The centerpiece of Janine Antoni’s recent exhibition is Tear, and, paradoxically, all the tears (shed and ripped) remain offstage. A battered wrecking ball faces off against a video of an enormous open eye, blinking defensively in response to the loud percussions of a demolition.  The shapes—eyeball and wrecking ball—are isomorphic yet antiphonic.  On the one hand, the visceral vulnerability of the defenseless eye sets up a sympathetic blinking and shuddering in the viewer—a response few recent videos can equal.  On the other hand, we learn from the backstory offered in the press release that the wrecking ball itself is vulnerable, made of soft lead and scarred by its own assault on the building it apparently actually smashed.  The revelation of this destructive prelude is one of the best examples of “time release capsule” art, work that delivers its dosage in waves. Antoni is deft at “noises off.”

There are many standoffs here and many ways to call the match.  The building, for instance, is shattered, but so is the instrument of its demise.  What seems to survive is the watching eye.  Given the other references in the exhibition to domestic joy (babies) and domestic prisons, the razing of a building, a shelter whatever its other functions, also reads as supremely ambivalent.  It is as if the animus hinted at in accompanying works—gargoyle penises and photos of dollhouse bondage—will ultimately leave behind only the evidence of havoc and the witnessing eye of memory.

In spite of its unprotected nakedness, the testifying orb endures.  it exists in time, in the beat of its blinks, while the agency of the ball, now an artifact, a souvenir, is relegated to the past. The “omniscience” of the overwhelming eye gives it a certain neutrality, an air of being above the fray.  But if one equates “I” and “eye”—a Wordsworthian conceit—then an “I/thou,” subject/object relationship develops between the confronting spheres.  In the dollhouse photos, Antoni channels Gulliver tied up among the liliputian furnishings.  Her giganticism then melds with that of the eye, further reinforcing its connection with subjectivity, which clearly triumphs here, if only through sheer size.

A kind of oxymoronic overturning—hard is soft, endangered endures—is the operative device, the Archimedean lever in this poetically layered installation.  And what is finally moved is the viewer who—male or female, instigator or bystander, fan or critic—is also a subject.  In a conclusive pivot, the self recedes from the subjective, which disperses itself among the multiplicitous other.  Parity is achieved.

Luhring Augustine Gallery
531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

Janine Antoni
Up Against
Sep 12 – Oct 24, 2009