Janine Antoni in "Loss & Desire" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

JANINE ANTONI:
A rope is an umbilical cord, you know.

It’s something that connects two things.

Which sort of is what Moor is about.

It’s about all these people being, you know,

my life sort of connecting all these people.

The idea was to take all these 
very different materials,

but also lives,

and sort of bring them together through

the rope making process.

My mother’s fall I put in there.

And then my friend Pat made 
this piece with hammocks,

so that’s what this is.

Another friend’s piece, Doug,

this is his Hi8 tape that we took apart.

And this is sort of my favorite section;

this is the section of the grandmothers.

This red dress is my father’s 
mother’s Christmas dress…

I wonder whether the viewer can in some way

uncover these stories through 
their experience of the object,

whether these stories are 
somehow held in the material.

Melissa: With a lot of the material what 
was done is they were cut up into strips

or say if it was an electrical 
cord it was taken apart

and all the wires inside were taken apart,

and then twisted together with 
other materials to create a rope.

Since I was a little girl, my mother 
and I would make things together,

actually the whole family 
would make things together.

And I love the handmade in any form it takes.

There’s so many objects that 
we come into contact with

that we’ve lost a connection 
to what they’re made of,

who made them.

So that’s really important for 
me to sort of, in the object,

on the surface of the object,

somehow give you a history of how that 
object’s made its way into the world.

To make this piece what I did is 
I dipped myself in a tub of lard.

The piece is called Eureka and it was 
inspired by the story of Archimedes.

And Archimedes was asked by the 
king how much gold was in his crown

and he was killing himself 
how can he measure capacity?

Well he’s in the bathtub one night

and he realizes that his body is 
displacing the water in the tub.

He gets very excited, jumps 
out and screams “Eureka.”

It seems to me that Archimedes’s 
body was the tool for the experiment,

just as my body is the tool for making.

But most importantly is this idea 
that he came to this knowledge

through the experience of his body.

And that’s why I do these kind 
of extreme acts with my body.

I feel that the viewer has a body too and

can empathize with what I’ve put 
myself through to make the artwork.

To me so much meaning is in how 
we choose to make something,

both in art but in all objects 
that we deal with in our lives.

I kind of think of the work as like the 
viewer is coming in on the scene of a crime.

And I’ve left all these clues for them to uncover.

I did this show and the exhibition 
space was connected to a dairy farm.

So right away I said can you 
give me a tour of the barns.

And I noticed that troughs are made out of tubs.

I thought what if I take a bath, 
will the cow continue to drink,

thinking that you know I’ve 
drunk from the cow my whole life

and I could sort of create this relationship.

Well cows are very curious, they all came,

started drinking, and it almost 
reversed the whole relationship.

She looks like she’s nursing from me.

And the title of the piece is 
2038 which is the tag in the ear,

and the reason I chose that is I felt that 
that epitomized our relationship to the cow,

that it was almost like a 
hardly an animal anymore,

but a biological machine and I wanted that to contrast the kind of tenderness of the image.

I was really thinking about um the Virgin Mary

and these images we know of her.

Like the Virgin Mary is not 
allowed to do anything physical.

No sex, she doesn’t get to die.

The only thing she’s allowed to do is nurse.

And I was thinking about how does that 
image affect my ideas of motherhood

and that sort of idyllic moment 
that we know from those paintings

but also from Pampers ads of mother and child.

What you’re looking at is a bucket 
from a construction tractor.

It was twice the size and I 
got the bucket cut in half.

Then I melted it down and I 
created all these forms inside.

Cradle is a piece which is mainly 
about these things cradling each other,

you know it ends with a looped spoon,

which is like when a child is 
first becoming independent,

first can feed itself and then,

it’s about that need we never lose to be held.

All the cow pieces were an 
effort to relate to the cow -

to understand it and to 
understand my relationship to it.

And so for me to get on my hands and knees is

really to imitate the animal in some way.

But also it’s clearly a submissive pose.

This work is made out of rawhide.

I made a mold of myself on my hands and knees.

And then I took the rawhide 
when it was very malleable

and I draped it over the mold.

I worked with all the folds, sculpting them,

to depict the body underneath the veil.

Then when the hide was completely hard,

I removed the mold from the inside.

So actually she’s totally hollow inside,

and that’s really important because 
I really want the viewer to feel

both the absence of me and the absence of the cow.

I thought that it was really interesting 
that soap was made out of lard,

that we’re cleaning the body with the body.

It seemed quite curious to me.

So I had this idea that I would make a 
replica of myself in chocolate and in soap,

and I would feed myself with myself by licking the chocolate and wash myself with myself.

Both the licking and the bathing 
are quite gentle and loving acts,

but I’m slowly erasing myself.

For me it’s about that conflict,

that kind of love/hate relationship 
we have with our physical appearance.

And really like, the problem I have 
with looking in the mirror and thinking,

is that who I am?

As I was making the rope,

I thought it would be really 
nice to walk on this rope.

So I was thinking of the 
rope as a kind of lifeline,

you know the story of my life.

So I thought wow, if I could walk on 
it that would really be beautiful.

So it was sort of making the rope that made 
me come to the idea to learn to tightrope.

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,

I could just compensate enough.

And I thought I wish I could do 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 that I grew up in.

It made sense for me to go back to this 
horizon I had looked at my whole life.

I thought it would have much more 
tension if I could walk along the rope

and as it dipped that just for a 
moment I would touch the horizon.

And so at a certain point, 
after making the video TOUCH,

and sort of living my fantasy of 
walking on air, walking on the horizon,

I thought, I really need to 
do a piece about falling.

And I went back to this idea that I 
wanted to make the rope to walk on.

We found a guy at Mystic Seaport 
and he gave us a personal tour

and showed us this quite 
beautiful rope-making machine.

And when we saw that machine 
then we got the idea, you know,

to make our own mini version of it.

Making the rope brought me 
to learning how to spin.

Where with MOOR we are using everyday materials,

now we’re using the most 
traditional material, which is hemp.

On a material level, I’m going back to the source,

but also those crafts are sort of the beginning.

I think that this, taking 
on this women’s tradition,

is also not a small thing.

You have to put the right 
amount of energy into the twist.

Too much energy makes the rope weak,

and too little energy makes the rope weak.

So, the correlation that I see with 
learning to walk on the tightwire,

the looser I was the easier it was to balance.

I’m not sure what this sculpture 
I’m making, with the hemp,

and, and the tightrope will be exactly,

but it will be about the fall.

It will, it will be about the 
impossibility of that illusion.