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Lot Essay
Mom and Dad (1994) is a bold, photographic triptych, that playfully subverts the associations of traditional portraiture and the clichés of the middle class family. Number six from an edition of six cibachrome prints (one of which is housed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) it presents three interrelated photos of Janine Antoni's parents sitting together in classical postures. The couple seems contented as they look attentively at the camera, yet something in the composition renders the viewer uneasy. If we inspect more closely, we see that Antoni has recast the couple in drag, reversing gender conventions using careful masquerade, costume, stage make-up and prosthetics. This artful ruse undermines photography's purported objectivity with the composition's duplicity.
Mom and Dad marks one of the first photographic works carried out by Antoni. Renowned for her performances and sculptures such as Gnaw (1992), which she created by carving out visceral materials such as lard and chocolate with her teeth, Antoni powerfully engages the body for artistic ends. In Mom and Dad, the artist uses her parents' bodies as materials, literally crafting their features and physical gestures to realize the desired deception. As we look across the composition, the couple's roles flit back and forth from artifice to reality, combined in various permutations in a disorientating yet humorous play of imagery. For the artist, "what became fascinating during the process was the resistance or the impossibility of turning my parents into each other. What I was arriving at was a half-mom, half-dad creature but to create this composite I had to reverse our roles in the sense that my parents made me, and now I was remaking them" (J. Antoni, quoted in R. Martinez, "Conjunctions and Disjunctions", in Janine Antoni, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 124). Through her physical investigation, Antoni was not only undermining the traditional family's prescribed conventions, but also reversing the generational divide. In Mom and Dad, the artist powerfully assumed the role of progenitor, becoming the maker of her own parents' identity.
Mom and Dad incisively comments on the relationships between family members. As in Antoni's later photographic work, Momme (1995) - where we find the artist sequestered beneath the hems of her mother's skirt - Antoni makes manifest the latent attachments and emotions between relatives and partners. Indeed, in Mom and Dad, Antoni discovered that her parents' "personalities were much more complex; what seemed most striking was that after 40 years they had become a kind of unit, sometimes in spite of these gender roles" (Ibid., p. 129). This "unit" inevitably includes the artist herself, as the offspring of the once-young couple starting a new family. As Antoni has said, "I decided [Mom and Dad] must be another self-portrait, because that is what I am, a biological composite of the two" (Ibid., p.129).
Antoni has consistently pioneered the investigation of gender and family relations. Through her ability to marshal the body as a tool, she channels the power of the 1970s generation of feminist artists such as Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke among others. Mom and Dad, an intimate work of unique insight, challenges the precepts of photography as well as the conventions of the modern family.
Mom and Dad marks one of the first photographic works carried out by Antoni. Renowned for her performances and sculptures such as Gnaw (1992), which she created by carving out visceral materials such as lard and chocolate with her teeth, Antoni powerfully engages the body for artistic ends. In Mom and Dad, the artist uses her parents' bodies as materials, literally crafting their features and physical gestures to realize the desired deception. As we look across the composition, the couple's roles flit back and forth from artifice to reality, combined in various permutations in a disorientating yet humorous play of imagery. For the artist, "what became fascinating during the process was the resistance or the impossibility of turning my parents into each other. What I was arriving at was a half-mom, half-dad creature but to create this composite I had to reverse our roles in the sense that my parents made me, and now I was remaking them" (J. Antoni, quoted in R. Martinez, "Conjunctions and Disjunctions", in Janine Antoni, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 124). Through her physical investigation, Antoni was not only undermining the traditional family's prescribed conventions, but also reversing the generational divide. In Mom and Dad, the artist powerfully assumed the role of progenitor, becoming the maker of her own parents' identity.
Mom and Dad incisively comments on the relationships between family members. As in Antoni's later photographic work, Momme (1995) - where we find the artist sequestered beneath the hems of her mother's skirt - Antoni makes manifest the latent attachments and emotions between relatives and partners. Indeed, in Mom and Dad, Antoni discovered that her parents' "personalities were much more complex; what seemed most striking was that after 40 years they had become a kind of unit, sometimes in spite of these gender roles" (Ibid., p. 129). This "unit" inevitably includes the artist herself, as the offspring of the once-young couple starting a new family. As Antoni has said, "I decided [Mom and Dad] must be another self-portrait, because that is what I am, a biological composite of the two" (Ibid., p.129).
Antoni has consistently pioneered the investigation of gender and family relations. Through her ability to marshal the body as a tool, she channels the power of the 1970s generation of feminist artists such as Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke among others. Mom and Dad, an intimate work of unique insight, challenges the precepts of photography as well as the conventions of the modern family.