism may not be so
much at odds after all, due to her true belief in essential womanhood.
In her Daring to be bad: radical feminism in America 1967-1975 feminist
social historian Alice Echols writes:
Unlike radical feminists who typically rejected as sexist the
whole idea of opposing male and female natures and
values, cultural feminists treated gender differences as
though they reflected deep truths about the intractability of

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maleness and femaleness. By arguing that women are more
nurturant, less belligerent, and less sexually driven than
men, cultural feminists have simply revalued dominant
cultural assumptions about womenCultural feminism is an
ideal bound up through symmetrical opposition in the very
ideological system feminists want to destroy (Echols 9).
Another observation by Echols is particularly apropos of the Womanhouse
project, although it is not explicitly making reference to it: Although [the] womanonly space was envisioned as a kind of culture of active resistance, it often
became instead, as Adrienne Rich has recently pointed out, a place of
emigration, an end in itself where patriarchy was evaded rather than engaged
(Echols 5).
Of course, in the end, not everything in Womanhouse was simply a
product made to order. The potential for works of art to sustain the power of their
own inner logic and their recalcitrant nature, regardless of whose manifesto lays
claim to them, would not be denied. Even though there was something of a
similar theme to the individual installations within the larger project, all of the
works that came out of it would not simply be subsumed under its explicit
program. All that remains of these artworks are reproductions, which
nonetheless offer a sense of their evocative power.

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Among the separate room exhibitions contained within the collaborate
Womanhouse, Camille Grey, one of the participating artists, is individually
credited with the creation of Lipstick Bathroom. In this case, this perhaps most
private space of any domicile is transformed to suggest the set of a peep show,
with its greasy red glow and gaudy arrangement of lights around a large mirrored
medicine cabinet. The sink itself is fully upholstered in what appears to be fake
fur, or thick velour terry. Nestled in every fold of fabric around the edges are
random items of makeup and hair rollers. And everything is either a highly
saturated red color, like the vinyl sheen drapes, or has been covered in a thick
enamel of shiny red paint. The eerie darkness and shadow formations may have
been the result of the installation of red lighting, as well. The space also
suggests a darkroom wherein images of femininity are perpetually developing, or
a place that is apocalyptically arrested in time by the ultimate despair of never
having produced the ideal image. There is even a feel of petrifaction to the array
of beauty products, as they seem impossibly poised and balanced for eternity on
the sides of the preposterous bathroom fixture. And yet, on a supporting bar to
one side of the sink two small towels hang neatly in an absolutely ordinary way.
It is as if a Pompeii-style disaster had welded things in their place and the
strange red atmosphere is comprised of volcanic gases and dust; it is as though
a single instance of daily life had been suspended intact for centuries. Or

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perhaps the oily red coating and illumination represent some scarlet letter of
shame over the entire room. In another moment, the image suggests a site of
the demise of a tragic heroine or young Hollywood starlet. Here the final
desperate words one might expect to find scrawled on the mirror in red lipstick
seem to have been replaced by a thoroughgoing crimson explosion left by the
force of histrionics in the closing act. The old dramas of distressed damsels
often degrade into clich in their original settings and the images lose their
power, while notions of exaggerated female vulnerability persist behind the blank
screen. Lipstick Bathroom seems to flicker red hot with intermittent flashbacks to
some such old melodrama, while at the same its strangely altered details
defamiliarize and perhaps reconfigure our awareness of the persistent story.
By comparison, Janine Antonis lipstick defamiliarizes the familiar objects
of feminine self-adornment in a somewhat different way. As part of the larger
Gnaw installation previously described in this study, Antonis Lipstick Display
piece consists of a glittering store window type of display featuring several
hundred red lipsticks and heart-shaped candy trays made of chocolate. Antoni
doesnt so much identify a scene and rework it; rather she creates a scene
comprised in large part of the labor of its creation. Her Lard Gnaw and Chocolate
Gnaw pieces stand as testimonial monuments to her bizarre labors in achieving
them. She creates a cycle of production and consumption in the realization of

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this piece that is suggestive of the more general mode of social production. Her
process rather oddly echoes the sometimes abject quality of abstract labor under
capital and the magnitude of strivings toward both accommodation and
resistance. The female consumer suggested here is both mass and individual,
both anonymous and uniquely marked. Antonis laborious project allows for a
glimpse of the constructed nature of femininity and personal identity.
Antonis lipsticks are, in part, by-products of her efforts at chewing around
an industrial-sized block of 600 pounds of lard, spitting out the contents and
collecting them to be formed later into the substance of the red lipstick. The
chocolate candy dishes are the result of the same kinds of labor and processing
with a comparable cube of chocolate. The raw material objects are displayed
on pedestals like ironically manipulated minimalist cubesthe gnaw portion of
the exhibition. Her individual mode of production with its traces of social
implications is an integral dimension of the objects or the objectified labor.
Another example from Womanhouse is Robin Schiffs installation
Nightmare Bathroom, featuring a pink, mannequin-like figure nearly submerged,
or seeming about to drown in her bathtub. The visible sections of arms and
shoulders, breasts and face represent the body of a woman. At first glance,
these form a coherent and clearly recognizable figure, along with the two slender
pink mounds spaced to represent the knees. The tub appears to display a kind

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of milk bath, until upon closer scrutiny the contents are revealed as a light
colored sand. (This would probably have been much clearer to a first-hand
viewer.) The neat rectangularity of the white tub filled to the brim and nestled
snugly between the walls of the room forms a level horizontal encasement
lending an entombing quality to this bathing scene. There is a plain black outline
in the shape of a snake seeming to crawl up from the floor to the side of the tub.
This element has been taken to represent the snake coming to ambush the
impassive, even oblivious Eve; but the image created is less suggestive of
primeval woman in the Garden, and more like the scene of a murder. The way in
which the silhouette of the snake is traced is reminiscent of the forensic outlining
of a corpse. It also resembles the likeness of a body traced on a sarcophagus
containing a real body. Closer inspection shows that the full sphere of the
womans head disappears inexplicably into the wall. A notable lack of articulation
between the mask-like face and the melting slope of the shoulders contributes to
a suggestion of the swathing effect of hair and water rising around the chin. But,
of course, the water is really sand and the head seems preternaturally poised
between tile, porcelain and eternity. Is this the nightmare reversal of the
housewifes ever-elusive retreat into the relative luxury of the bath, a retreat that
might only be realized as a final destination, or the last place of rest? Or perhaps
it is the phantom of an anxiety for the best bath product. This little "scene" may

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reveal the rarely seen spirit escaped from the imagination of advertisersa
naked ghost of merchandised desire prior to being brought to life with high
production values.
The suggestive quality of the Nightmare Bathroom is not so unlike Antonis
bather in the case of her Eureka piece. As earlier described, Antoni filled a freestanding tub with lard and through an elaborate operation of rigs and pulleys, had
herself immersed in the raw material for soap and lifted clean away in order to
reveal the imprint of her body. In Antonis case, the perhaps more performative
nightmare may be the material process of rendering her presence/absence in
quite this fashion. In this instance, the evocative form traces the actual
movement and labors involved as one in the same object of affect.
Another room in Womanhouse attributed to three different artistsSusan
Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts and Robin Weltschis Nurturant Kitchen. The scene of
the kitchen seems normal enough in some ways, albeit strangely monochrome.
But what is decidedly not so normal is the appearance of fried eggs transforming
into breast forms as the bizarre objects are arranged as if crawling toward the
ceiling and down the walls. A drawer is left open as if to coax the unruly objects
back out of sight. It is an absurdist scene of sorts, creating such diverse
impressions as the whimsy of fantasy and the horrors of cancer surgery. In
another moment, the picture "eggs" the viewer on with a suggestion of climbing

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the walls to be fed or suckled. In a similar sense, it may be a homely parody of
the sexual tease. The blend of irreality and the ordinary appearance of common
name-branded groceries gives the piece an eerie edge. Although Antoni has no
comparable kitchen scene in her oeuvre, she has quite often taken special
liberties with foodstuffs. The outpouring of eggs/breasts mechanically replicated
around the Nuturant Kitchen compares with the exaggerated scale of Antonis
lard and chocolate; in both instances, there is a sense of grotesque surfeit, of
abstracted overproduction.
Arlene Raven seems to have a rather different view of Nurturant Kitchen in
terms of a progression through other exhibits involving a pantry and dining room:
When moving from the kitchen, through the pantry, to the
dining room, questions arise: How did the nurturing breast
that becomes the emblem of the Kitchen, the plates of food
prepared and placed in line in the pantry, conceptually move
from the private rooms of food preparation to the social act of
eating and breaking bread together? And how did this
evolution become empty and perverted? (Raven 52).
One of the apparent differences between Antonis work and the group
project of Womanhouse is that Antonis productions are much more solitary
affairs. Yet her seemingly more traditional solo efforts do not necessarily make

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the case for her work being more purely individualistic. Rather, more than a few
of her works appear to focus on individualistic strivings with a critical and often
self-reflexive eye. Again, in her Lick and Lather piece for example, she begins
with self-portrait busts in the form of multiple copies, suggesting that reproduction
of the self involves a powerful impulse to conform as much as distinguish oneself.
Antonis technique of licking the busts made of chocolate and lathering those
made of soap is an exaggerated act of production referencing not only mass
consumption, but the exacting rigors of striving to achieve impossible standards
of feminine beauty set by advertisers and other media images. However, the
quirky one-of-a-kind alterations produced with each bust hardly appear to be
attempts at perfect assimilation of feminine ideals. At moments, the refigured
forms of her visage take on the quality of mutilation, while the same objects may
also stand as symbols of rejection or a mockery of the goals of so-called feminine
perfection. In addition, the acting out that went into creating the objects is
intrinsically thematic and performativea primary and integral aspect of the
artwork. And while on one level Antonis acts of licking and lathering over the
form of her own likeness are uniquely individual in a literally personal sense, they
are at the same time grossly generic and related to basic life tasks, not
individually authored masterpieces. More generally, Antonis efforts lend
themselves to an imaginary which accommodates structure and agency in terms

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of interrelationship rather than a simply dichotomy of opposing values. Her work
is more appropriately related to challenging assumptions and received wisdom
concerning gender, labor and society.
Antoni's work also plays off the earlier challenges to traditions of art and
art-making by reworking or reinventing the gesture. At the same time, her
creative reconsiderations are accomplished without the usual tools for artmaking. To date, she has used photographic media for certain pieces; otherwise,
Antoni's art does not involve conventional art materials or techniques. The Johns
target collaboration is an odd exception with its built-in artistic elements, which
then becomes the literal ground for her act upon with a touch of the taboo.
However, in all cases Antoni characteristically performs: she uses her body and
engages the implications of her often intimate involvement with her material.
Antonis work does not attempt to carve a place outside of the concerns of either
art or the world in which it arises. Her usual cross-referencing of historical art
and art-making both past and present, with aspects of material culture other than
art is richly suggestive. Her typical artistic strategies are transparently depicted
as the logic of her objects, if you will. Antonis primary focus on labor and
allusions to gender emerge within the context of an evident and exaggerated
artistic production, emphasizing gender as a constructa cultural production
socially imbedded as more than a timeless, static mark of difference. Her art

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does not tend toward a simple defeat of or assimilation with the purist version of
minimal, conceptual, or even feminist art. In this way, Antoni's content is not
simply injected but inheres within the mutually constitutive form and production of
her objects. The overriding implication is that both art and gender emerge
contextually as mediation and construct.

Chapter VI
Antoni: More or Less Minimal

The subject of minimalism or minimalist art has already been introduced in

this study and briefly woven into the analysis of Antonis work at various points.
At this juncture, a deeper engagement with the topic becomes important with
regard to issues of gender within both Antonis work and feminist discourse about
art itself. Feminist critique has tended to identify minimalism as male or
masculinist, yet many of Antonis works suggestively employ elements of
minimalism in order to foreground and challenge the ways in which gender is
constructed. Antoni efforts do not simply dismiss minimalism as somehow
intrinsically male-oriented; instead, her awareness and appreciation of the legacy
of minimalism allows her to work through and tease out new perspectives on both
art and gender.
This chapter examines some of the complexities, innovations and
problems of minimalism in an attempt to deal with it on its own terms as art, not
simply as an expression of male dominance, as some would have it. It will also
work through and expose the problems presented by some forms of feminist
critique, especially as they relate to minimalism. This includes not only a focus
on the feminist critique of so-called male minimalism, but also on feminist
attempts to distinguish related works by women from their minimalist male
counterparts through perceived inherently female traits. Throughout, there will
269

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be a view toward developing alternative perspectives and forms of critique
regarding issues of gender and greater possibilities for art practice. I will argue
that Janine Antonis innovations and performative strategies are uniquely suited
for this work in progress.

