By Ayden Duchovnay ’28
Staff Writer
On Nov. 12, Scripps Presents hosted Janine Antoni, a New York-based artist and performer, to discuss her body of work. Antoni’s art blurs the line between body and tool, exploring how physicality creates meaning.
Audience members Jenna Morais ’28 and Izzy McDonald ’28 reflected on the Scripps Presents event. “Seeing her in person brought an abstract idea of how an artist works into reality,” Morais said. “It’s inspiring as an artist to see that kind of intentionality and connection in someone’s work.”
“I thought it was genius — using her body in ways that most people wouldn’t think of,” McDonald said.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Antoni earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at renowned institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Hayward Gallery in London. Her accolades include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. Antoni’s daughter currently attends Pitzer College.
Antoni began her presentation by introducing her first project out of graduate school, “Wean,” a study on the separation between mother and child. Through negative imprints — her breast, nipple, latex nipples for bottles, and their packaging — she explored the absence inherent in physical presence. This work marked a turning point in her career. She described the switch from real nipple to fake as a breakthrough, a transition into the artistic territory she still resides in.
“[The latex nipples] mediate our intimate interaction with our body,” Antoni explained. “They replace the body, and define the body, somehow, within the culture.”
Another early project, “Knaw,” used 500 pounds each of chocolate and lard, meticulously molded into minimalist cubes. Antoni sculpted the cube with the tool that felt most natural; her mouth.
“Believe it or not, I chewed on that for a month and a half,” she said to the audience’s laughter. The cube of lard eventually collapsed under its weight. Excess material from both was repurposed into lipsticks and chocolate packaging.
Referring to the work as her “art school exorcism,” Antoni humorously reflected, “It was pretty hilarious, for me to be chewing on a minimalist cube. But they didn’t quite get it.” In a culture focused on consumerism, critics labeled the piece an angry critique of patriarchal art history.
Heavily inspired by 1970s performance art, her work evolved into fluid, performance-based creations. In Love and Care, she used her hair as a paintbrush, mopping a gallery floor with hair dye and claiming the space as her own. She drew inspiration from Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein, combining action painting with feminist critique. She chased “the desire to be the model and the master at the same time, and the inherent contradictions of that.”
In her adjacent piece, “Butterfly Kisses,” Antoni applied mascara to a canvas by winking — 2,248 times in total, limiting herself to 60 winks a day.
“That’s my cutoff point in masochism,” she said, eliciting laughter from the audience.
For Antoni, the act of creation is as vital as the finished piece. This ethos is evident in works like “Mortar and Pestle,” a photograph of her licking her ex-husband’s eye — a gesture she described as tasting his vision, attempting to “see” the world through his perspective.
Her collaboration with choreographer Anna Halprin resulted in “Paper Dance,” a performance piece that wove together movement and reflection on her previous sculptures, bridging the gap between her work and identity.
More recently, Antoni has embraced large-scale installations. In “I Am Fertile Ground,” commissioned by Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, gilded bone-framed images and live affirmations transformed the catacombs into a meditation on life’s connection to the body. After the performance, Antoni’s audience practiced ecstatic dancing.
In “Here-ing,” an ongoing collaboration with the University of Kansas, she has created a labyrinth shaped like a human ear, designed to foster healthier grasslands while engaging audiences in an exploration of listening and growth.
From submerging herself into a bathtub of lard, convincing a spider to create a web between her legs, and peeing off the Chrysler Building, Antoni’s art challenges social norms and perceptions of intimacy.
As Antoni concluded, she reflected on the thematic cohesivity of her oeuvre: “To me, they are all the same work. Even though their form is radically different, it is all about two forms trying to come together, and then meaning happening in their resistance, even in spite of me.”
