SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
Thinking Like an Artist
Janine Antoni
June 3–4, 2010
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
Thinking Like an Artist – Janine Antoni
June 3-4, 2010
Janine Antoni
Thank you for that introduction. I have to say it’s a great pleasure to be here, and a great pleasure to talk to you about my creative process. A lot goes into what I make that I don’t get to show or I purposely don’t show. But every once in awhile I get this opportunity to focus on one or two pieces and show sort of this crazy path that led me to the object.
And as an educator myself, I so enjoy thinking about the creative process and how we can create a supportive container for this unfolding. And I don’t know about you, but for me, the creative process is a great mystery, and something that is incredibly hard to teach. I don’t know if it can be taught. And I ask myself that question all the time.
So what I thought I would do is start by just laying out a few ideas I have that I’ve come to through my own creative process and through watching other artists. And this may be something that you’ve talked about already. We’ll see. But I guess the first thing I would say is that it’s not linear, which makes it very difficult to teach. And what I’ve experienced with my creative process is it actually—creativity comes in spurts. And you never know when it’s going to happen. It’s a little bit like watching my five-year old grow. Something clicks in the brain, and all of a sudden she’s changed. And that’s how it seems to me.
I think creativity happens at the periphery of our vision. And I wanted to tell you a story about a very famous artist, and I won’t use his name. And I happen to be friends with his assistant. He’s a painter. And this assistant told me that after working for him for years, he noticed something very funny. He was in the studio painting this painting. And every so often he would go into a door at the back of the studio and not come back for about 20 or 30 minutes. And the assistant thought, Oh, well, maybe he’s making a phone call or going to the bathroom or something like that. And one day when he was cleaning the studio and this artist wasn’t there, he saw that the door was open. And he went into the door and he found that there was a whole other studio behind that door, and there was another painting happening. And when I’m making an object, there’s something happening over here that is calling me desperately to pay attention to it. When I turn to look at that thing, the thing that I was making calls me. And so there’s something about the creative process which is about being able to stay in this floating place and not trying to solidify too quickly. And I think that this is a really scary spot to be in. It’s the spot of the unknown. And in that space, there’s infinite potential. So I think to be creative is to be limber and to remain in that state of flexibility.
I guess the other two things I have to talk about are mistakes and chance, because I don’t think any great works happen without that. And sort of this idea of paying attention to those mistakes, or not only mistakes, but a kind of resistance. When the wheel wants to produce something, but the material is leading you in another direction. And can you have a dialog with the material? And then, I guess, is this notion of being open. And I think that that goes for the maker as well as the viewer. Can you lay your prejudice aside and open yourself to the process? It’s a very difficult thing to do.
But as a teacher, I become more and more interested in what it is to hold space for the creative process. And it is not the way I was educated. I did the boot camp version of graduate school, where we thought being rigorous was to be as mean as possible to each other. And I did that for many years. I married one of those artists and brought them with me to the real world. I surrounded myself with friends that were like that. And for many years I thought that was the way to be a good artist. Now I have a very different feeling. And my feeling about teaching is that we’re very good at teaching the language—how to take an idea and put it into a form. But we do very little teaching about how to get an idea. And that is more than half of the process.
And I think on some level we don’t even know how to begin to teach that, or maybe that’s what we think talent is. That the talented artists have access to the unconscious. And I don’t think that’s actually true. I think that that’s something that needs to be worked on. I think that we all have an unconscious. And I think some of us live partly in that world, and some of us don’t. And I think that’s a choice. So for me, I’ve thought a lot about how to support that kind of behavior.
So anyway, I’m going to start in. And, hopefully, some of these ideas will come through in the two pieces that I want to talk about. But before I begin with that piece, I want to show you a piece I made in ’94, and it’s called Unveiling. And what I did is I just took a veil and I put it over my head, and as faithfully as possible, I sculpted the veil. And then I cast it in bronze and I made it into a bell. And then what I did is for the clapper of that bell, I made it out of lead. And lead is a softer metal than bronze. So as you ring this bell, you are sculpting the form underneath.
So I was thinking about identity in those days. Maybe I’m still thinking about identity. But in thinking about the veil and whether the veil, you know, how it hides one’s identity. But thinking about that whole Greek idea of the veil and how the body is making the shape of the fabric. And then thinking that there’s nothing under there but the clapper, and the clapper is being shaped by the veil. And, you know, if the veil is hiding, the bell is calling out. So sort of going back and forth between these ideas.
You know, piece came and went. Wasn’t my greatest work at all. But in 2004, there was one aspect of the piece that I realized was really interesting. And it was an aspect that actually didn’t work in the piece, which is that nobody thought to look under the veil to see that this clapper is being reshaped. And I thought, But that’s really interesting. And so I thought that I want to make a piece that just accentuates that idea of the clapper.
So I was asked to make a presentation to try to represent the United States in the Venice Biennial. And at that moment, we were at war and I was not being American. I was having some conflict about how one represents one’s country when they are behaving very violently. And somehow that whole idea got me to the wrecking ball, and thinking that the wrecking ball, its nature is destructive. And feeling like, at that time, we were not aware of the repercussions on ourselves with this destructive behavior. I think now we’re very aware.