Wherefore Minimalism
The use of the term minimalism sometimes refers to the work of avowed,
self-styled practitioners, as well as provides a context for related art practices
and counter-practicesincluding what is termed post-minimalism. Its certainly
not always a term of clarity, though there are some who have been so labeled
who seem to have a strict program of aesthetic rules. But the categories do
appear to be somewhat porous. For example, Eva Hesses work appears in
Gregory Battcocks anthology Minimal Art, Kenneth Bakers Minimalism, and
Robert Pincus-Wittens Postminimalism. The same applies to works by Sol
LeWitt and Barry Le Va. The list of artists variously and sometimes erratically
identified as minimalists or post-minimalist could go on at some length, though
these variable designations tend to tell more about how works are received than
how artists self-identify.
Capitalized Minimalism is an established and authoritative art historical
classification. However, the term never seems to satisfy everyone completely

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(least of all the artists labeled as such), perhaps because it suggests somehow
self-reflexively an ineluctable inadequacy. Yet, minimalism seems to have had
the greatest endurance, at least in part, because earlier labels such as Barbara
Roses ABC Art and Donald Judds Specific Objects are too closely identified
with a rather limited range of forms and practices. This chapter will treat the topic
in the way of stepping into a stream of discourse about artistic practices that are
more variable and contingent; and, the term better suited in this instance seems
to be minimalism. The more generic term better accommodates the variety of
critical and art historical narratives about minimalism. In any case, the
groundbreaking and authorizing precedent of minimalism continues to benefit
even those who have tended to dismiss it, or simply treat it as a negative
provocation.
The entire category of minimalist art is often identified by feminists as
objectionable in terms of being male oriented or masculinist. In The Power of
Feminist Art (1994), Laura Cottingham generally refers to minimalism as male
and stereotypes Richard Serras monumental sculptures, for example, as one of
the male Minimalist metal constructions (282). In Whitney Chadwicks 2002
edition of Women, Art, and Society Minimal art is characterized as part of the
dehumanization of the late 1960s and early 1970s hegemony of Modernism
(Chadwick, 3rd ed. 338).

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For the purposes of this analysis, the kinds of minimalist works generally
at issue will be sculptural pieces. These sculptures, or sculpture-like works are
natural objects of comparison with Antonis installations, in part, because Antoni
seems to be alluding to or directly quoting these earlier worksworks that are
emblematic examples, almost icons of, minimalism. However, it is important to
note that the very term sculpture fell out of favor with some minimalist artists.
While Robert Morriss writings simply reference new sculpture, Donald Judds
preferred term is object (as in Specific Objects), and Dan Flavins fluorescent
light pieces are identified as image-objects.
Originally published in 1966, Robert Morriss essay Notes on Sculpture
articulates some of the most important ideas about the new forms of art and art
making. In his well-known anthology Minimal Art Gregory Battcock introduces
Morriss seminal essay:
Robert Morris is considered by many artists and critics to be
one of the leading sculptors working in the new Minimal
style. His works and ideas have helped to delineate a
variety of problems inherent in Minimal sculptureMorris
discusses some of these problems, including those of viewer
participation, size, scale, surface, and of gestalt (Battcock
222).

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The following is a sample of some of the formulations Morris offers to explain the
new directions in art making:
The size range of useless three-dimensional things is a
continuum between the monument and the ornament.
Sculpture has generally been thought of as those objects not
at the polarities by falling between the extremes of this size
continuum. Because much of it presents an image of neither
figurative nor architectonic reference, the works have been
described as structures or objects. The word structure
applies either to anything or to how a thing is put together.
Every rigid body is an object. A particular term for the new
work is not as important as knowing what its values and
standards are (Morris 230).
Morris was a major figure in the story of minimalism and his essay is a
significant part of the effort to articulate its emerging concerns. Here, he
attempts to explain the new art as art and its object status in relation to other
kinds of art and objects. Feminist critics have condemned this as a
preoccupation with a kind of empty formalism that stood in opposition to their own
call for art to express or embody social content or relevance. Lucy Lippard
writes: For a lot of feminists, formalism represented the patriarchymale

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authority, male ideas, and male rule, as well as a kind of neutralized,
dehumanized art (More Than Minimal 29). But Kenneth Baker offers another
view: Minimalist art proves itself not by preserving a range of aesthetic values
against the ravages of history and human forgetfulness, but its power to keep us
mindful of art and its meaning as creations of the social order, not just gifted
individuals. He also characterized the matter more in terms of a shift in content
rather than its evacuation: An earmark of Minimalist art is the tendency to locate
content outside the art object, in its physical setting or viewers responses, rather
than inside it, in the literary or psychological import of an image, for example
(Baker 21).
Antoni seems quite aware of the minimalist space of spectatorship and the
idea of shifting the site of content. Indeed, she takes advantage of it to create
her own complications. Her 1994 Unveiling consists of an unusually shaped bell
suspended freely and apart from any extraneous structure or enclosure, unlike
the motionless and fully sealed boxes of Donald Judd or Tony Smiths variously
shaped geometric objects. The metallic hollowness of Unveiling is revealed by
the presence of a clapperas one would expect of a bell. However, it seems
oddly undercover, until closer inspection reveals that the bell itself is cast in the
shape of a thick veil draping around something. There is an eeriness to the
implied shape, which is very similar to the top of a human skull beneath the

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deep and heavy folds cast in bronze. Yet the clapper dangling conspicuously
from inside contradicts that image. The caption of the reproduction in Janine
Antoni reads: I was thinking of an object that is simultaneously calling out and
hiding. Antonis casual description of its making and the idea behind it in an
interview with Amy Jinkner-Lloyd, help to bring it to life:
I veiled one of my self-portrait busts [from Lick and Lather]
and, as faithfully as possible in clay, sculpted the body under
the cloth. Its a bellThe clapper is made out of lead. The
reason I did that is that lead is a softer metal than bronze, so
when you ring the bell you sculpt the clapper. It started as a
perfect sphere and its slowly changing shape (4).
Here Antoni freely plays with the legacy of minimalism and the related condition
of presenting image and object as one in the same thing. For example, a Donald
Judd's "specific object" may be shaped like a box, as a box, and simply is a box.
Unlike more traditional figurative sculpture, it does not represent something
outside itself. It is self-referential in this way, though it may suggest something
about the larger social context out of which it arises precisely because of the
condition of its existence. It may refer to a world of mass-produced objects with
no sign of their making, but it still looks like what it is and is what it looks like. It
does not imitate the figure of a general on a horse or a frolicking nymphnot

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even in a modern abstract style. However, Unveiling oscillates between a
minimalist object and its undermining. It is a simple object that literally rings like
a bell, with the same basic physical structure allowing it to operate like a bell.
Yet, it appears something like a draped bell, while the vague shape of a human
head confuses matters. Indeed, it is an actual cast of a cast of Antonis body
under a thick veil. On the other hand, almost as soon as it starts to appear as
something like a head under something like a veil, the stubborn objecthood of
the bell remains most apparent. In addition, the reference to unveiling in the
title is contradictory, because the veil has nothing to reveal and no capacity to
fall away. Ultimately, Unveiling plays on the absurdity of the minimalist object.
The literally dangling form of the piece suggests an abandoned object of aspiring
minimalism that couldnt keep its referentiality entirely to itself.
Antonis 1990 Grope is another image/object coincidence with
contradictory manipulations. In this case, she gathers together over twenty
roughly similar mens trouser pockets minus the garments in which they normally
reside, and attaches them seam to seam, corner to corner into a motley
triangular formation. The piece almost resembles an improbable kite or
experimental sail, because the end-to-end gaping pockets seem to flutter and
pucker in a way that suggests they are waiting to catch a transporting breeze.
The object is a kind of fabric sculpture, which just like its component parts, needs

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to be attached to something to be what it is. The overall shape mimics the
pocket units that make up the piecethe individual pockets being Antonis
version of minimalist repetition of identical components or modules. The
assembly of parts seems to create one large honey-combed pocket that hangs
in the corner with the same gaping form as its parts. This aspect of the piece
contributes to a minimalist-style unity of form, but the often very subtle
differences in the color, wear, and construction between component parts
introduce a clearly inflected quality that contradicts minimalisms requirement of
smooth unmarked surfaces. However, these variations are inherent in the
material, just as formica is evenly textured and opaque and factory glass is slick
and completely transparent. In the kind of artworks normally identified as
minimalist, the consistent quality of industrial materials as such, is complemented
by the uneven, live-in wear and tear of the pockets as an incidental fact of their
pocket character, if you will. And so, Grope is arguably post-minimalist in the
sense that Robert Pincus-Witten meant when he coined the term, in large part to
account for the work of Eva Hesse (1936 1970). Hesse's work is clearly
indebted to minimalism (it has also been categorized as such), though it evinces
striking and ingenious deviations. Indeed, in his 1977 volume Postminimalism, a
number of terms and descriptions of Hesse and her work might be easily
identified with Antoni. Of course there is Hesses special interest in process,

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though some of the more specific descriptions such as her appreciation for the
intrinsic physical properties of her materials (Pincus-Witten 48) heighten the
comparison. There are also important distinctions, such as the way Antoni
leaves traces of herself and her labors in the work itself as part of it. In the case
of Grope, the evidence is fairly clear in the piece itself, but Antoni elaborates on
her process another part of her interview with Amy Jinkner-Lloyd:
If you think of Lick and Lather and the idea of the bodys
residue left on the object, Grope is my found-object version
of that. This describes the body by its absence. Really, it
describes the hand. These are all work pants, so Im
thinking about labor, and that your pockets are something
you touch everyday but dont see...It was important that it
was hand sewn, that my hands connected these places
where all these other hands had been (4).
The plain, wrinkled, and somewhat discolored fabric is just what one would
expect of the insides of worn pockets, but this new fangled structure of detached
but consolidated pockets is totally unexpected. These empty little envelopes of
fabric, normally hidden in the space between the outer garment and the wearers
body, become naked abstract forms, stripped of their normal context. The space
of each pocket is no longer there for searching (for keys and exact change);

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hiding (sweaty palms or stolen notes); seeking warmth (and steadying nervously
unsteady stances). But the sense of having once been repeatedly touched
coincides with an awareness of their emptiness.
The pockets of Grope may even refer to female genitalia, though in a more
abstract symbolic sense than Judy Chicagos more sensual and luridly specific
imagery. Perhaps this piece suggests the idea of a sexual encounter? If so,
there may be as much a sense of male anxiety or vulnerability suggested by the
pockets of the mens pants. Antonis references to gender are more complex and
nuanced than some kinds of feminist criticism may be able to apprehend or
tolerate. There is clearly a male reference in this piece simply according to the
basic appearance of the pockets. This may be too much of a problem for those
feminists who are anxious to dismiss or condemn as masculinist anything they
might identify as masculine in a work. Perhaps Antonis gender crossreferencing with her use of sewing would be a mitigating factor for them. It
seems that Grope dares to suggest that it is possible as a female to identify in
some way with the male or masculine elements, without suffering a crisis
without losing ones female identity or dignity in the process. I would argue that
Antonis little complication of the gender issue is a salutary gesture, rather than
a cause for alarm.

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Feminism takes on the minimalist problem
The 1996 retrospective exhibition More Than Minimal: Feminism and
Abstraction in the 70s brought together a collection of works by eleven important
female artists in order to thematically include the art of women in the story of
twentieth-century modern art. It ran during the spring term at Brandeis
Universitys respected Rose Art Museum as a relatively rare attempt to address
more directly the historically contentious topic of minimalism and feminism with
concrete examples of actual artworks. Within the exhibit, the contributions of
these artists are portrayed in terms of a special defiant force for change. In the
introduction to the exhibition catalog, the curator Susan L. Stoops writes to make
the case for the artists and their work as representing historically significant
events and movements. She makes a point of associating the American
feminist movement with a shifting of sensibilities within the dominant aesthetics
of the art world. She refers to the feminist demand for a new view of matters
such as the relationship between politics and culture, gender and subjectivity,
while regularly returning to try to link abstract art with feminism (Stoops 6).
Ultimately, one of the primary ways Stoops defines minimalism is as that
which the exhibition leaves out or significantly modifies. Among the artists
represented are major figures (many of whom are deceased) such as Lynda
Benglis, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke. These women are described as part of

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a generation of artists whose visual sensibilities were strongly shaped by the
abstract aesthetics of minimalism during the sixties. And though they
collectively expanded boundaries of traditional art, they do so by offering an
alternative to minimalisms monolithic voice, making concrete the possibility of
formally challenging yet profoundly human art (Stoops 6).
The case is never actually made clear how it might be that formally
challenging art would normally tend to exclude the profoundly human, but it is
hard not to infer such a notion from her formulation. The curator seems
conflicted and perhaps it is because abstract art (which she equates with an
advanced or formally challenging work) can readily be traced back to what may
be termed its modernist origins; such an account is also part of the art historical
discourse that is clearly the authors native tongue. In other words, Stoops
accepts the terms of the discourse, just as she is busy trying to dismiss or
undermine them. The point here is not to advocate for a return to these origins,
but that a dismissive response toward any notion of modernism can diminish
the sense of richness and substantial change that is related to itas is
demonstrated in various examples of Antonis work. Stoops quite properly
wishes to have women artists be included as important figures in one of the
major developments of modern art, but she seeks to accomplish this by implicitly
demeaning the very same. It is as if she is making a guilty attempt to redeem

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aesthetic abstraction through a feminist perspective. The difficulty with Stoopss
approach may lie in her formulations that art is related to a scheme of flat
contradistinctions based on gender, and strictly in terms of identity or reductively
ontological affinity.
Indeed, Stoops rather extensively, if not always explicitly, carries forth with
descriptors that imply feminine values as a major distinguishing aspect of the
work included in her exhibition. She builds up to the remark about the
profoundly human quality of these womens works by identifying them with a
postminimal rejection of the austere, domineering presence and industrial
fabrication characteristic of minimalist sculptures (Stoops 6). However, as this
chapter will explore further on, her analysis reveals a tendency to discover
feminine qualities in womens art as if this might be nearly the only point of
interest of any particular woman-made piece. Seeking out the feminizing aspects
of any particular work appears to become a goal in itself that flattens artworks
into one-dimensional emblems of feminine or feminist affirmation.
For Antoni, it appears that an outright rejection of minimalism would be
both not enough and a bit too much. For example, she does not completely turn
her back on the minimalist boxes for all their cold steel austerity. Her work has
turned them into cubes that can rot (Chocolate Gnaw), melt (Lard Gnaw), and
she can wash her hands with one (the Eureka soap block). But she does not

