Janine Antoni

Antoni is one of a number of artists who emerged in the early 1990s with a hybrid of performance and site-specific work. (Others include Andrea Zittel, Gabriel Orozco, and Rirkrit Tiravanija). This performative drawing is one of a series of four titled Butterfly Kisses. Contrary to the title's levity, this work is more than an amusing gesture.
To make this drawing, Antoni applied Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, then fluttered her eyelashes against a sheet of paper. She averaged sixty winks per day and completed the drawing after 2,124 winks, over many months. This almost unimaginably laborious act resulted in a complex and dense array of random lines. It places the work squarely in the tradition of aleatory, or chance-dependent, mark-making, from Surrealist automatic drawings to Robert Morris's Blind Time drawings of the 1970s and 1980s, made while blindfolded. Delicate yet lively, Butterfly Kisses's pulsating lines trace the movements of the artist's body in simultaneous homage to and parody of the muscular brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism and the impersonal repetitions of serial Minimalism.