Janine Antoni uses every part of her body in her work. For her famous 1992 sculpture Gnaw, she chewed away at 600-pound blocks of chocolate and lard—carving stand-alone sculptures, rough with tooth marks—until she was too tired to carry on. Antoni uses her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve cubes, one made of chocolate, the other of lard, then used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. Antoni made a statement about her work saying “Lard is a stand-in for the female body, a feminine material,since female typically have a higher fat content than males, making the work somewhat cannibalistic”. In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.
The following year, she cast busts of her own face in chocolate and soap and licked and scrubbed at them for the aptly titled Lick and Lather—currently a hit at the New Museum’s “1993” exhibition. This exhibition showed several busts of herself out of chocolate and soap, she licked the sweet sculpture to re-mold herself and her image.
Elsewhere she has painted canvases with her eyelashes, and photographed her eyeballs. This work was known as ‘Butterfly Kisses’ (1996-1999), she covered a canvas with marks made by batting her eyelashes covered in Cover Girl Thick Lash Mascara. In this process Antoni explores the body as a means of creating art.
In Loving Care (1992), Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and hair dye as her paint. Antoni dips her hair in a bucket of hair dye and mops the gallery floor on her hands and knees and in the process pushes the viewers out of the gallery space. Once again, in this process Antoni explores the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism. Her performance was at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, in 1993.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Antoni
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/janine_anotoni_stephen_petronio
Gnaw, 1992 – Janine Antoni
Loving Care, 1992 – Janine Antoni
Lick and Lather, 1993 – Janine Antoni
Butterfly Kisses, 1996-1999 – Janine Antoni
Major Project; Destruction 