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make these simple structures out of organic material merely to have them be
warmer and more vulnerable to decay; these materials are intrinsic, critical
elements included toward making the details of production and the palpable
sense of the process the central features of the work. Indeed, the punishing
rigors of some of Antonis labors may suggest as much about dehumanization as
any generically affirmative human quality. In this sense, her more critical
approach does not make her work any less "human."
This is not to denigrate the art of the women in the "More Than Minimal"
exhibitionnot at all. Indeed, the point here is quite to the contrary: perhaps
these women and their art should not be reduced to the terms of doing opposite
work to men. The critique of minimalism as male-oriented tends to include the
assumption that such art merely affirms or celebrates modern industrial society; it
is as if the minimalist art forms themselves became instruments of domination. A
brief note from Siegfried Kracauers formulations about art is germane to this
case: By giving shape to the phenomenal, art provides a form that enables it to
be touched by a meaning which is not simply given along with it (Kracauer
69).
The curator of "More Than Minimal" does identify certain formal strategies
consistent with minimalism that are generally deployed in the works of her
exhibition. Apparently, there were some elements retained by these artists that

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did not necessarily offend female sensibilities, such as, the minimalist emphasis
on relatively elemental forms, schematic compositions and formal repetition and
restraint (Stoops 6). Obviously, a great many of Antonis works meet some or all
of the above criteria. The Gnaw installation has the elemental forms of lard and
chocolate cubes, of course. The mirrored store window display portion of the
installation with its lipstick and candy tray by-products is a nearly vertiginous
array of multiples and reflections. In another instance, Antonis Slumber is a
schematic composition on more than one level. The whole design of the loom
at the foot of the bed and her attachment to the machine registering rapid eye
movements as she sleeps has a schematic flow to its arrangement and
operations. The patterned graph of sleep activity worked into the weave of a
blanket, made from the progressive unraveling of her nightgown is a circular
scheme of repeated forms and activities. Lick and Lather repeats the form of a
self-portrait bust in a schematic composition of chocolate and soap, making up a
dark and light pattern of objects facing one another. But the obsessive repetition
of licking and lathering activities that went into making this piece undoes the
precise replication of forms, and here is where Antonis distinctions begin to
emerge: repetition is just as often about activities and the overall process of the
works as it is about forms. For example, the Gnaw installation repeats the
elemental cube form with the huge blocks created to undergo the gnaw

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treatment, but her biting technique transforms the cube shape with the
intensively repetitious application of these elementary labors. Then, the
schematic composition of products manufactured from a collection of the
masticated and discarded foodstuffs, makes up another instance of excessive
repetition. And the items in the display case take on an elemental character as
iconic and culturally constitutive in the production of femininity and the
reproduction of a gendered body. Ultimately, the fully interrelated composition of
forms and methods suggests forms of social production that cannot be reflected
in an itemized list of separable parts. There is a mutually constitutive operation
of consumption and production in this piece. Here the body itself seems as much
processed by the labor and materials as it is involved in the creation of new
products. In the end, however, it is difficult to perform the same discrete
breakdown of elements with the image, material and making of Antonis works
that Stoops has attempted with her comparison of minimalist characteristics.
Almost any one of Antonis pieces has an integral logic that resists such a
formalistic analysis.
Stoops continues to try to distinguish the womens art of the exhibition in a
way that repeats the adjectival human to qualify their special more than
minimalist approach as turned toward human experience (sometimes their own),
and natural occurrences, and gravitated toward unpretentious, often times raw

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materials and visibly direct hands on methods (Stoops 6). But even the most
monolithic minimalist piece, such as Ronald Bladens The X with its gigantic xshaped imposition overwhelming an exhibition space comprised of nearly two
stories of a large atrium, might facilitate an experience of wonderment or anxiety,
or both. Are such experiences less human because of the artwork's larger than
human scale and absence of intimately hand-wrought forms? Moreover, the
sculpture did not drop in from some extra-terrestrial void beyond the human
domain; if it created a sense of something alien, it might resemble much of what
the larger world was producing at the time in the way of strange new forms.
(Marxs famous quote from the Roman playwright Terence is irresistible: Nothing
human is alien to me.) Moreover, how is it any less human to redirect the focus
to the embodied site of the experience apart from the object? How is the space
of the viewer any less a site of the human particularity of experience?
Given this type of feminist critique, does Antoni measure up in relation to
the curators catalog of the virtues of art peculiar to women? Essentially, Antonis
work always draws attention to her experience of creating it, though in a rather
concrete sense and not simply as an abstract feminine value. And what exactly
is meant by turning toward human experience? Is human experience always
warm and life affirming, as Stoopss general interpretive frame implies? Some of
Antonis experiences during her process of production are likely to be those that

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created moments of pain and revulsion, doubt or ambivalence about the
experience. Indeed, there are almost limitless ways of turning toward or
drawing upon human experience. On occasion, Antoni's works seem to put the
question to matters such as what qualifies as natural, and how raw might be a
relative condition. Significantly, the unique and visible evidence of the method
apparent in her work regularly leaves out of the actual hand of her hands-on
process. For example, Eureka is made in part by the artists hands-free
immersion into a bathtub of lard accomplished through an elaborate scheme of
having herself lowered in and lifted out in order to leave a deep ghostly imprint of
her body in the white fatty mass. This piece may seem to parody a supernatural
event while at the same time referring to Archimedess earthly discovery during
his bath regarding the measure of solids by observing how his own body
displaced the water in the tubthe discovery that led to the famous exclamation
of eureka. In the case of Loving Care, her performance involves more of a
head-on method that literally has her throwing herself head-first into the
progress this piece; Antoni turns her body into a live paintbrush to cover the
gallery floor completely with repeated gestural swipes of her dye-soaked hair.
Her Lard Gnaw cube may be literally more raw than the chocolate version, yet
both become the raw material she extracts by chewing, in order to process it for
another phase of production in the larger installation.

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At a certain point in my research, during one of the countless
examinations of the catalogs reproductions, one particular work seemed to pop
up out of the pages. The Nancy Graves piece Variability of Similar Forms cries
out as an example to be probed in relation to the curators feminizing political
agenda. At one moment, the work is a lyrical and wistful display of form; and at
another glance, a vaguely nightmarish image. The piece is comprised of a
collection of freestanding skeletal legs resembling something like a small-scale
petrified forest of extinct animal remains. They are in fact thirty-six separate
objects actually modeled after the bones of camel legs, with a startlingly real
quality to their detailed and carefully articulated bone-like parts crafted out of
steel, wax, marble dust, and acrylic. This art is clearly unlike the giant wroughtin-steel geometrics of artists such as Ronald Bladen or Donald Judd. The
organic shapes are also a clear departure from the insistently rectilinear work of
artists most often identified with minimalism.
In her catalog entry devoted to Nancy Gravess work, Stoops elaborates
on a comparison between the efforts of Graves and Eva Hess made by Robert
Storr, quoting his observation about a confluence of distinct aesthetics (Stoops
50). Indeed, Hess did seem to produce suggestively organic forms from
elemental geometric structures, while Graves renders organic elemental shapes
abstract through a kind of alienating repetition and patterning. However, Stoops

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concludes that this implies a significant intersection in the work of these two
distinguished post-minimalist peersa convergence of the conceptual sort
between natural phenomenon and abstraction, repetition and heterogeneity,

which transcends related subject matter [emphasis added] (Stoops 50). Doesn't
this contradict the feminist claim of rejecting formalistic transcendence?
As previously noted, Stoops maintains in her introduction that these artists
are quite capable of producing formally challenging but qualitatively different art
than their male colleagues. Here she emphasizes the point by characterizing the
work in terms of a kind of aesthetic sophistication. Of course, the theme of the
entire exhibition and catalog is one implying a certain transcendence of
minimalism performed by these women and their art. Her recurring comparison
and contrast between the works of this exhibition and that of other, often earlier
minimalists is in fact a kind of formalist critique concerned with the presence of
feminine versus masculine forms. Yet Stoops seems to imagine herself to be
doing the very opposite by simply claiming that it is the presence of and
preference for content that distinguishes the works within the exhibition.
The entry on Jackie Ferraras work describes how her signature
structures shared certain obvious formal affinities with classical minimalist
sculpture, though her work is differentiated for being far less austere and
unyielding. Stoops argues that this distinction is due to Ferraras use of wood

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and other relatively soft materials. She is noted for creating a place where
geometric representation and human experience touch. Some of this is
attributed to the more human scale and natural surfaces of her pieces
(Stoops 46-7).
Often enough the contrivance of the congruent polarities male/female and
minimalist/post-minimalist is inserted into Stoopss narrative somewhat subtly. In
any given catalog entry, the opposing qualities or categories are treated more or
less implicitly through a detectable pattern of dichotomous terms, emerging at
times with explicit emphasis. This way of examining the work in the exhibition as
against the generally unnamed male sculptures is a basic structuring principle
for Stoopss critique.
The two pieces by Jackie Ferrara featured in the exhibit are Curved
Pyramid (1973) and Truncated Pyramid I (1973). The first is a precisely stacked
arrangement of equal-size fir blocks exhibiting the variable striations and
surfaces found in wood. The latter is a more vertical and tower-like configuration
of hand-treated cotton bating wound closely and tightly with glue around a narrow
cardboard pyramid. Ferraras method is described in terms of the way her
inclination toward the matter-of-fact has been intimately connected to a
responsiveness to idiosyncratic details and the manner in which her art

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manages to function in the real of mathematical progressions while always
acknowledging the incidental disruption of lived experience (Stoops, 46).
The point here is not simply to find fault with Stoopss account of the work
per se. Indeed, her essay has moments of insight and persuasiveness. But a
breakdown of her vocabulary and opposing formulations reveals implicit
assumptions that support a characterization of male values as those of reason,
logic and order versus the female values of sense, intuition, and the relative
chaos of the organic. On the one hand, there are attributes of the matter-offact, mathematical progression, and geometric precision that are aligned with
the masculine. On the other hand, she describes work which prominently
features the intimately connected, idiosyncratic details, and incidental
disruptions of lived experience identified as feminine. Ferrara and her work are
clearly identified with the phrases human experience, human entailments, the
realm of the human body, and human inexactness. Added to the list of the
feminine column are associations with natural states, natural coloration, and
natural occurrences. Whatever Ferraras inclination toward supposedly more
masculine tendencies, they seem to be checked, tempered, or somehow
modulated by what is termed the role of female subjectivity (Stoops 46-7). The
catalog sometimes reads as having less to do with art than with a manual on the
positive science of human gender.

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The section on Nancy Graves ends with Stoops making the following
conclusion:
If her works contributed to a knowledge of the place of the
feminine within the social, it was in terms of what Graves
perceived as the conceptual gap between the natural and
the constructed. Because the camels and bones are
representations of a female fabricating natural evidence
(redoing nature by hand), Gravess constructions are
profound examples of female agency as well as conceptual
disruptions in the traditionally exclusive and gendered realms
of nature (that which can only be expressed, not changed,
i.e. feminine) and culture (that which is unfixed, capable of
variation, i.e. masculine) (Stoops 57).
Stoops seems confused somehow. She wants to trade in stereotypical
categories of gender, but looks to avoid following through with the logic she sets
up for herself. At the same time, the premises and assumptions that are the
basis for the above assertions are actually somewhat vague, though perhaps
certain inferences can be drawn from some version of the common sense being
expressed. In any case, what does it really mean to contribute to a knowledge
of the place of the feminine within the social? What is she trying to say? Is this

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about the socially embedded character of that which is identified as female? Or it
may be a statement regarding the insertion of the natural (the feminine) into a
deforming social medium (society). The latter connotation seems more
consistent with the way the curators writings repeatedly associate the artist and
her work with being close to nature and more humanly connected. But what is to
be made of the phrase, the conceptual gap between the natural and the
constructed? The implications for such an opposition as she has posed it may
be that the natural is a pure given and the constructed is a mere contrivance.
This does not allow for the way the idea of nature is part of a construct; or for the
interplay between the world and our representations of the world in which each
shapes how we perceive and even experience the other. And her formulation
concerning the traditionally exclusive and gendered realms of nature versus
culture is not only awkward but it may concede too much in order to make the
argument. Has nature most often been identified as that which can only be
expressed? Sometimes the feminine is associated with the expressive but what
does this have to do with nature, per se? And is culture simply and truly unfixed
and therefore masculine? In fact, many an inflexible and long-enduring custom
or tradition would fall under the category of culture. Actually, nature has not
only been used to describe the immutable but to give the weight of truth to all
manner of claims about various human populations and subcategoriesincluding

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the cultural. Indeed, nature has historically figured quite prominently into
notions of female inferiority. Stoopss point is hardly that clear and she tends to
give a bit too much credence to these gendered realms as wholly distinct and
self-sufficient.
Perhaps the most troublesome assertion in Stoopss closing paragraph for
the section on Graves is: Because the camels and bones are representations of
a female fabricating natural evidence (redoing nature by hand), Gravess
constructions are profound examples of female agency First of all, how is this
work itself a representation of a peculiarly female type? It seems that by this
account, it is a female type of fabrication simply because the maker is a female.
Furthermore, the very definition of art at various points over a huge expanse of
space and time (Plato comes to mind) has had much to do with some notion of
fabricating or redoing nature. The remark further strains credulity with the claim
about profound examples of female agency. Finally, why wouldnt the agency
of the artist simply be a given? Her point becomes something of a non sequitur.
However, it seems likely that this is a response to the unstated assumption that
any assertion of social determination or construction demeans individual agency
in such a way that it must be reasserted.

