Sexual Deployment: Janine Antoni
For today’s installment of Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse we present work from artist Janine Antoni. Antoni utilizes her body as both a mechanism for making art and an art object. Antoni sculpts with her teeth and even paints with her hair, exploring the physicality of the body as well as social and cultural constructions of femininity.
For her most recent exhibition of new work at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Antoni designed a device in the shape of a gargoyle made to fit a woman’s body that allows her to urinate standing up, using the body and the art object for gender role reversal and power shifts.
In the performance Loving Care (1992), the artist dips her hair in a bucket full of Loving Care hair dye and ‘brushes’ the gallery floor with it while pushing the viewers outside of the gallery space. For Saddle (2000), the artist drapes a single cowhide over a cast of her own body on her hands and knees. The result is an object that plays on the visibility and invisibility of the body of both the artist and of the animal.
Images provided by Luhring Augustine Gallery
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