Janine Antoni: Mother's Milk

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Nancy Princenthal

The rhythm of energy that Antoni registers even when asleep, at once feverish and underwater slow, has become a distinctive tempo. It runs through the video projection Swoon (1997), with its heavy-breathing ballet dancers, and through the grueling daily ordeal of pushing one rock against another that produced and (1996-99). Partly rooted in ritual and sacrament, and perhaps influenced by her 1997 residency at a Shaker community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, this particular pacing is reflected in all Antoni's professional decisions. She works slowly and releases objects sparingly (even the photographs only a few at a time), and they reward prolonged engagement.[9] Hysterical profusion is undeniably a pronounced tendency in current art, and, perhaps partly in response, scarcity is another. Robert Gober, Ron Mueck and Jennifer Pastor are others who, like Antoni, take their time at every step. Antoni herself cites Charles Ray as an artist whose work, also produced with careful deliberation, similarly induces a drawn-out process of perceptual recognition. But Antoni's is an idiosyncratic temporality, calm and measured, thickened by her (and eventually the viewer's) concentration. Reflection plays a major role in this work, and, most surprisingly in the context of contemporary art, so does the time it takes for gratitude.

Unless otherwise noted, quotes by the artist are from a conversation with the author, June 6, 2001.

[1.] This series of work came out of Antoni's 2000 residency at the Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden, a rural estate that includes a fully functioning dairy farm.

[2.] In a related sculpture titled Naked, also made at Wanas, a pair of gloves and one of shoes were similarly cut and shaped from a tanned cowhide, this one laid on the floor.

[3.] Others of Duchamp's cast body-part fragments and accessories seem relevant to Antoni, including especially his 1947 Please Touch, a female nipple shown in relief on the cover of an exhibition catalogue. Antoni's Tender Buttons (a 1994 pair of gold nipples) directly descends from Please Touch and also makes a reference to the School of Paris by appropriating Gertrude Stein's title.

[4.] Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, New York, Norton, 1963, p. 226.

[5.] Quoted in Janine Antoni, Kusnacht, Ink Tree, 2000, p. 84.

[6.] Exhibition brochure] with an interview by the Aldrich Museum's public relations coordinator, Megan Luke (unpaginated).

[7.] Exhibition brochure.

[8.] This connection was observed by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth in "Antoni's Difference," in Janine Antoni (op cit.), p. 63.

[9.] The beautifully designed (with Antoni's close involvement), thoughtful and exhaustive recent monograph in which Lajer-Burcharth's essay appears includes six essays focusing on at most a handful of works each, but they overlap anyway.

The 1999 Larry Aldrich Foundation Award Exhibition, "The Girl Made of Butter," appeared at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art Ridgefield, Conn. [Jan. 21-May 20].

Author: Nancy Princenthal is a critic based in New York.