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Narrow vision feminism
The painstakingly crafted, mock bones of Nancy Gravess Variability of
Similar Forms might be read not as a profound example...of female agency, but
as a visual pun of the Marxian concept of dead labor, which is also that of the
objectification of historical time (Postone 356): it suggests the production of that
which is already largely consumed by decay. It hardly seems an homage to a
Mother Goddessunless perhaps she is a bitch goddess who mocks the cult
by creating objects resembling figures of the undead. Contra Stoops and her
brand of feminism, it might even testify to a mutually constitutive construct of
nature and culture. At yet another moment, the piece offers a sense of anxiety
with its literally self-effacing and close to the bone object of art after modernism,
eternally situated in relation to an ongoing crisis of representation.
Gravess artwork resembles a bizarre natural history display, as it might
appear to be both familiar and frightfully alien to a child, or someone who had
never been to a museum of natural history. The large scale and realistic
elements might produce a similar sense of awe and wonder to that of the
museum exhibits it references; while the incongruous variability of some of the
upper limb sections appears to spoof the projection of gravitas associated with
some scientifically authoritative tableaus. It seems to echo Donna Haraways

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remark that science has developed into an object human beings make only to
forget their role in creating it (Haraway 8).
There is an almost graceful sweep and oddly arabesque quality to most of
the length of these skeletal figures, extending up from the curved prong of the
two-toed structure. Then they appear nearly broken at the cracked bulb of kneelike joints, the last extension left jutting up and out at a vacancy once occupied by
a body: the broken limbs appear to be parts in search of a whole. Sharper
angles create a teetering effect, while the slightly tilted projections display a more
balanced pose. It seems all at once to be a fragmented jumble of similar
dismembered parts and a grouping of autonomous figures with variously tilted
heads, gathering to posture and converse. The piece is alternately eerie and
comic, chaotic and choreographed, yet ultimately rather distinct from an
instructional scientific model. In this sense Variability of Similar Forms is a
reminder of Adornos comment in Aesthetic Theory: As knowledgeart is
neither discursive nor is its truth the reflection of an object (282). As an artwork
it will not simply explain; as knowledge it is non-discursive.
Both Nancy Gravess Variability of Similar Forms and Antonis and are
suggestive of an archeological project, though in rather different ways. Whereas
a collection of bones might involve the excavation and removal of soil and stone,
Antoni collects and reassembles the masses of earth normally left behind. At

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one showing at the Art Institute of Chicago the accompanying plaque describes
and (1997-1999) as consisting of two 800-pound limestone boulders that are
placed on top of one another with a steel rod creating a central vertical axis. It
continues with an account of the pieces creation in which the artist spent five or
six hours everyday for a period of eight weeks using a second metal rod inserted
in the top stone to forcefully rotate and grind one stone into the other It may
well be plain enough that Gravess bones and skeletal constructions are entirely
fabricated by hand, but the objects themselves do not call attention to the details
of their actual making any more or less than other manually crafted work of art;
the bones do not exhibit a specific quality that would conjure up an image of the
artist in the midst of creating them. Yet, in the case of and the work exists as a
testimonial object of Antonis artistic process; our perception of the object is
inextricably bound to and inflected by the story of its making.
Antonis and might also refer to the same massive constructions of
antiquity as Jackie Ferraras series of stacked pyramids, made of wood or
cotton batting on cardboard. But whereas Ferraras artistic objects recall the
shape of pyramids, Antonis work involves reproducing the kind of labor and
materials needed to make an actual pyramid. Indeed, the idea for this piece
began with Antonis 1996 visit to the sanctuary in Delphi, Greece.

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She was fascinated by the perfect juncture of the stones
used in building the walls. When she asked how this had
been achieved, she was informed that only continual rubbing
of the two surfaces against each other is capable of
producing such a perfect fit. She assumed that she herself
would be able to create the same flat connection that she
had seen in Delphi but, to her surprise, her experiment
produced a much more complex union, one that departed
from the perfect straight lines of the sanctuary but which
bore witness to the malleability of two bodies mutually
transformed by continual contact (Martinez 129,133).
A first glance of Antonis and does not immediately call to mind a fascination with
the construction methods of the ancients at Delphi; rather, its initial impact
derives from the sheer weight of its material and the naked quality of the
monstrous rocks, apparently displaying the actual color and texture they had
when first retrieved. But if the kind of feminist critique espoused by Susan L.
Stoops were applied to and, it may be seen to evince the rejected qualities of
minimalist sculpture not found in the works of presumably more authentic female
artists. Given this narrow logic, Antonis piece might project too much of an
austere, domineering presence and too little of an alternative to minimalisms

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monolithic voice to be included as an example of profoundly human art. At the
same time, at least and does not have the industrial appearance of a factory
product, particularly those such as the actual factory made, gargantuan plastic
creations by Les Levine, or Dan Flavins fluorescent lights.
But perhaps by virtue of the simple fact that Antoni is a woman, Stoops
and like-minded feminists would be persuaded or even required to redeem
Antonis wayward appropriation of masculine elements: the brutish labor
associated with men, or mens domination over workers/slaves; the aloof and
domineering presence of the stacked rocks; the phallic and ruthlessly penetrating
poles. It may be that on the basis of the artists gender alone all of the potential
defects mentioned so far would be transformed; such that and may be read as
a parody or protest of male dominance. (This characterization of masculine
elements is itself an interpretive speculation of a stereotypically essentialist
read.) It is indeed the case that the degree of deliberate ambiguity in much of
Antonis work allows for a variety of responses. But the original and specific
issue regarding Stoops and her exhibitionwhich potentially implicates Antonis
artis minimalism and the way it is characterized as essentially masculine.
Ultimately, the point is not a matter of whether Antoni would be judged well or
poorly in this regardthe problem is the criteria of narrow gender stereotyping
and essentialism. The shrunken quality of the discourse of cultural feminism is

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arguably all the more apparent via the unique challenges raised by Janine
Antonis artistic efforts.

Minimalist discourse and beyond

Allen Leepas essay Minimal Art and Primary Meanings in Gregory
Battcocks seminal anthology Minimal Art demonstrates the range of ideas
expressed within the general discussion of minimalism. Though the essay has
moments of insight and thoughtful formulation, Leepa is prone to caricature when
he attempts to provide a typical composite of the positions of Minimal artists:
Spontaneity, the unconscious, the irrational have no place in
art; the vacant and disinterested mind with its own
symmetrythis is the basis for art. Then the emphasis is
where it should be: in the mind of the observer. I use
standardized, repetitious, boring forms because they are the
most primal and ageless (Leepa 207).
It is not that this is an entirely false characterization of some ideas of minimalism,
but it oversimplifies the case, while it seems to provide an easy target for critics
indeed, feminist art critics readily come to mind. On the other hand, some of his
general formulations are useful in a different sense, as in his account of one of
the functions that art can perform being that of recording, reproducing, and

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recreating familiar ideas, feelings, and scenes in easily recognizable forms
(Leepa 202). What happens in this instance, as Leepa explains, is that the work
of art hands back to the spectator the feelings and ideas he already knows and to
which he can react positively. This even describes work that initially appears
radical and genuinely creates new kinds of awareness, such as the art of Judy
Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. But their work never actually challenged received
notions of gender and culture; just as much of feminist art criticism continues to
operate within the safe and familiar terms of gender stereotypes and cultural
essentialism.
There are other instances in Battcocks anthology which appear to indicate
that some minimalist ideas might actually be consistent with the feminine values
privileged by feminist critique. In Laurence Alloways Systemic Painting he
remarks: A system is not antithetical to the values suggest by such art world
word-clusters as humanist, organic and process. On the contrary, while the artist
is engaged with it, a system is a process (58). Rather than an emphasis on the
monumental or monolithic, another writer notes that most of the larger,
geometrically conceived pieces relate to a fresher class of creation: the
environmental (Benedikt 88). Apart from his consistent use of the male pronoun
(this was written in the mid-1960s), it would be difficult to make the case that
David Lees minimalist attitude is domineering and masculinist:

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We have ceased giving our work a focus. There is no place
for the spectator to be from where he can see it all happen.
The spectator is not directed toward a point in the piece at
which its parts are balanced, nor is there any attempt to play
policeman by leading the spectators eye around in the
composition. The spectator is not invited to take home with
him a static mental picture of the piece. The idea is
dissolved in the complexity of experience (Lee 198).
Returning to Leepas essay, in another instance he presents a case for
minimalism, which is hardly at odds with the values of and desire for human
connectedness so emphatically proclaimed for the art and artist of the "More
Than Minimal" exhibition. The difference is that minimalist works may reflect
upon dehumanizing forces, which are not so simply countered through the
positive resistance of a supposedly more humanizing aesthetic. During the initial
historic moment for minimalism, it would have been addressing deeply felt
awarenesses for which no generally acceptable form exists (Leepa 202). Here
the approach is described as an effort to deal as directly as possible with the
nature of experience and its perception through visual reaction, and to relate
the observer to the thing observed at the point where human perception brings

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them togetherin the magic of the phenomenon of experiencing itself (Leepa
201).
While these ideas about minimalism are not feminist per se, there is no
specific evidence of the exclusion of the female subject. Of course, women are
also not specifically included (neither are men), but this may be just the opening
allowing for an insinuation of Antonis ways into the narrative, if you will. Indeed,
Antonis efforts might play off some of these minimalist ideas and perform a
version of the following articulation: In human experience, what can be
perceived but cannot be clearly understood can often be expressed in art (Leepa
201). The gap between experience and that which may or may not be clearly
understood is often political and needs to be articulated in context. But Leepas
formulation allows for a very broad range and variability of human experience,
which doesnt exclude the experience of gender. At the same time, it implies that
art is not merely a device for grasping ideas or taking possession through
cognition.
Antoni has in various ways both stated and demonstrated that she begins
her process of creation with the idea of having an experience, which is built-in
from the outset. She structures the experience in specific and concrete terms
inextricably related to the materials she uses. In fact, all aspects of her
production are tightly interspersed considerations of performance, perception and

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her specific materials. Of course, Antoni realizes that the outcome is not
guaranteed, as is also generally the case with most artistic efforts. (Hers is
certainly less predictable than a factory ordered production, though the idea that
any art can be about an absolute prohibition of spontaneity and exclusion of the
unconscious is far-fetched at best; no such thoroughgoing constraints are
sustainable over every step of the process.) But again, as has been
demonstrated in a number of examples to this point, one of the most significant
ways in which Antonis work is distinctive (to borrow from one critics remarks)
involves her particular sequence of choices and their development toward
having the finished work be as transparent with respect to process, as possible
(Cameron, "Parts and Whole" 24). Antoni also makes the choice of having the
viewer apprised of the details of her process with an accompanying narrative at
the point of reception (especially for the majority of her works which do not
include an onsite performance). This aspect of her exhibitions is a critical
dimension of the artwork; it should not be read as a compensation for the
inadequacy of her objects. The work, with the narrative of its own making, selfconsciously acknowledges the way in which artworks have become embedded
within discourses on art. It is not that art can simply be reduced to discourse, but
forms of professional interlocution figure into a process of recognition and even
the basic opportunity for having any kind of substantial audience. Antonis

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artworks with companion narratives offer a more specific type of analogy through
presentation of objects and the story of their making (or history, if you will), and
references to the way the history of art is often deliberately applied as intrinsic
elements of later works. Thomas Crow remarks on this in his 1995 book Modern
Art in the Common Culture: Almost every work of serious contemporary art
recapitulates, on some explicit or implicit level, the historical sequence of object
to which it belongs. Consciousness of precedent has become very nearly the
condition and definition of major artistic ambition (212).
Antoni has made specific references in certain works to: the minimalist
cube (Eureka and the gnaw pieces); historical portrait busts (Lick and Lather);
abstract drawings (Butterfly Kisses); and, action and gestural abstraction in
painting (Loving Care). But her inclusion of information about her process as an
integral feature of her work might also point to the generalized presence of the art
historical vis--vis the range of forms of artistic production up to the present day.
Indeed, one of the clearest differences between Antonis objects of
performance and minimalisms objects of presence, if you will, involves the
substantial matter of their making. Major minimalist works were meant to be
products with no specific trace or outward signs of production. By contrast,
Antonis pieces are very much about the work involved in their realizationher
process is that realization, in a sense. However, it may also be that Antonis

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work and those works more often identified as minimalist are related in a way that
is more complex than initially apparent.
One way to compare works by Antoni and these earlier artists has to do
with the orientation of the object vis--vis the viewer at the point of presentation
and what effects this has upon the viewer. Hal Foster certainly focuses on a shift
in this orientation as a major point of distinction for minimalist artworks. Perhaps
even more importantly, he refers to the initial impact of the encounter with
minimalism in its time as a unique moment. Foster notes in The Return of the
Real: Although the experiential surprise of minimalism is difficult to recapture, its
conceptual provocation remains, for minimalism breaks with the transcendental
space of most modernist art (if not with the immanent space of the dadaist
readymade or the constructivist relief) (36). Foster goes on to state that it
refuses the siteless realm of most abstract sculpture because it no longer
stands apart on a pedestal or as pure art, but is repositioned among objects and
redefined in terms of place (38).
Indeed, a sculpture installation in which the viewer might walk among the
objects as part of their scene has the potential to offer a different sort of
dynamism with its apprehension. Relatively simple geometric objects are less
evocative of specific external referents, arguably giving them more presence as
objects in themselvesespecially as other bodies. Perhaps the dire lack of

