[quote]""Loving Care" is a performance where I use Loving Care hair dye, natural black.
I dip my hair in it and proceed to mop the floor with my hair. When I begin the performance, the room is filled with people.
As I slowly mop the floor, I mop the people out of the room. This is an important aspect of the piece, because what I'm doing is very vulnerable.
By mopping the people out of the room, I take over the space, and that's empowering.
A lot of my work deals with traditions of art-making. I was interested in the tradition of painting, and the relationship between the notion of aesthetics passed down to us through art history and the ideas of women and beauty.
In many of the pieces, I work with both forms of aesthetics simultaneously, hopefully calling both into question.
So for me, this piece relates to abstract expressionism, to Jackson Pollock and probably most closely to Yves Klein, with the performances where there were women covered in blue paint and then rolled on the canvas.
Klein has a great quote: "Rather than to paint the model, I wanted to paint with the model."
My response is that this is about the conflict of trying to be the model and the master at the same time."
Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Antoni’s work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Transforming everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, Antoni’s primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body. She has chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving a blanket the following morning. In the video, "Touch," Antoni appears to perform the impossible act of walking on the surface of water. She accomplished this magician’s trick, however, not through divine intervention, but only after months of training to balance on a tightrope that she then strung at the exact height of the horizon line. Balance is a key component in the related piece, "Moor," where the artist taught herself how to make a rope out of unusual and often personal materials donated by friends and relatives. By learning to twist the materials together so that they formed a rope that was neither too loose nor too tight, Antoni created an enduring life-line that united a disparate group of people into a unified whole. Antoni has had major exhibitions of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, S.I.T.E. Santa Fe, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. The recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, Janine Antoni currently resides in New York.[/quote]
I love this performance, I find it strangely moving
8O 
Janine Antoni - Loving Care.avi 
