- Brooklyn Museum
- GNAW: Those teeth marks on that chocolate cube? They are Janine Antoni’s art.
Here are some things Janine Antoni has done for art: 1) gnawed on two 600-pound cubes, one chocolate, one lard, and created small sculptures from her gnawings; 2) used her hair as a paintbrush by coating it in Loving Care hair dye and dragging it across the floor of a gallery; and 3) used her eyelashes, coated in Cover Girl mascara to cover a canvas with tiny Butterfly Kisses.
That’s not all. Janine Antoni’s work incorporates aspects of performance art, but it’s unique in that her medium is primarily her body, and it’s informed by feminism. Gnaw, especially—the aforementioned chewing project—has been described as a feminist rendering of the male-dominated minimalist cube, and this seems right.
Her work is wonderfully conceptual, but it’s about as far from that stark white box as you can get. Antoni’s pieces are performative and odd, and lean into the abject. But what I love about them is her strangeness, an avant inclination that’s almost goofy. It makes your skin crawl without being harrowing or sad. It’s confrontational, while also pulling an involuntary laugh or gasp from its viewer. It’s kind of amazing. What I’m saying is that despite artist talks’ deserved reputation for being boring, Antoni’s, tonight at Reed, should be well worth seeing, and I think you should go to it!
Janine Antoni will give a free lecture at Reed College’s Kaul Hall at 7 pm; her work can also be seen currently at Reed’s Cooley Gallery. The cubes of chocolate and lard, alas, will be absent. The chocolate belongs to MoMA, where it’s kept in a protective crate. Due to the instability of its, um, medium, the lard cube is reconstructed at every appearance of Gnaw.