Janine Antoni: Mother's Milk

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Nancy Princenthal

Working in a variety of unexpected materials--cowhide, cast silver, a bulldozer bucket and more--sculptor Janine Antoni has lately been exploring both the nature of nurture and the social functions it serves. Her recent show at the Aldrich Museum provided several cases in point.

Anyone who has kept a domestic pet to a reasonably regular diet has had the occasion to contemplate one of life's little mysteries: day by day, the unremarkable bags of, say, dried cat food are reconstituted in the form of a living, thriving animal. Janine Antoni's immensely satisfying spring exhibition at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut was, in part, about the cognate miracle whereby mother's milk (perhaps a little richer in metaphor than cat food) is transubstantiated into a growing baby girl, thence an adult woman. Called "The Girl Made of Butter," after a folktale traditional to the Bahamas (where Antoni was born), the exhibition also explored the iconography of purity: the tale, reprinted in an artist's book that accompanied the show, concerns a vulnerable butter girl who melts when her mother leaves her alone with two boys. As the book's large-print recitation of a 16th-century Catholic litany makes clear, the Virgin Mary, as the Western world's preeminent symbol of incorruptible chastity and dedicated maternity, was also a crucial referent.

To state the matter more broadly, Antoni's recent work concerns the formation of character, both by ontogeny and psychology, and the definition of a given art object through (physical) process and (historical) precedent. Following her established practice, Antoni proceeded elliptically, around eccentric foci. The basic motif in "The Girl Made of Butter" is bovine: two substantial new sculptures, Bridle and Saddle, are made of cowhide, and a single new photograph is set in a dairy barn.[1] But even in those works that rely on other materials and metaphors, nurturing--of personality, of sensibility--and the questioning of that process together provide the dominant theme.

Bridle was in two ways a showstopper, a big, eye-catching work that was stretched right across a main gallery from floor to ceiling. A simple piece, but also a bit of a brainteaser, it involved removing just enough skin from the spread-eagled hide of a brown-and-white spotted Ayrshire cow, in cleanly cutout sections, to make a leather backpack. The resulting satchel was stitched to the center of the hide, the cow's tail dangling from it jauntily, straps positioned at shoulder height on the other side; Antoni says she aimed to make the backpack resemble, in shape, skin marking and function (as a kind of a vessel), the cow itself.[2] Mentally reconstructing the process of assembly is the viewer's first order of business, and it requires considering a sequence Antoni finds greatly absorbing: in the constructed world, she notes, raw materials (trees, animals) are often flattened into two-dimensional goods (plywood, tanned hides) before being returned to three dimensions.

Next, for the viewer and by her own account (Antoni plots the work's reception in unusually careful steps), comes a cascade of associations. From our initial idea of the animal as barnyard stock and beast of burden, these thoughts lead us to consider the flayed animal (which could be any of us) in relation to the creative individual (i.e., the artist), who is engaged in an act that can be seen variously as one of expressive thrift, patent solipsism or shameless exploitation. Antoni is no Sue Coe; while Antoni's artist's book does list several dozen industrial, medical, food and cleaning items that contain cattle byproducts, Bridle is by no stretch an essay in animal rights and human malfeasance. But the work's very title suggests tension, the inevitable opposition ("bridle" as a verb) aroused by the subjection of basic animal energy to human social purpose. Too elegant to make us really feel the rude bite of metal in our teeth, Bridle nonetheless induces, at the least, a long moment of discomfort, which arrives right along with the pleasure of working out the puzzle it poses.

Sharing the room with Bridle was another big sculpture and two wall works. Cradle (Antoni favors titles that name actions as well as objects), a version of which was seen in her most recent exhibition in New York, at Luhring Augustine Gallery, is made from the gaping bucket of a bulldozer. Half of the bucket remains intact (it was cut vertically); the other half was melted down and recast as a series of scooping implements that steadily decrease in size from one to the next: a smaller bucket without the original's menacing teeth; three graduated shovels; a serving spoon; a tablespoon; and a loop-handled, baby-sized spoon. Regression in scale is a fundamental analytical tool in physical science (cell to molecule, to atom, to particle, etc.); regression in time is similarly basic to every kind of cultural study and personal history. It is characteristic of Antoni's work to blur these categories, so that forms dissolve physically, and often with considerable effort on the artist's part, to reveal sources both emotional and organic. Also typical of Antoni's work is Cradle's avoidance of mess, despite its focus on themes-birth, for example--that cry out for viscera and spilt blood.