Delight, Disturb, and the Books Behind It

ARTnews is taking a close look today at Janine Antoni, tracing how her work can be tender and unnerving at once. A key example is footage from an Art21 feature showing Antoni remaking a bust from Lick and Lather, her 1993 installation commissioned for that year’s Venice Biennale. The work includes 14 busts cast from a mold of her head and chest—seven made of chocolate and seven of soap—and their features wear away as she washes and devours her own effigy. Antoni calls it a conflict tied to a love/hate relationship with physical appearance and the uneasy question of, “Is that who I am?” The piece notes intense audience responses, including a Biennale moment when a young woman licked and bit some noses off.

Staying with ARTnews, there’s a bookshelf peek with “5 Books on Dena Yago’s Shelf,” published as her collection That Figures: Selected Writings comes out this month from After 8 Books. The article frames Yago as an artist and writer attentive to everyday aesthetics—through painting, writing, and her “trend forecasting” collective K-HOLE, where she and her cofounders coined “normcore.” Her picks include The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which she read when she turned 30 and connected to letting political and artistic roles coexist; Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, written in second person from Amazon warehouse labor; and The Odd One In: On Comedy by Alenka Zupančič, which she links to comedy exposing unstable systems. She also names Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

Thanks for listening—links to everything I mentioned are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another download from the art world; until then, Chinga la migra

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