I had seen the lick and lather piece before but was less familiar with Antoni's other works. After seeing the pieces and hearing the explanations and processes, I have a new found appreciation for her as an artist. The first piece in the video, the rope piece, was particularly uplifting because it acknowledges the importance of other people in a person's life. I do not have many people I would weave into a rope of my own, but the ones who would make it there are extremely important to my life, and I wouldn't be who I am without them.
I liked that the displacement piece, the lard in the bathtub, related all the way back to the first measure of volume with Archimedes. Origin stories like that are something I really enjoy, and I'd like to find more ways to incorporate them into my own art and graphic design. Oddly, when she described the piece, it seemed to be the least personal, even though it was essentially a cast of her whole body. I had seen her paint with her hair before as well and appreciate her inventiveness with the mark-making process. That piece also reminds me of a piece by another artist, whose name I forget, who used the entire body as a mark making device, not just a part of it, by removing the clothing, covering the body with paint, and lying down on the canvas to make a print. In my postmodern studio class at my previous school, one of my classmates emulated this piece by covering herself in chocolate sauce and making a print and the effect, even though it was not an original idea, was somehow profound.
I particularly respect Antoni's research process, and I admire her ability to come up with ideas somewhat spontaneously, as it seems she did when she was at the dairy farm. Her willingness to interact with the cows in such a way, something I might want to do but be too afraid or self conscious to do, really did result in a piece that makes a statement not just about herself or about the cow but about humans almost universally. In an interesting sort of contradiction, the rawhide piece portrays both the extreme vulnerability of the cow and the consciousness of this vulnerability and the caring attitude of some humans such as Antoni. However, though she seems to sympathise with the cow by adopting this anamalistic, submissive pose, the piece is constructed out of the skin of a cow. The irony almost creates a paradox that I don't think you could think your way out of.
What I would be most excited to do as an artist that Antoni has the opportunity to do is to really delve into the research for each piece, most notably the tightrope pieces. The pieces may seem simple and have a short run time once they are complete, but the fact that she spent weeks learning how to walk a tightrope and learned and practised using a spinning wheel to spin hemp rope adds whole dimensions of experience to the viewing of the pieces. The horizon video had a very... happy is not quite the right word. It had an almost victorious air to it because it was so personal. She'd looked at that horizon as she was growing up, and maybe as a little girl of 5 or 6, wished she could walk out there. And then, 20, 30 something years later, she is able to create this piece that really creates that illusion. Knowing that while viewing it is just so powerful.
Lick and lather itself was a piece I really liked the first time I saw it. I think the soap half of it is a little more effective than the chocolate half for a few reasons; The soap piece has more continuity to it now that I understand that soap is made from lard. So you have the body being made into this material with which we clean the body, and you also have this material being made into an actual representation of the artist's body, with which the artist is cleaning herself. Chocolate, though, is made from plant matter (though in a more extreme philosophical sense you could also consider this a body), so really the only iteration of the artist's self in the piece is the fact that the bust is a representation of herself, with which she feeds herself. Washing the bust is also a more effective method of eroding it than licking is for the chocolate bust. It would take much more effort to wear down the chocolate bust to the same extent as for the soap bust. She constructed another piece that I believe were part of the same exhibit, which was a large chocolate block that she had gnawed at the corners. I can't remember if there was also a soap block. One thing I got out of this piece though pertaining to the soap carvings we will do is that, in thinking about what ways in which I can alter my second sculpture, I had forgotten to consider using the piece like a regular bar of soap as an option. I have chosen a bear for my piece, and I think it would mean a lot less to use a small soap bear to wash myself than it would to use a bust of myself, but I think it may be one of the most effective ways pertaining to the material to show the passage of time.
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