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expressive qualities or formal articulation would render the otherwise purely nonfleshy inanimate things the plain insistence and coherence of something like
other bodies. However, without making the same demands on the viewer as
animate forms or more complexly articulated figures, she or he would be granted
a more personal and focused experience of bodily awareness. Such an
experience might also create an opportunity for a type of personal or embodied
sense of the relation of subject and object as a process, rather than a fixed and
neatly bifurcated abstraction. Hal Foster offers these remarks concerning a new
audience position in relation to minimalist works:
In this transformation the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign
space of formal art, is cast back on the here and now; and
rather than scan the surface of a work for a topographical
mapping of the properties of its medium, he or she is
prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a
particular intervention in a given site. This is the
fundamental reorientation that minimalism inaugurates
(Foster, Return/Real 38).
Since this inauguration, orientation in relation to Antonis and sculpture is
somewhat differenther object lost its innocence, in a way, before it was first
exhibited. It is bound to be read in light of what has come before. Minimalism

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and other examples of artistic practice have not only set precedents for her work,
they have become part of an art historical canon. And while the notions of a
transcendental or safe, sovereign space still linger, these are primarily used
as justification to dismiss any and all works even remotely identified with fine or
high art. Lately, Antonis work might be less likely to be dismissed in terms of
the fashionable requirements of political correctness, since she is a woman and
her work generally deals with issues of gender. However, and may be the one
of her pieces that has only the most minimal references to gender. One is left to
wonder how the kind of feminist critique deployed by the curator of the "More
Than Minimal" exhibition might treat andespecially if the gender of the artist
were not disclosed. Would it be automatically identified with something like
minimalisms monolithic voice (Stoops 6), or the isolated, authoritative,
impenetrable object devoted only to itself and exclusively related to the
masculine position? (11).
Ultimately, it seems likely that the narrow view of some feminist critics
would miss the more sophisticated aspects of Antonis artistic strategies.
Antonis pieces usually refer to minimalism by both citing it and deviating from
itin effect, putting scare quotes around minimalist elements. In the case of
and, which basically alludes to the abstract objects of minimalist sculpture, her
configuration of boulders obviously doesnt quite qualify as a precise version of

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the primary structures of clean-line geometrics with smooth surfaces and even,
monochrome hues. At the same time, the rocks might appear to be "primary" or
minimal in terms of the raw beginnings of a traditional stone sculpture, as in a
preparation for portrait statuary. Moreover, Antonis rather minimal production
process resembling rudimentary, human-powered mills has a primary quality
evoking ancient building methodswithout necessarily knowing of the Delphi
sanctuary as her initial source of inspiration. Even Levi-Strausss odd formulation
of certain fundamentals of human perception and expectation related to art has
relevance for Antonis and:
[W]e may ask whether the aesthetic effect, say, of an
equestrian statue which is larger than life derives from its
enlargement of a man to the size of a rock or whether it is
not due to the fact that it restores what is at first from a
distance seen as a rock to the proportions of a man (LeviStrauss 23).
Of course, equestrian statues almost invariably depict male figures, such as
warriors, generals, heads of state or mythical heroes. Perhaps the relative
blankness of Antonis rocks might be read as a refusal of these markers of
historically male achievement; but more importantly, the masses of limestone are
relational objects in terms of a dialectic of division and connection. Antonis

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grinding technique has worked away at their stony stuff in order to have them fit
together in a nestling formation. Ultimately, her efforts situate the rocks in a type
of imperfect alignment made of variable gaps and contact points. The fixing and
fissures beckon the viewer to inspect the interstices of the sculpture more
closely, with its gaps and vacancies. This might seem to disrupt the minimalist
requirement of a unitary form as that which allows the viewer a bodily awareness
of perception; and yet, despite the breaks in the sculpture, there remains in it a
strong sense of an overall whole whose division alludes to unity. The surface
does not have the same blank and uninterrupted character of Robert Morriss
fiberglass or Donald Judds aluminum; it is inflected with the natural quality of
unmodified limestone. Perhaps now, at a point when fiberglass and aluminum
can readily be thought of as raw materials for relatively more sophisticated kinds
of industrial production, field boulders may be seen as found objects here
chosen for their lack of any definite shape and the through-and-through rugged
irregularity that makes them a natural find. The piece has the facticity of rocks,
which seem to resemble the plain facts of minimalist geometryin a similar
sense, a rock is a rock is rock. But the important and vital distinction for Antonis
specific object is that her stones representing stones actually refer to other
matters in terms of their specific materiality; the medium is fully aligned with her
laborious method in ways that point beyond it.

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Antonis and is a rather straightforward object with a simple story of its
making. The only direct reference to gender for the audience is that of the artist
herself. The process of grinding such large rocks together might suggest a task
meant to be performed by some burly man, or even work animals such as oxen.
But the simple engineering made it such that any fairly sturdy and able-bodied
individual could have handled the rotation of the mill. It is literally an object
representing the daily grind; labor and labored material is the substance, the
content of sorts. The basic physical specifications of its form put it in the
category of non-representational art, and its material is neither chiseled nor
polished nor painted in the manner of more traditional artrepresentational or
not. It is neither about craft, nor the evacuation of any such concern. It is not
simply about color, line, balanced or unbalanced composition. Accordingly, and
could accurately be termed minimalist in a certain literal sense. Yet, andas
well as nearly all other works by Antonicontains at least one critical element
which renders it distinct from its minimalist relatives, and that is the way in which
labor is both central and visibly featured rather than disguised and basically
forgotten. Antonis effort is perhaps even more literalist as an object of the
performance of labor than the historically minimalist works in which the very
absence of the evidence of craft characteristic of mass-produced objects and
the erasure of the mark of labor as a feature of industrial production is a part of

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the content. Antonis piece and minimalisms industrial aesthetic each reflect
part of the same reality in their own waysthe reality of the invisibility of labor in
industrial production. The minimalists reflect this idea by denying the evidence of
labor in one of the last remaining places where individual labor as craft has not
only long been acknowledged, but afforded special status through the object of
art. By erasing the individual hand of the artist from a work of art, the
minimalist foregrounds the way in which the perception of labor in general has
been erased in a world in which all objects seem to arrive ready-made by
invisible hands. Antoni foregrounds the contemporary invisibility of labor, but she
does this by defamiliarizing its normative "phantom" presence through
evidentiary, often bizarre monuments to laborbodily but actually and
emphatically not made by hand. While both strategies circle the same ideas,
Antonis testimonial objects such as and may provoke an empathic response
from its audiencethe viewer having a sense of the experience of the artists
laborwhich minimalist forms can only suggest at a theoretically level.

Minimalism: Objects and contexts

In the late sixties Tony Smith was described as a sort of grandparent of
much new minimalist sculpture, having produced it since 1960 (Benedikt 89).
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Smiths work, setting him apart
from other minimalists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, may be

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described as his tendency to give his forms more variety and asymmetry. This
distinction alone gives Smiths work something in common with Antonis boulder
sculpture. Specifically, Smiths 1967 Wandering Rocks installation and the
individual piece Crocus are worth examining in relation to and as a way of
teasing out more of Antonis minimalist connections and departures. Both
Crocus and Antonis piece seem to sit in space in a vaguely similar way.
Crocus is more of an abstract reclining figure, while and might resemble the
gross formation of a torso. Antonis has one spindle arm extending from the top
rock, which was the appendage put to use in her grinding labors and it literally
appears to point to the process. Crocus is fully sealed and reveals nothing of its
making, though its medium is described as vapor blasted stainless steel. The
materials for Smiths piece are consistently and thoroughly the products of labor
(regardless of the deployment of machinery), while disclosing no outward sign of
human processing. Antonis piece is all about her labor made apparent through
her transparent process and its targeted modification of precisely corresponding
material. Crocus is totally man-made as a way of obscuring craft, while and is
largely nature-made, allowing Antonis clear but relatively limited evidence of
manipulation to be more of a central feature. In both cases the labor is abstract
(as invisible or defamiliarized) in the context of art as abstracted from life, which
may also make reference to the abstract homogeneous human labor constitutive

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of commodity relationsa living process reductively quantified in abstract time,
apart from its qualitative specificities.
Another perhaps not so obvious way in which minimalist artworks and
some of Antonis pieces are comparable is through their use of provisionally raw
materials. Lard Gnaw and Chocolate Gnaw were initially made by forming 600
pounds each of lard and chocolate into cubes. Such quantities, relative to Antoni
as the solitary producer, are of industrial proportions; it is the scale of manmade materials that become the raw stuff for mass production of more
sophisticated forms. Though Antonis unembellished foodstuffs are actually preprocessed, they seem raw in relation to their ultimate transformation. Antoni
complicates matters and defamiliarizes the "building blocks" through an
intermediary process of her individual acts of biting, chewing, and spitting. Her
bizarre activity reinserts the laboring body into a scene of production with
elements that seem closer to large-scale manufacturing than individual artmakingthe former being a type of production that swallows up the body of labor
in effect, and makes it seem to disappear in the final product.
Tony Smiths steel cubes such as his six-foot 1962 piece Die also seem to
be made of a kind of crude material because of the unaffected quality of the
object. But perhaps Sol LeWitts three-dimensional modular grids, or Donald
Judds very shiny box forms refer more to their 1960s world in which more and

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more things were designed to include modular and pre-fabricated construction
materials. This relatively new landscape of human manipulation may have
seemed to have a pre-formed character that also reinvented the raw in terms of
steel and glass. Urban sociologist Sharon Zukin describes some of this
homogenizing affect in the experience of the everyday when the leisure of home
life is invaded by well-designed machines [and] cities appear more alike (39).
She elaborates: New architecture and urban forms are, moreover, produced
under nearly the same social conditions as consumer products. They
increasingly follow similar patterns of both standardization and market
differentiation (Zukin 42).
Zukin may well have left out the nearly the same qualification for social
conditions, since the differences were really only superficially about size and
quantity. The point is that pervasive forms of cultural production and institutional
structures are not simply extraneous to art-making. Indeed, some of the
minimalist art products such as the glass, steel, and other shiny metallic
creations of Donald Judds have the character of being chips off the old Mies van
der Rohe block. In other words, in retrospect at least, some works seemed to
replicate much of the visual landscape. The degree of coincidence is rather
unusual in this case, because although the production of art is always related to
its world in some way, it is not simply about spitting out myriad objects

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straightforwardly mirroring that world. At the same time, to the extent that such
an appearance of abstract component bits of the modern world emerges, this
becomes a definitively minimalist effect. Indeed, the look of some of the objects
may have been too much like the visual landscape at times to be noticed as
such, especially in the context of their own aesthetic bubble, as it were. At the
same time, Kenneth Baker views minimalism in terms of a kind of activism
pervasive in the 1960s. He describes minimalist works as tacitly critical of the
condition of American culture. Baker asserts that the opportunities for
contemplation on offer aided in allowing an audience to step back from the
constant exhortations to consume products, services, and diversions in a neverending, short-sighted pursuit of enjoyment and self-esteem. Moreover, he
notes: By its very quiescence, Minimalist art draws the viewers attention to the
pace of his experience and thus to question who or what is setting that pace
(Baker 77). However persuasive some of Bakers case for minimalism may or
may not be, he does point to some of its underlying logic. The lack of gender
specificity in this kind of art relates to a strategy that necessarily excludes all
such details, arguably as a kind of response to the distracting pseudo-specificity
of consumer society. Actually, the absence of style and the plain or homely
character of many of Antonis objects can be seen within a roughly similar frame
of reference. The difference is that Antonis details arise through her

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performative approach involving labor and related materials, revealing references
to gender built into the condition of its making. Her way of art making does not
rely on simple signs of so-called feminine affect or sensibility.
Returning to the comparison begun earlier between works by Tony Smith
and Antoni, I wish to further develop the relationship between their works more
concretely. Smith is noted for the way he
shaped a number of his sculptures so as to make it
impossible to anticipate views as one moves around the
object, as if to post-pone conclusions about the sculptures
structure as long as possible. The disparities of aspect in
Crocus and in other elements of Wandering Rocks, for
example, affirm the fact that no intellectual act or idealized
vantage point can supplant the process of walking around
the objects and that no meander can comprehend the totality
of relations implicit in the whole ensemble (Baker 73-4).
Michael Fried quotes Tony Smiths remarks regarding a kind of minimalist
logic of interest in objects: Im interested in the inscrutability and mysteriousness
of the thing. Something obvious in the face of it (like a washing machine or a
pump) is of no further interest. He contrasts these things of sensuous
particularity such as a Bennington earthenware jug as those that continue to

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offer such qualities as new experiences of the object with each encounter. Smith
concludes, There is something absurd in the fact that you can go back to a cube
in the same way (Fried 143). Fried sees no virtue in this. He gathers up Judds
Specific Objects and Morriss gestalts or unitary forms, along with Smiths cube
as if to throw them in a junk box of annoying novelties. Fried explains: Smiths
cube is always of further interest; one never feels that one has come to the end
of it; it is inexhaustible. But he has an important caveat: It is inexhaustible
however, not because of any fullnessthat is inexhaustibilitybecause there is
nothing there to exhaust (Fried 143-4).
It seems as if Antonis efforts may have picked up on this failure of
minimalism at the point where it became clich. It is as though she finds her
audience in that almost mythical position of expectation for more and fills in the
same blank she has borrowed. Antonis and with its giant rocks stacked one
atop the other is certainly literal in its way; however, the in-between cracks and
gaps of the arrangement involving her labor may mark the point of impasse for
the radically self-referential object in art.
Fried also quotes Donald Judds insistence on sheer specificity of
materials: Most of the work involves new materials, either recent inventions or
things not used before in art. Judd listed some of them: Formica, aluminum,
cold rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass, pointing out that their direct

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use make them more specificand there is an objectivity to the obdurate
identity of the material (Fried 142-3). It seems almost quaint now, over thirty
years later, to identify such materials as new and so unlike the stuff used to make
art. Fried states his complaint rather plainly: the materials do not represent,
signify or allude to anything: they are what they are and nothing more (143).
Antoni has used a wide range of non-art materials in her way of working
that are more new simply in terms of her deployments; but the self-referential
aspect of her works in general tends to refer to her process in precise relation to
her materials. The boulders of and literally refer to one another as Antoni
situates them, while in that same instance they refer to her labors in connecting
them. In this case, however, the self-referential object of the stones as stones
remains as such, apart from its connection to Antonis labor. It is a kind of
emancipated form (in the modernist sense) given in the context of the artists
process, which doesnt burden the object with content, but grants a palpable
sense of the investment in its objecthood. At the same time, the investment does
not simply reside in the object or in the act of its making; it is in the circuit of
desire and its assertion in material process that is given.
It would seem, therefore, that perhaps the major distinction between
Antonis work and the work of early minimalists is a matter of objecthood. It
appears that minimalists were more invested in the object as an autonomous

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thing, unrelated to the individual craft identified with the idiosyncratic motives of
the artist. The erasure of any visible signs of labor was readily accomplished by
way of a thoroughgoing factory production. According to feminists such as
Susan Stoops, it is precisely this manufacture of impersonal objecthood that
masks the male principle behind a conceit of universal subjectivity. However, to
the extent that a generally unacknowledged but presumably male neutral
subject has been asserted as a socio-historical phantom-figure, does the way in
which minimalist art appears to comport with this type of phenomena reduce it to
those terms? What happened to a womans power of agency? Is it utterly
dependent upon an assertion of her particularly gendered subjectivity? It is a
historical fact that women have quite often been denied recognition as
accomplished artists, which makes the fact that very few women and their works
receive any mention in Battcocks 1968 anthology Minimal Art none too
surprising. Indeed, among those few included, Judy Gerowitz (before she
became Judy Chicago) and Ursula Meyer worked in the characteristically
minimalist ways of their male colleagues, but would this simply reduce their art to
the terms of male identification? Were they really just victims of a maledominated art system to the extent that it actually nullified their artistic efforts? If
this is the case, what happened to their agency?

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Of course, that last question is rhetorically pitched with reference to what I
argue is the false formulation of opposing agency to structure, as Stoops does
implicitly with her awkward championing of Nancy Gravess female agency in
one of her catalog entries. To simply counter pose structure and agency in
discrete deterministic terms is not only a distortion, but it may ultimately
undermine the claim of individual achievement by denying its fuller dimensions.
If structure is understood as both the product of human agency and the
conditions for human agency, and that neither institutions nor agents/acts must
be taken as primary, (Wolff, Social Production of Art 22) then excessive
protestations based on an assumption of discrete oppositions in which one side
is always dominant are rendered nonsensical.
Minimalist creations are not actually designed to erase all traces of
humanity; they are about reinvesting it in the viewers reflection, the viewers
experience of the artwork as a type of presence. It may even be argued that the
lack of certain particularities in minimalist works reflects a non-discriminatory
appeal, a utopian strategy of presentation for the engagement of any and all
particularized individuals. The relative success or failure of such a strategy in
these terms may remain an open question. But Michael Frieds preferred term of
literalist over minimalist may be a bit too literal-minded to identify some of the
cold steel and hard glass constructions as simply masculinist. And what about

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the capacity of art as art (as non-discursive) to be something more or other than
a mere statement? What about the potential for provocation? Toby Mussman
offers one way of imagining this: The job of art, like philosophy, is to ask
questions through such and such a framework, or set up such and such a
framework which asks questions of us" (Mussman 237).
Another historical perspective emerges with the following:
Minimal artists acknowledge both the viewer and the
space of the gallery. They grasp aggressively at all available
space, and in doing so point in every direction. They force
the audience to an awareness of existence that goes beyond
the presence of any particular art object. The audience is
persuaded to walk about the newly defined and delineated
space, and the path is determined by the art (Battcock 32).
The power of awareness Battcock sees as possible through an experience of the
minimalist field of objects, if you will, may seem overstated to us now. Such
awareness may even relate to some kind of existential crisis, given his account.
But this is all part of its historical context.
Antoni knows this territory and has no need to retrace the path of what
was once considered a newly defined space of the gallery. The beyond for her
is the particular process and details of the objects making, which complicates

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any audience awareness of existence. If as Fried imagined it, literalist art
defines or locates the position it aspires to occupy (117), Antoni co-opts that
space to exhibit her preoccupation with process as a type of awareness she both
experiences and creates for an audience with her objects.
Minimalist sculpture is a type of work that is always rendered off-site with
no visible allusion to a backstage process. Historically, the minimalist objects
performance is almost exclusively about a seemingly spontaneous presence.
Antonis artworks are literally objects of performance, though only a minority of
them (to date) is performed on-site at the point of reception. Her pieces move
the process center stage, very often with vivid scenes of what remains of a
special site of production. And yet, minimalist pieces and those by Antoni, each
in their own way share a preoccupation with issues of production. Each
emphasizes concerns of material or medium and embodied experience. In terms
of the nature of the object, Antonis works do not simply stand to scorn or belittle
the attempt at pure objecthood; rather, her work may refer to the desire for a
transcendently real form and the material bodily struggle that is involved with
such aspirations.
In a 1965 essay included in Battcock's anthology, Richard Wollheim
wrestles with the subject of artistic production: I suspect that our principal reason
for resisting the claims of Minimal Art is that its objects fail to evince what we

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have over the centuries come to regard as an essential ingredient in art: work, or
manifest effort (Wollheim 395). Of course, his line of inquiry would have to
include Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades, along with others who might
force us to reconsider what it is to make a work of art. At one point, Wollheim's
concerns direct him toward recognizing that the act of deciding where a work
begins and ends is an aspect of artistic production, though he stubbornly persists
in asserting that such decisions cannot be said to be literally work. For
Wollheim the more real work involves the putting of paint on canvas, the
hacking of stone, the welding of metal elements (395-6). He seems to consider
minimalism from a materialist perspective, but his concern about work, or
manifest effort ultimately remains at the level of an idea in relation to Antonis
work. Antonis approach is not simply about the physical labor of art as an
abstract value, and her decisions regarding where her piece ends is just a part of
an integrated process.
As noted by Kenneth Baker, from Donald Judds perspective:
[S]urrendering personal handiwork was a great
advantageit meant [Judd] could avail himself of techniques
and material effects he could never have commanded if
restricted to his own skills and expertise. Acting as a
contractor rather than a fabricator increased the control he

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could have over the precise physical qualities of an object
(Baker 58).
Judds process of production was largely decided before reaching the factory to
be carried out. He actually reversed Wollheims idea of phases. Physical labor
and material applications were Wollheims first phase the production of an art
object, while the second phase in artistic productivity was identified as that
without which work would be meaningless: namely, the decision that the work
has gone far enough. But Judds approach does seem to follow Wollheims
account whereby it is the second phase in the total production that is picked out
and celebrated in isolation. The isolation is achieved in the starkest fashion; that
is, by entrusting the two phases to quite different hands (Wollheim 396).
Bakers portrayal of Judds method of production casts him as an artist
who merely found a way to build a better mousetrapor metal box, as was so
often the case. He does not inquire about the nature of such an advanced
technique. For Wollheim's part, his essay mentions ready-mades and Ad
Reinhardt paintings, but tends to ignore certain specifics related to productions
such as Judds. Had he been able to identify his "phases" division of labor
scheme as a type of industrial process, the starkest fashion of object and its
making may have made a different kind of sense. Instead, his emphasis on the
way art objects are produced seems purely academic. In other words, Wollheim

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appears too concerned with theorizing about abstract values and phases of
artistic production to notice how these matters might relate to the larger world
from which they emerge. And whether the minimalist object appears to be a
celebration or a lamentation regarding advanced industrial society, the legibility of
such objects is generally related to that very aspect of social production.
However, Donald Judds shiny metal and glass boxes are not merely reflections
or symbols of the particular period of modernization going on around him; they
do not simply create some record of the world, but they are produced within the
context of their time and place. Nonetheless, there appears to be an unusual
coincidence in the comprehensively abstract character of minimalist art, from
production to objectit seems to emblematize the commodity form. The whole
story of minimalist objects is about the same kind of abstraction that creates the
category of object specific to a social order of commodity relations. The
rudimentary objecthood might also appear timeless in the way that such a
social order institutionally assumes that its course of human progress is the
natural and inevitable inclination of our species. This is not to claim that the
minimalist cube, for example, is any more or less subject to commodification than
any other art forms (including performance), or anything else for that matter.
Moreover, the point here is not the assertion of minimalisms ultimate meaning,
nor is it that such art strategies are an essential part of some masculinist

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agenda. Indeed, Antonis specific focus on actual labor with its abstract quality
literally inscribed in her objects may be what allows for new perspectives on
minimalism; and the neutrality of minimalist forms may be understood as related
to the commodity abstraction as much as any unmarked masculinity. It seems
clear that to whatever extent minimalisms suppression of details of human
particularities and expressive qualities may comport with certain notions of
masculinity and male dominance, it should not be reduced to an issue of gender.
Not only does such a narrow focus leave out the broader historical context, it
tends to essentialize gender and obscure the construct as socially embedded.

Situating gender and masculinity

Susan Faludis research tracing the history of masculinity in America
certainly supports the idea of gender as construct:
A study of heroic male figures in late-eighteenth-century
periodicalsfound that the perceived key to masculinity was
publick usefulness. The hunter in the saddle, untethered
from public life, was regarded as only half a man. He was
the outsider whose blood-letting served no social purpose,
the lone killer who kept on killing because there was nothing
else to do (Faludi 11).

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Such a character was branded a frontier wastrel and Davy Crockett was
considered one of these. Later his image would be rehabilitated as a cleanedup Walt Disney character in 1955 (Faludi 12). In-between these disparate
incarnations, masculinity itself had been subject to revision:
In industrializing nineteenth-century Americanthe wastrel
would begin to gain a certain renown as an emblem of virility,
his rapaciousness evidence of his ambitious, rags-to-riches
drive, his heaps of dead pelts the equivalent of the tycoons
consolidated fortunes, his killer instinct compensating for the
loss of service to a community. To be a man increasingly
meant being ever on the rise, and the only way to know for
sure you were rising was to claim, control and crush
everyone and everything in your way (Faludi 11).
Returning to the More Than Minimal catalog, the introduction refers to
Anna Chaves 1990 essay Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power. There is a
brief focus on Chaves critique of Robert Morriss Notes on Sculpture essay that
seems to oversimplify his work with a literal-minded extrapolation on gender
stereotypes:
Chave argues that Morriss call for an aesthetic unity, a
resistance to separate parts, and the elimination of details

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that might result in intimacy producing relations was clearly
a valuation of power and control over the psychological or
physical risk of involvement(Stoops 10).
The point here is not simply to champion Morriss ideas, but to show how his
desire to create new conditions for the viewing experience and new terms for
spectatorship is being misconstrued as a drive to vanquish intimacy from
relations between people. Dismissing Morriss aesthetic as a domineering pose
of control and personal distancing seems part of a specifically gendered ad
hominem attack.
A fuller view of Morriss 1966 essay offers a rather different sense of his
artistic ambitions. Some may find the full two-part essay to be a bit too formulaic,
but it is worth examining a somewhat lengthy excerpt toward an understanding of
the problems with Stoopss and Chaves reading as rendered in the More Than
Minimal catalog. The following features Morriss comments on the then new work
of minimalist artists (a term he never uses here, which was also generally
unacceptable to his colleagues), revealing many of the values and strategies he
adopts for some of his own work:
The better new work takes relationships out of the work and
makes them a function of space, light, and the viewers field
of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer

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aesthetic. It is in some ways more reflexive because ones
awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work
is stronger than in previous work, with its internal
relationships. One is more aware than before that he himself
is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object
from various positions and under varying conditions of light
and spatial context. Every internal relationship, whether it be
set up by a structural division, a rich surface, or what have
you, reduces the public, external quality of the object and
tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details
pull him into an intimate relation with the work and out of the
space in which the object exists (Morris 232-33).
It becomes obvious in the fuller text that Morris is not demeaning by exclusion the
general human value of intimacy; rather his point about avoidance is part of a
specific formal strategy intended to allow for a more open inclusion of the viewer.
It is also clear that the concern for unity of design as a controlling element is
meant to invite a kind of psychological or physical risk of involvement, rather
than refuse it. The degree of success this strategy might have, or even some of
the unanticipated effects it created may be opened to debate. However, a
blanket dismissal attributed to masculine values lends itself to the development of

