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 friends' 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 kind 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.