Janine Antoni

I intentionally create an ambiguous image that reflects the complex reality of motherhood, and I embrace the necessity of shape-shifting in order to fulfill this role. The elastic scale-shifting in the photograph acknowledges the mother’s required flexibility. She’s a ubiquitous presence, and yet her role requires a degree of withdrawal. A mother has to clear space for the development of the child’s imagination. This is a conscious desire, a willful decision: to be a point of stillness whose function is to nurture. In Inhabit I depict myself as half-hermit crab, because I’m carrying my house on my body, and half-spider, because I’m still at the center of the converging ropes. At the same time I want to be unclear about whether my body is suspended or ascending, entrapped or the structure of support. In the end, the substitution of the house for the skirt allows the mother to wear the family drama.

DD Images that incorporate a house and a spider clearly evoke earlier works by Louise Bourgeois.

JA I’d be the first to admit that Bourgeois is a very strong influence on my work. When asked about the spider in her own work, Bourgeois said, “She is my mother.” Well, Louise is my art mother.

DD Another recent work references the family.

JA Yes. Another piece that is linked directly to my experience with my daughter is One Another, a photograph that captures her attempting to feed me through my belly button. She’s acting like an umbilical cord, returning me to my fetal memory. The photograph isn’t staged. I fell in love with her uncanny instinct and tender gesture of reciprocity. It’s like an image from a dream.

DD You spoke earlier about the unconscious. It looms large in your work.

JA There’s something I call the escape hatch. Every project needs one. It’s the one part of an installation that doesn’t add up. And that escape hatch leads to the unconscious. To liberate the unconscious might be to let go of the ego, or the notion of authorship. I always come back to the word “conduit,” because I feel like an open channel when I’m making art. I often imagine my body as a funnel through which the world is poured. And yet I always anticipate the audience at the other end of that funnel, because without them, half of the picture is missing. I need someone to fantasize about!

DD Your notion of sculpture has constructive affinities with work by Hannah Wilke, Lygia Clark, Carolee Schneemann and Joseph Beuys, and shares with Beuys and Ana Mendieta a ritualistic bent.

JA My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.

DD Performance can have an afterlife in sculpture, with the challenge being, as you once put it, “How can an object tell you its history on its surface?”

JA In Tear, which I initially proposed for the 2007 Venice Biennale and subsequently showed in New Orleans at the Prospect.1 Biennial [2008], I tried to tell the history of a wrecking ball through its surface. I did this by casting the wrecking ball in lead, a soft metal, and then using it to demolish a building. Unlike an industrial wrecking ball, the lead ball was vulnerable; each strike left it permanently scarred. The sound of the ball crashing against the building was synchronized with the blinking of my eyelid.
The installation of Tear at Luhring Augustine includes, just as it did in New Orleans, the video projection of my eye and the actual lead ball used in the demolition, but excludes what has been seen and hit. I intentionally create a gap at the center of the work. The viewer is left to consider whether the closing of the eye is an instinctive reaction against danger, or the willful avoidance of something one doesn’t want to see.

DD After the performance, whose narrative is it?

JA When I performed To Draw a Line at Luhring Augustine in 2003, I chose my audience, knowing that they would become the storytellers, the ones who would perpetuate the narrative, and that over time the narrative would inevitably change. So I enlisted good storytellers. I think in the end I’m a storyteller with many stories to tell: the story of the material and its cultural meaning; the story of how the object is made and its life in the world; and the story of my body in relation to the object—often a stand-in for the viewer’s body. With each of the artists you mention, I experienced their performances through anecdotal stories as much as through images. Of great interest to me is how stories and myths change over time, according to our needs.

Janine Antoni's exhibition "Up Against" is on view at Luhring Augustine in New York through Oct. 24. She is also included in "British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning, 1966-2008," at the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, through Dec. 13.

Douglas Dreishpoon is chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.