On Friday afternoon, Mandel classroom G03 was filled with the simmer of nearly 60 people whispering, anticipating Janine Antoni's Artist Talk, part of the new Art in Dialogue series sponsored by the Brandeis Arts Council. Prof. Jonathan Unglaub (FA), and member of the Arts Council, opened the lecture by welcoming Prof. Gannit Ankori (FA) to introduce the main speaker.

Ankori presented the sculptress and performance artist, praising her ability to artfully use "the body to understand our own lives. She can walk on a tightrope ... and make the rope from scratch ... she has peed from the top of the Chrystler building," Ankori stated.
Antoni was born in 1964 in the Bahamas; she earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, where she was awarded many distinctions including the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Antoni began her PowerPoint lecture with a slide of the first sculpture she created in 1989 fresh out of RISD, titled "Wean." The all-white plaster cast displayed a woman's breast, followed by a nipple, two baby bottle tops and a stack of packaged baby bottle caps. It sounds unimpressive on paper, but Antoni convincingly explained its significance as the "separation from our bodies as we are weaned into our cultures."

In fact, the intersection of the body, selfhood and consumerism permeates her artistic career. Her fascination with humans creating culture explains her obsession with "handmade and readymade" objects. Antoni's sculpture, "Gnaw," not only exists as a sculpture, but also as a process of getting to know how we interact, possess and consume. In order to make "Gnaw," Antoni chewed a three-cubic-foot block of lard and one of chocolate.

She melted the chocolate shavings to create a mold of a chocolate box, and melted and dyed the nibbles of lard to make 50 tubes of lipstick. She displayed these decadent chewed treasures in glass cases, marking her place in "the 80s school of consumer critique," she said.

She described the "happy accident" that occurred when her giant lard cube from "Gnaw" crumbled once displayed in the gallery. "I was going to reconstruct it," she said, "but then I realized this accident was more interesting than the original cube." When we eat chocolate, and consume in general, "it is the fat that we try to control, but can't," she elaborated. Antoni seemed to say that when we try to command the excessiveness in our lives, we collapse along with it.

However, our body doesn't always succumb to such a dramatic cave-in. "Eureka," another lard-influenced sculpture, is much more tender than her teeth-scraping marks in "Gnaw," and is inspired by the story of Archimedes, who calculated the weight of his golden crown through the displacement of his bathwater.

The sculpture process involved Antoni burying her body in a bathtub of lard, then hoisting herself out with a harness, creating an impression of her body, almost Pompeii-like, in the tub. She mixed the displaced lard with lye to create soap and washed herself with this cube of soap for two weeks. "Like Archimedes, I came to an understanding through the experience of the body," she said. Antoni was also fascinated with the thought of dissolving away her image: "Through this loving act [of bathing] I am erasing myself," she said.

The same message of being nourished while erasing oneself carries through to Antoni's piece, "Lick and Lather," where she molded chocolate and soap into a traditional bust resembling her likeness. She washed with the soap bust, and licked the chocolate bust until her features began to dissolve. I have never seen such creative, gentle self-cannibalism.
But sometimes, the licking translated to creepy rather than warm and affectionate feelings. The photograph, "Mortar and Pestle," depicting Antoni licking her husband's bare eyeball was uncomfortable and Antoni said, "freaked people out." I didn't quite understand the visual metaphor here, as well as in the aforementioned pieces she presented.

Her sculpture "Gargoyle" also did not portray the body as sensitively as in her other pieces. Antoni casted a penis-sized copper gargoyle to funnel her urine off of the top of the Chrysler Building in New York City.

The photograph shows Antoni with her dress hiked up to reveal the statuette leaking drops of urine. The photograph didn't look as drastically chauvinistic as the description may suggest, but it does force us to look at the fundamental biological differences that make men more dominant than women. Is the ability to "go" standing up the only act truly separating boys from girls?

I enjoyed the descriptions of Antoni's work often more than the visual aspect of the work itself. Antoni was truly masterful at conveying the personal connection between her self and her art.

Before attending the Artist Talk, I watched PBS's feature on Antoni in the Art-21 series to get some hints about what the lecture would be about. In fact, the PBS episode on Antoni seemed to be the script for her talk. I was disappointed to find that during the Brandeis Artist Talk, she showed almost every piece featured in the documentary, and even recited explanations of her art verbatim from the video.

In spite of this, Antoni did keep her audience engaged through her whimsical, fresh and self-exploratory approach to art. Antoni's talk will be followed by more installments of the Art in Dialogue series, made possible by the Brandeis Arts Council.