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a new kind of exclusiveness wherein some women artists may be deemed less
than authentically female.
During the sixties, when many of the major works originally identified as
minimalist were being created, and artists and other writers were advancing the
ideas of this pioneering art, even an informal review of the literature of the time
reveals that the work of female minimalists was being overlooked. As women
were generally developing a keener awareness of the trend of exclusion and
even organizing against it with protests and other actions, it may be
understandable that a perceived masculine sensibility in minimalism would have
been associated with gender-based exclusion. But did it ever really make sense
to simply identify minimalist art as such with the institutional bias against women?
Does the measure of ambiguity in the very simple geometric design of many
works actually signify male privilege? Does a woman really need to see herself
in a work to feel included? Antonis work suggests a new kind of challenge to this
line of thought.
Antoni made two versions of the minimalist cube in her gnaw pieces,
(which may even be seen as a word play on the way artworks are referred to as
pieces). As previously described, in this case, as with so many others in her
body of work, she insists on displaying evidence of production to the point of
having it be an integral and often primary aspect of her artwork. However, she

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does not simply look to restore the virtuoso status of the artists hand so
emphatically shunned in minimalism, to an earlier position of privilege. In fact,
Antonis evidence of her labors in the process of production has really never
been about the artistic mark of her hand at all. It may well be that Antonis
regular exclusion of her hand suggests the historic evaluation of the artistic hand
of the woman as a defective tool of sorts for the creation of great art. However,
the strength of the allusion is clearly related to one of the fundamental challenges
about this measure of greatness previously raised by minimalists.
What at first glance appears to be a precisely opposite strategy to
minimalism may be more closely or complexly related than it seems. Certainly,
Antoni puts a very different kind of emphasis on the issue of the making of art,
especially in relation to the final productthe art work, if you will. After all, Carl
Andre is noted for having insisted that physical labor is the least important
determinate of art. Kenneth Baker went on to remark: Possibly the only
sculptor more committed than Andre to renunciation of personal workmanship is
Donald Judd (Baker 55). And even though Richard Serra developed more of a
sense of individual process, his 1968 piece Thirty Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up,
for example, hardly evokes the sense of bodily involvement invested in its
creation that Antonis Eureka, Lard Gnaw, or Lick and Lather feature so
emphatically. Minimalists have most often vanquished any sense of physical

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labor with their cleanly molded or invisibly constructed pieces. At the same time,
while the obsessive quality of Antonis actions and markings offers a vivid
reminder of her production process, it does so in a way that makes even common
acts such as washing, biting, chewing, or licking seem strangeperhaps
monstrous. In this way, her oddly intensive efforts are literally about estranged
labor.
In David Harveys The Condition of Postmodernity the author attempts to
sort through the relationship between the conditions of labour and life in the
shifting dynamic of modernization and aesthetic modernism (Harvey 99). His
observations of developing social conditions related to the modern world include
the obscurity of the details of labor and production, as so much seems hidden
just beneath everyday awareness:
We can take our daily breakfast without a thought for the
myriad people who engaged in its production. All traces of
exploitation are obliterated in the object (there are no finger
marks of exploitation in the daily bread). We cannot tell from
contemplation of any object in the supermarket what
conditions of labour lay behind its production (Harvey 101).
Comments made by Kenneth Baker about Donald Judds work are interesting for
how they relate to Harveys remarks. In one passage Baker also focuses on

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products in the supermarket; his concern at this point is not for the labor that
goes into them but for the shoddy, artificial quality he finds. He views these
matters as part of a broad cultural background with it surcharge of deceptive
detail in contrast to Judds art:
It is all but impossible to find in a supermarket so much as a
matchbook or box of facial tissues that is not covered with
advertising or a pattern that stands in for advertising. Plastic
is made to look like wood, chrome, tile, natural fibers, or
leather, both mocking and exaggerating the luxury of the
genuine articles. Paper napkins are embossed to simulate
embroidered linen. Soft-drink labels are designed to imitate
wine labelsJudds best sculptures, on the other hand,
reward curiosity about why something is made the way it is
with the rare sensation of seeing an industrially fabricated
thing that exists solely to be contemplatedand which seem
wholly to be what it ought to be in terms its material and
structure set forth (Baker 65).
It seems that Baker is more than willing to accept the minimalist erasure of signs
of production at face value. He sets the focus back on the surface of things and
the look of the products. At one point in the same passage as above, his praise

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for Judds artwork comes with a parenthetical remark, so long as its status as a
commodity is not held to discredit it. Here commodity seems to become a
quality in itself, as if it is simply more natural or more apparent in some things
than others. But commodity is not just a matter of things like soy beans and
pork bellies; it is quite specifically about labor and social relations. In this sense
it is not a matter of a discrete image or type of productit is about a mode of
social production.
However, Baker does offer a certain insight: In relative terms of
appearances Judds pristine boxes do seem to stand ever more substantial and
genuine amidst the endless stream of new-and-improved, crass and disposable
items. But of course, its status as a commodity is its existence within a world of
commodity relations; it is not a status at all and is, in this way, precisely what
makes it identical to every shoddy productthe only difference on this
particular score is a matter of quantity within the specifically capitalist scheme of
commensurability known as value. Yet that illusory moment of seeing an
industrially fabricated thing as simply there to be contemplated is not merely
false. Judds specific objects are not only industrially produced, they can be
understood as monuments to invisible labor by referring to nothing but
themselves.

336
And so, it may now become a bit clearer how Antonis works and those of
even the strictest variety of minimalism have more in common that meets the
eye. The strangely apparent and often bizarre labor that is revealed as part of
the greater substance of Antonis pieces points to the same kind of labor (per the
normative terms of this society) as that which is never seen in minimalist
constructions. The otherwise all-pervasive (historically specific) condition of labor
as the commodity labor-power is something that can never be seen in any normal
sense. In this context, Antonis objects of the performance of labor create a
properly freakish display directly related to the total absence of signs of labor in
minimalist objectseach example is similarly implicated socially through the
specter of difference, the appearance of contradictions. The narrowness of
essentializing difference feminism short-circuits this kind of insight.

Conclusion

This study has explored the work of Janine Antoni with a particular focus
on her hybrid forms, multi-layered concerns or allusions, and most significantly,
the special performative character of her art. Antonis body of work is not only
prodigious in its multiplicity, but for the way in which it expands upon previously
established artistic strategies and categories. By current standards the diversity
of Antonis work with its inclusion of a wide range of materials and methods, is
not so remarkable in itself. However, a brief glance into the past provides a
measure of historical perspective through which to situate her work and see it for
the remarkable contribution that it is.
Such an eclectic approach as Antonis would have been unthinkable for
the kind of early modern example of impressionist painters, though this would
also have been the case for the more pure-minded minimalists of the 1960s. The
acceptance of Joseph Beuyss various pioneering efforts is an important instance
marking a trend toward broadening or simply confounding the categories for art.
In order to account for the rapid accumulation of new artistic strategies and
forms, there was a need to develop more general and ambiguous terms to begin
sorting through the increasing variety of innovations. Art classes began to break
things down into the broad headings of two, three, and even four dimensions for
time-arts. For example, the category 3-D could begin to account for an
337

338
expanding field of artistic production that would include such forms and strategies
as neon or kinetic sculpture, assemblage, environmental works, installation, and
more. Painting and realist would suffice for a preliminary discussion of
Gustave Courbets work; sculpture and figurative may be adequate to open
the topic of Auguste Rodins art. But as the idea of dematerialized art
developed, the usefulness of a term like object art would become part of this
historical shift in artistic practice. Indeed, as the production of conceptual and
performance art became more established, some artists would appear to be
dispensing with the object altogether. Of course any attempts at disavowal were
not likely to be comprehensive, yet the changing status of the object would
require new approaches to making and thinking about art.
Antonis work may be seen as an intervention to retrieve the forgotten
realm of objects through performance. Her journey through this territory
involves a patient kind of progress. Nancy Princenthal notes: She works slowly
and releases objects sparingly (even the photographs only a few at a time), and
they reward prolonged engagement. She also remarks that Antonis process is
often at once feverish and underwater slow and the art that results from her
careful deliberation, similarly induces a drawn-out process of perceptual
recognition ("Mothers Milk" 128). Given Antonis own experience of her lengthy
lived-in productions, it makes sense that the protracted interplay of the making

339
and the made would in itself become of special interest for her. Some of her
musings about her process may be described in terms of the performance of the
object:
Ive come to trust my process and the slow transformation of
the object. Joseph Beuys called beds energy catchers,
because in your bed you have sex, you have dreams, you
are sick, you have babies, and you die. He felt that beds
collect all this energy. Im interested in whether an object
can really do that or not, and how it works. The relationship I
have with the object is a real one. Im interested in the point
where Im not sure whether Im making the object or the
objects making me. When I get to that point, I usually know
I have something interesting (Antoni, Inside the Studio 229).
Antonis object of performance foregrounds performance in significantly
new ways. Her reconsideration of the object uniquely reinscribes it through
performance. In the most primary and obvious sense, Antonis works are objects
of performance because they exist as emblems of their own makingas
testimonial objects of embodied processes and actions. One way to examine the
basic anatomy of Antonis performative and redefining operations is to begin by
considering standard denotations of the word object. The first definition in a

340
1994 edition of Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary is anything that
is visible or tangible and stable in form. Antonis special objects are often
defined in relation to their instability. Her malleable materials offer testimony to
her labors in the forms she creates, but the condition of her objects is such that
they continue on as forms in process, so to speak. Their stability is notably
temporary and contingent. Lard Gnaw is the quintessential example for it literally
melts and requires repeated recasting. In this way, the visual aspect of her
works is also contingent, but their very visibility refers to her typically behind-thescenes performance. Antonis creations most significantly reveal the marks or
signs of the invisible scene of production, which may then reappear in the minds
eye of the viewer. Another twist on the definition of the object as something to be
seen occurs with Lick and Lather, whereby what is most visually compelling
about the piece is a result of the near or complete erasure of the facial features of
her self-portrait busts. Antonis work also amplifies the tangible part of the
definition of object, which not only describes its concrete form but the capacity
of the object to evoke the tangible process of its creation.
Returning to the example of Gnaw, the presence of Antonis labor appears
in the traces she leaves behind as marks of her absence. Her great gnawed
cubes refer to a form of fragmented, alienated labor that is rearticulated in the
display of multiple finished objects in Lipstick Display as part of the condition of

341
mass production. These objects of performance also allude to the obscured
performance of social labor. In this case, Antoni absents herself from the scene
in order to maintain this kind of emphasis and avoid the potentially overwhelming
spectacle that would arise with a live performance of her bizarre labors. As she
explains in her interview with Stuart Horodner, she removes herself in order to
create a place for the viewer (Horodner, 50). Her work draws the attention of
the viewer as more than a matter of merely mundane objects, while being
something other than the preciously considered form that is put forth as a
manifestation of artistic virtuosity. Without actually articulating the term object of
performance, in a lengthy passage from the same interview, she offers a
consistent sense of the role of her objects in relation to performance:
Imagining the process is so much more powerful than
watching me do it. Imagining is much more provocative and
makes each viewers story slightly different. By imagining
me, the viewers experience turns out to be about their own
wish fulfillment. It is an effort to connect. Its a crazy thing
to remove in an effort to connectbut Im interested in that
fine line between how much information I give and how much
information I withhold, and my whole body of work plays with
that. The key word for me is empathy. Its something I think

342
about a lot because I want to put the viewer in a particular
relationship with the objects (Horodner 50).
Antonis explanation suggests a connotation for the object that refers more
broadly to the objective of performance. In this sense, the object of performance
is not simply a case of the things that are created but of situations and
relationships. This is not merely a matter of relics of performance but of the way
performance is itself an objectification of experience, whether it is crystallized in
the form of physical objects or presented live at the point of receptionin
Antonis work the two may be combined in one piece. Yet, even with the on-site
performance that primarily features the performing body of the artist, the object
may be a form of presence, a series of actions, or a fully developed narrative.
Real-time enactments are a way of objectifying feelings and ideas; the object of
performance is an externalization that may take different forms and derive from
various sources.
The second dictionary definition of object is anything that may be
apprehended intellectually. This study has examined the intellectual
underpinnings of Antonis work, particularly in relation to issues of labor and
gender. However, Antonis art is much more than the objectification of concepts.
Immediately after she raises her special concern for placing the viewer into a

343
particular relationship with the objects, she goes on to clarify her point with the
following:
Thats different from how we have traditionally learned to
approach a conceptual work of art. Traditionally, we stay
objective and go through a process of decoding information
to make meaning. Im much more interested in the viewer
empathizing with my process. I do these extreme acts
because I feel that viewers can relate to them through their
bodies. I realize its charged. The viewers can be analytical,
but about their own responses (Horodner 50).
Antoni traces some of the legacy of her extreme acts back to feminist
artists of the 1970s. She identifies with the intensely visceral quality of their
work and their willingness to be more extreme than artists of the 1980s. As she
explains in an interview with Laura Cottingham, It was necessary for the 80s
feminists to exist for me to return [to] the 70s (Cottingham, "Biting Sums Up"
104). But while Antoni may have been significantly inspired by the efforts of
these women, she doesnt exactly return to the 70s with her own work. Stuart
Horodner notes that Antoni is historically linked to artists such as Hannah Wilke
and Ana Mendieta, two of the figures cited in her interview with Cottingham. At
the same time he remarks: This legacy is constantly referenced in discussion of