But anyway, I thought, What if I made a soft wrecking ball and I used it to demolish a building. I could make an object that showed its history and the repercussions of its behavior on its surface. That’s where the idea started. What you’re looking at is a maquette of the space in Venice. And that image that you see, which is just the dust of the demolition, is just taken from the Internet, stock imagery. And so this is how I put the proposal together. And I wanted it to be very silent, and I wanted you to just see this dust rising and falling. And that would feel sort of very gentle in relationship to this ball which was all mangled. I didn’t make it to the Venice Biennial, but a few years later I got the opportunity to show in Prospect 1, which is a biennial in New Orleans.
And I went to New Orleans to think about the site and what to do. And you can’t go to New Orleans without thinking about Katrina. And I found myself in the Ninth Ward, devastated by what I saw. And I started to think about the experience of what I knew of Katrina, which was, you know, looking at the TV. And realizing, as a country, how we had a very delayed reaction to that experience. So I started to think about what it means to be a witness, what it means to be a viewer, and the responsibility of witnessing. And that’s what brought me to this idea of the eye.
So I went from there to try to figure out how I was going to make this wrecking ball. I made a small maquette. It was made out of a beach ball about that big. I made friends with Demolition Dave, who was really an innovative guy in the demolition world. Into recycling and all sorts of stuff. And he loved the idea that this crazy woman wanted to make a big wrecking ball. And so he invited me down, and I interviewed him and so forth. We made this ball. He let me drive it up to Gloversville in the back of my car. And we started to demolish this building.
I swung the ball for about ten minutes, and the ball ripped right out of the socket and flew into the bush. I retrieved it and, you know, this is what it looked like. So I knew that my test didn’t work. So then I found this guy Lenny in Ontario, and he was a wrecking ball builder. And I said, you know, Lenny, I want to make this wrecking ball, and I need it to be soft. I need it not to fall apart. I need all these things. So Lenny started to design this for me. So lead is incredibly heavy, as you know. My wrecking ball in the end was two tons. That’s already incredibly heavy. So I knew that I couldn’t make a solid wrecking ball. So we had to design something that would be hollow on the inside.
So what you’re looking at here are these round steel discs, very thick, because I didn’t want to lose the spherical shape, because I wanted in the installation for you to relate the shape of the ball to the shape of the eye. So those steel plates allowed it to bend without losing the spherical shape. Then these steel plates allowed it to be hollow. And then we put a grating around it so that when it hit the building, the lead didn’t rip off the surface. So then we cast it in lead.
And then after maybe two years of courting Demolition Dave, I was ready to smash my ball and he couldn’t get his permits together to do the particular demolition. So I had a panic attack. I drew a circle around New York City and started calling every demolition company. I finally found somebody in Pittsburgh, an 85-year-old man who had a demolition company. And he said, Come on down. So I put my ball in the back of the truck and we took it to Pittsburgh, ironically, to demolish a steel company. So this was, you know, the demolition site.
I took two friends with me, Shane and Uri, who are sound guys. And what I wanted to do was to record the sound of the demolition. So we brought all this equipment in the back of a car, and we started to put mics all over the demolition site. We taped some mics to the building to get the vibration of the building. We put some boom mics to get the kind of atmospheric sound. And we threw a few mics over the top of the building, because—and I bought really cheap mics that we could actually smash so you could the excitement of the smash. So here we have ten channels of audio. Then Ace Demolition is the people who so graciously worked with me.
And this is the other creative force behind the piece. This is Charlie Meadows. Not only is the wrecking ball on its way out, we favor implosion these days. It’s more accurate and effective except for very specific cases. So Charlie Meadows is one of a dying breed. He is one that still has this incredible talent to swing that wrecking ball. So Charlie and I worked together along with my assistant Rosemary. This is us checking it out as it got to the site. And here’s one of the most exciting moments as a sculptor, to see my sculpture smashing into a building. So here’s a few pictures of the process.
It was a funny process, because I’m kind of sculpting this ball. So I would say to Charlie, Well, you know, this side isn’t being hit at all. Can you smash this side over on that corner of the building? And it was like he was picking his teeth. Just swing that thing, the ball would swerve right into that point. So it was this incredibly delicate process even though it seemed so violent. To our surprise, parts of the building embedded themself in the ball. So there you get some close-ups of the smashing. That’s the final one.
So then there was the project of filming my eye. So I called up a friend, Kristen Johnson. She went to school with my husband at Brown, and she is a documentary film maker. Because I had to do something that was a bit beyond my skill. I wanted to film a very small part of my body, and I wanted to blow it up 11 feet by 11 feet. That’s very difficult to have real detail in that kind of image. So Kristen had the expertise, and we started to set up a situation in order to film me.
We realized that my head would have to stay really steady to be able to get the detail. So we made this apparatus you see on my head, which is modeled after when you go to the optometrist—if some of you have seen those things that they put on your head. And then the problem is lighting this area. And the more light, the sharper the image. The problem with that is that it’s probably not so smart to put a bright light into your eyes. So I start to talk to optometrists, What do I do? They said, Put the light in there and then look at a white wall. If the halo stays for more than five seconds, you know you’re in trouble.
[laughter]