Janine Antoni is an artist whose work is tied to the senses and how we experience and engage with the world through the physical. Instead of focusing purely on how the art object looks, her approach is more likely to draw the viewer into an engagement through touch, smell, taste, or sound and into the process of how the work comes to be. This approach draws us into our perception of how we make choices, take actions and experience the world, whether she manipulates chocolate sculptures with her mouth or mops the gallery floor with her hair. Antoni observes,
Performance wasn’t something that I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. I try to do that in a lot of different ways, by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives…
For Saddle, the artist made a cast of herself on all fours and then draped it with a soaked sheet of cowhide. After the skin hardened she removed the cast, so that the cowhide became a freestanding entity that delineated the outline where her body had vacated. continue reading