344
your work, yet youre not operating in the same way these folks did. Horodner
then refers to Antonis Lick and Lather piece with a comment that in the image
one constructs of your bathing or licking self-portraits, there is this sense that one
is with you in the moment you are forming these objects, but of course, ones not.
Theres a great familiarity and at the same time a great distance (Horodner 50).
In a related passage he wonders about the way people feel close to Antoni
because of her body-generated work, though she does not reveal
autobiographical information. The artist replies: When you are with my objects
you are with something I have, literally, been intimate with. The work doesnt
necessarily reveal anything personal. You come to understand the work through
your own body (Horodner 50). But the situation is truly more personal in the
case of artists such as Hannah Wilke (1940 1993) and Ana Mendieta. These
women tended to reduce the object to that of their own bodies in a way that
Antoni does not.
Before Hannah Wilke succumbed to cancer in 1993, she became well
known for revealing her naked or partially dressed form in many of her works.
Perhaps her most poignant performance of nakedness was produced in
documenting the bloated and disfigured appearance of her once beautiful body
as she suffered through the ravages of disease and the effects of chemotherapy.
Wilke was a pioneer in probing issues of femininity and the sexualized female

345
image through her artespecially in terms of explicit depictions of the body. In
one of her best-known works, S.O.S.Starification Object Series (1974 79) her
own nude or partially clad image is featured in a group of twenty-eight
photographs as the star object. Wilke parodies the come-hither stance and
seductive pose in most of these shots, while adding an unexpected element to
these images. In Body Art: Performing the Subject Amelia Jones describes how
the artists flesh in each S.O.S. image is covered with tiny, cuntlike bubble-gum
sculptures as these mark her body in its contingency and woundedness as
feminine... (182-3). Much is made of Wilkes vulvar sculptural form, though I
interpret the subtle absurdity of these objects as more significant for the way they
mark the viewer in the act of consuming the images. The viewer becomes more
self-aware with the insertion of these incongruous marks, while the effect is to
interrupt the unconscious assimilation of female nudity.
One account of Wilke entitled I-Object begins: Perhaps to a greater
extent than any other female artist, Hannah Wilke made herself the subjectand
objectof her art (Lffler 554). In Body Art Amelia Jones devotes an entire
chapter to Wilke entitled The Rhetoric of the Pose. Wilkes more exclusive use
of the body as the primary object does seem like a rhetorical move of invoking
the body as simply a given thing of nature that needs to be repositioned in
relation to culture. In this case, it appears as if the emphasis is on the original

346
female form as an authentic object hiding behind an artificial pose. By contrast,
Antoni does not simply shine a spotlight on the body as the lone posing star;
rather, in Antonis work the body performs more like a player in an ensemble
cast. For her the body is not simply nature in opposition to or imposed upon by
culture: the body is the subject and the object, both productive of and produced
by culture. Most often Antonis strategy is to include only a partial or fragmented
depiction through bodily traces and impressions. Embodied experience may be
seen as embedded in her material and the body is revealed by the evidence of
her labor.
When Antoni quotes Beuyss reference to the bed as an energy catcher,
it recalls her own scene of the bed in Slumber. In this case, the bed seems more
like a site of energy transmission, as its place between the loom and the
polysomnograph machine offers the sense of it as a kind of power station. From
the bed the force of Antonis dreams emanates from the movement of her eyes,
captured by the machine and reinvested in the actions of weaving. In this way
Slumber is not simply about the unconscious performance of Antonis bodily
movements during sleep and the conscious activity of during the day at the loom;
rather, the whole piece seems to activate a circulation of energies. Slumber
stands in contrast to a work like Tracey Emins 1999 piece entitled My Bed. Emin
does not spend the night in the gallery, but she meticulously reconstructs the

347
detailed scene within and around her bed in the middle of the exhibition space.
The set is quite convincing, being much like that required for a play or a movie
with a carefully designed lived-in appearance; however, it conveys little more
than the vague sense of a very anxious inhabitant with poor housekeeping
habits. In contrast to Slumbers complex relational scheme and multiple
performances, My Bed seems inert and uninspired.
Gabriel Orozco, whose art appears in the same select group with Antonis
in Art: 21Art in the Twenty-First Century, explains that his work is about traces
of human activity (Sollins 86). His production of terra cotta pieces reveals
objects created through brief manipulation and impressions of the hand; they do
not appear to be about anything beyond their making. Antonis art reveals
evidence of its production as a primary feature of the work; it is about its own
making in a way that always implies something more. Orozcos works seem
more like objects of impress than objects of performance, with little sense of a
process or activity. On the other hand, Orozco did produce a most evocative
piece in 1999 entitled My Hands Are My Heart, which consists of a small terra
cotta work and a two-part cibachrome apparently demonstrating its creation.
One of the photographs features a partial image of his body tightly cropped at the
neck and isolating the upper torsoit is a headless figure. The shot centers on
his bare chest at the breastbone where in an almost prayer-like pose he holds a

348
nearly indistinguishable but apparently malleable lump of material pressed tightly
in his palms, with his fingers fully clasped around it. This central image of his
hands is very like that of a heart, mimicking the outline as the horizontal pattern
of the clutching fingers repeats the structure of the collar bone and rib-cage.
While it is not so obvious initially, a bit of the material is exposed in shadow from
the bottom of his grasp, and it appears to have the color and texture of a heart.
Of course, the mystery about the substance is never entirely complete as the
second photograph already displays the precisely impressed clay cupped in his
now open hands. The image of the heart is all at once an illogically articulated
form that is yet so palpably heart-like it creates a bit of a shock. It might even be
a raw lump of bizarrely finger-molded flesh that has somehow rematerialized in
his hands from the inside of his body. The image is a rich and compelling, but it
hardly seems appropriate to describe it as tracing human activity, as Orozco
would have it. Compared with Antonis work, it simply traces the momentary
clutch and release of malleable material.
The material Orozco uses in My Hands Are My Heart appears to be an
important element of the work. Yet, in relation to Martha Buskirks detailed
description and analysis of Antonis deployments, Orozcos medium seems
nearly incidental. The following passage from Buskirks The Contingent Object of
Contemporary Art further explicates Antonis object of performance. Referring

349
to Gnaw, Eureka and Lick and Lather, she examines the issue not only of the
resonance of Antonis materials, but the precise nature of their use:
It was important in each of these cases that the material in
use was indeed chocolate or soap or lard and not something
fashioned to resemble that material. The presence of these
materials is itself significant, even as they also carry the
potential to be molded into shapes that suggest a series of
other references. Under Antonis command, chocolate does
not dissemble its medium, even as it is made to assume
shapes that bring multiple additional associations...Antonis
use of these materials opens a series of intersecting
concerns, with process and the traces of actions, with
gender identification, and with the process of representation
itself. Antonis medium could more appropriately be
identified with her insistent return to the body and to the
traces left by repeated actions or patterns of use (Buskirk,
Contingent Object 142-3).
Buskirks reference to the dissembling of a medium is also appropriate to the
concerns of minimalism, which often involves an insistence upon having the work
be true to the material.

350
Richard Serra is generally classified as a minimalist, though some of
Kenneth Bakers discussion of Serra reveals an unexpected element of the
performative in his artistic strategies. The following ideas from Baker seem to
anticipate Antonis work:
In 1967, [Richard] Serra began thinking in terms of simple
actions that would convert materials into sculpture without
prettifying them or making them celebrate his sensibility. He
made a now famous list of transitive verbs"to crease, to
fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist," etc.acts just
legible enough that they might amount to techniques of
sculpture if exercised on the right materials (Baker 111).
One of the works said to have resulted from this line of thinking, as expressed
above, is Serras 1968 piece Tearing Lead from 1:00 to 1:47. It consists of
literally a ten foot square sheet of lead that is partially unraveled, in a sense. The
piece is installed in a corner of the exhibition space with the sheet of lead lying
flat in the center of lengthy crumpled strips of lead arranged around the corners
still connecting them to the original square piece of heavy elemental material.
The uniformly wide strips appear as irregularly curving and undulating pieces
resembling a haphazard unfurling of relatively delicate ribbons.

351
Antonis 2001 installation Moor appears to reinvent Serras Tearing Lead.
This piece also lies unfurled on the floor in the form of a far more complex kind of
motley rope. It is made of a quite lengthy collection of disparate materials, with
the list of contents displayed as part of the installation. The scraps and pieces of
material range from strung pearls to cat hair to fire hose to dental floss, and the
list of different elements is considerably longer than those four. Antoni collected
materials from friends in order to make the very long and variegated twists of her
special rope piece. Antoni explains: A lot of people gave me materials from
friends who had passed away. Giving them to me to put into the rope is like
giving them another life, another form (Sollins 82). Antonis Moor is another
example of the object of performance in the more expansive sense that also
applies to her larger body of work.
Although it has only spanned about fifteen years, the depth of Antonis
work remains somewhat difficult to sum up. Nonetheless, a few writers have
been able to offer some general insights into the importance of Antonis artistic
contributions. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth notes: The performative mode of operations
impliesa different mode of address. Although Antoni is often witty, it is not
through ironic distance typical of the critical practices of the 1980s but through a
kind of ironic complicity that her work engages the viewer ("Antonis Difference"
2000: 70). Dan Cameron identifies Antoni among those artists who are more

352
interested in a context-based deconstruction of the object and who approach
their work from a desire to re-experience the stuff of daily existence through the
lens of a heightened sense of attention (Cameron, "Same and Different" 54).
The crucial difference in Antonis case is that her performative method also
creates a heightened sense of self-awareness in the viewer. Her synthesis of
performance and elements of absence or distance is a key distinction: she offers
a vivid sense of her embodied process with productive gaps of information giving
the audience a sharper awareness of their participation in completing the work.
Indeed, when writing specifically about Antonis art, Cameron remarks that her
partial viewenables us, in a very real sense, to see what is lacking in our
current viewpoint, and to begin considering everything we must bring to the
occasion of perception, if we truly desire to find the missing part within ourselves
("Parts and Whole" 39). In a more concise fashion Judith Findlay comments: To
see Janine Antonis art is to think figuratively. We are the art as we view it
(Findlay 16). As we have seen, Antonis work is not only remarkably daring and
innovative, she is a most generous performance artisteven when she absents
herself from the stage. She seems poised to continue offering up ever unique
and startling objects of performance as we progress into the twenty-first
century.

353
Yet, Antoni remains committed to her transformative production as the
practice of art. Horodner once asked Antoni, How do you deal with success?I
wonder about how artists use what they have achieved to keep that going. She
responded:
I just believe in the power of art, what it can do for our lives.
I think if you stay focused on what art can do and dont get
distracted, you discover it is limitless. Somehow it seems
like we dont talk about the power of art that way.
Sometimes I think about Beuys; he seems so crazy to me, I
miss that idealism. He believed that everyone was an artist.
He really believed that art could solve all the
problemssomehow weve lost that, or at least nobody is
willing to come out and acknowledge it (Horodner 54).

Illustrations: Works by Janine Antoni

354

355

Janine Antoni, and (1996-99)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

356

Janine Antoni, Butterfly Kisses (1993)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

357

Janine Antoni, Chocolate Gnaw (1992)

(from the Gnaw installation)
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

358

Janine Antoni, Cradle (1999)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

359

Janine Antoni, Eureka (1993)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

360

Janine Antoni, Grope (1990)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

361

Janine Antoni, Lard Gnaw (1992)

(from the Gnaw installation)
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

362

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather (1993-94)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

363

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather (Detail)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

364

Janine Antoni, Lipstick Display (1992)

(from the Gnaw installation)
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

365

Janine Antoni, Loving Care (1993)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

366

Janine Antoni, Mom and Dad (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

367

Janine Antoni, Mom and Dad (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

368

Janine Antoni, Mom and Dad (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

369

Janine Antoni, Moor (2001)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

370

Janine Antoni, Moor (detail)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

371

Janine Antoni, Slumber (view of Antoni sleeping) (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

372

Janine Antoni, Slumber (view of Antoni weaving at the loom) (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

373

Janine Antoni, Slumber (full installation view) (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

374

Janine Antoni, Unveiling (1994)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

375

Janine Antoni, Wean (1990)

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine

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APPENDIX
Illustrations: works by various artists

390

391

Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks (1974)

392

Audrey Flack, Chanel (1974)

393

Robert Morris, Corner Piece (1964)

394

Joseph Beuys, Coyote: I like America and America likes me (1974)

395

Joseph Beuys, Coyote (additional performance view)

396

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (197479)

397

Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair (1963)

398

Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair (alternate view)

399

Joseph Beuys, Fat Corner (1960)

400

Joseph Beuys, Felt Corner (1963)

401

Martha Wilson, I Make Up the Image of My Deformity;

I Make Up the Image of My Perfection (1974)

402

Joseph Beuys, Mainstream (1967)

(composite view of Beuys's "action")

403

Judy Chicago, Menstruation Bathroom (1972)

(from Womanhouse)

404

Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgets, Robin Weltsch,

Nurturant Kitchen (1972)
(from Womanhouse)

405

Judy Gerowitz (a.k.a. Judy Chicago), Rainbow Picket (1966)

406

Joseph Beuys, Rubberized Box (1957)

407

Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification (1974 -79)

408

Joseph Beuys, Tallow (1977)

409

Joseph Beuys, Tallow (the artist at work)

410

Jasper Johns, Target (Do It Yourself) (1970)

(Johns's original piece prior to collaboration)

411

Richard Serra, Tearing Lead from 1:00 to 1:47 (1968)

412

Jackie Ferrara, Truncated Pyramid (1973)

413

Donald Judd, Untitled (1968)

414

Nancy Graves, Variability of Similar Forms (1970)

415

Tony Smith, [top] Wandering Rocks (1967) (Full installation view)

[bottom] (Detail: two views of Crocus)

416

Ronald Bladen, The X (1967)