Artist, Janine Antoni: When I conceived of Gnaw, I actually wanted to do the most traditional thing I could do as an artist, believe it or not. I wanted to carve. I was also interested in the tradition of figurative sculpture. But rather than to describe the body, I decided to talk about the body by the residue it left on the object.
and sort of bring these two ideas together and use my body as the tool. So rather than use a hammer and chisel, I would use my mouth. I was very interested in everyday activities, like the activity of eating. So I said to myself, if I'm going to carve with my mouth, what's the best material to carve with?
And chocolate seemed like the obvious choice. It seemed to embody desire for the viewer. And what happens if you succumb to that desire? So I used fat as the material to make the second cube, the 500 pound cube of lard. The lard will begin as a cube, and as the exhibition goes on, it will collapse onto the floor.
I was interested in working with the cube because it was a kind of, uh, icon of minimalism. Minimalism really introduced fabrication to us. And what I was taught by minimalism is that not only the material had meaning, but the process in which it was made. So my cubes are poured, chewed, spit out, melted down, and recast.
They've really been in intimate contact with my body and really carry the traces of my body on them. I chewed on the chocolate cube for about a month and a half. The chocolate that I spit out I melted down and recast into heart shaped packaging for chocolate candy. The lard that I spit out I cast into lipstick by mixing it with pigment and beeswax.
And then I made this display, trying to imitate a department store to put all my products in. I was sort of interested in the idea that you were overcome with desire for the chocolate, you were kind of disgusted by the lard, and then I would turn around and take that very material That was disgusting to you, and make it into lipstick, which we use to make ourselves attractive.
Chewing on the lard wasn't a pleasant experience. But I'm really interested in the viewer empathizing with my process. And I feel that somewhere in your body You can imagine what it's like to chew on 600 pounds of chocolate, or chew on lard, and I'm very aware of the kind of visceral response you have to that.
And I'm really trying to play those up against each other, and then have you walk in this display and be seduced by these objects, but with a memory of where they came from. I chose the packaging, the heart shaped packaging, for chocolate candy because I feel that packaging embodies our time in a way.
Because it seems that more attention is put into the packaging of an object than the object itself. When you buy cosmetics, the expensive part is the packaging, but more importantly is this notion of using lipstick to package the body. I call the piece, Gnaw, because I'm interested in the bite as a kind of primal urge.
I love to look at a little baby when they put everything in their mouth in order to know it. And through that process, they destroy it. I was interested in the bite because it was both intimate and destructive. It summed up my relationship to art history. I feel attached to my artistic heritage, and I want to destroy it.
It defined me as an artist. And it excludes me as a woman, both at the same time.