Janine Antoni | Art21 | Preview from Season 2 of "Art in the Twenty-First Century" (2003)

Janine Antoni's work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Antoni transforms everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, such as painting and sculpting. Themes in her work include mortality, desire and the body.

Janine Antoni is featured in the Season 2 episode "Loss & Desire" of the Art21 series "Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century".

Learn more about Janine Antoni: http://www.art21.org/artists/janine-antoni

© 2003-2007 Art21, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[intro music]

I practiced tightroping for about an hour a day

and after about a week I started to feel like

I'm now getting my balance

I started to notice that it wasn't that I was getting

more balanced, but that I was getting more comfortable with

being out of balance.

Rather than getting nervous and overcompensating

if I could just compensate enough

and I thought I wish I could that in my life.

After going down many different avenues,

I decided to make this work 'Touch' and what I did is I went

home to the Bahamas to the beach that was directly in front

of the house I grew up in.

It made sense for me to go back to

this horizon I had looked at my whole life.

[sound of ocean waves]

[ocean waves and birds chirping]

I thought it would have much more tension

if I could walk along the rope and as it dip

that just for a moment I would touch the horizon.

[ocean waves and birds chirping]