The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Surely, when art historians of the future look back at the 1990s, one of the defining works of art they will pick is Janine Antoni 's Chocolate Gnaw (1992). lt has been reproduced countless times, been in several important shows, is referred to constantly, has been purchased for the influential Saatchi collection and has even been pooh-poohed recently by Robert Hughes in his television series American Visions. What is it? It is a huge six hundred pound lump of chocolate, about three by three by three feet, whose corners have been bitten away by the artist. (If we look closely, we can see her teeth marks, which form, of course, a new kind of signature-and this indexicality, the stamp of the artist's actual bodily presence, is very important for Antoni's work.)
What is Chocolate Gnaw about? Perhaps the most common reading of it is that is a literal representation of eating disorders, the female "disease" of bulimia. Lois E. Nesbit, in a review for the Summer 1992 edition of Artforum, writes: "In her recent show, Antoni brought together compulsive eating, artmaking as consumption and the contemporary truism that we are, despite (or perhaps because of) an ostensibly image-saturated society, hopelessly out of touch with our bodies". But, beyond this, we can't help but think of Gnaw as a remake of such Minimalist works of art as Tony Smith's Black Box (1967) or Robert Morris' Battered Cubes (1965). What is Antoni's relationship to these? Here again, we might turn to her most prominent and persuasive critics. In Artforum, Nesbit develops the theme that Antoni's work is a sort of forced feeding and regurgitation of art itself: "Like all compulsive behaviours... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline