For Janine Antoni, the body is a tool with which to create art. Combining performance and sculpture, she investigates such everyday activities as eating and sleeping. In her breakthrough piece Gnaw (1992), she used her mouth to chisel away at two Minimalist-looking cubes—one made of 600 pounds of lard and the other of chocolate. With the discarded mouthfuls of chocolate and lard, she created 27 boxes of chocolates and 130 tubes of lipstick. “For me, creativity is about unlocking memories within the body. It’s also about thinking with the body,” she has said. Antoni’s work has been compared to the body-oriented work of Feminist artists Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998.
For Janine Antoni, the body is a tool with which to create art. Combining performance and sculpture, she investigates such everyday activities as eating and sleeping. In her breakthrough piece Gnaw (1992), she used her mouth to chisel away at two Minimalist-looking cubes—one made of 600 pounds of lard and the other of chocolate. With the discarded mouthfuls of chocolate and lard, she created 27 boxes of chocolates and 130 tubes of lipstick. “For me, creativity is about unlocking memories within the body. It’s also about thinking with the body,” she has said. Antoni’s work has been compared to the body-oriented work of Feminist artists Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998.