Tender loving care

Rachael Schwabe

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992-1996. Performance with Loving Care hair dye, Natural Black. Photographed by Jordi Calafell at Fudació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain in 1995. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Janine Antoni empties several dozen bottles of Clairol’s Loving Care hair dye into a bucket. She puts on a pair of plastic gloves and dips her long hair in the inky black dye, lathering the back of her head. She gently wrings her hair, then flattens herself like a rock climber to make contact, head-first, with the gallery floor.

Beginning at the far end of the space, she lightly braces her body with both hands and drags her dye-soaked head from left to right, then swivels her head, at ground level, to move right to left. She repeats this sequence to cover the entirety of the floor’s surface, occasionally resting her head, eyes closed, in between pivots.

Antoni’s movements methodically propel her across the floor—sometimes she swings up an arm or extends a leg to indicate her path—slowly pushing her spectators out of the space. She shuffles her bucket throughout her performance to periodically re-saturate her head-brush. When she finishes her painting, she removes her gloves, flips her hair on top of her head, and leaves the room.

This was Antoni’s Loving Care, which she performed at least seven times between 1992 and 1996. The performance summoned a broad spectrum of feelings for her viewers – love, denial, care, curiosity, disappointment, and desire – and was aligned with other artworks that she created when she first emerged in the New York art world in the early 1990s. At this time, she often selected organic materials that were especially receptive to her touch, including chocolate, soap, and lard. She made her impressions visible by personifying various utilitarian tools, such as the paintbrush, the chisel, and the sponge. Invested with the knowledge of their making, Antoni’s crafted objects transmit a message about the labor and affect that created them.

Antoni did not initially envision Loving Care as a live performance. She first showed images of “traces” painted with her head and hair dye in The Auto-Erotic Object, a 1992 group show at the Hunter College Gallery in New York City. In 1993 she enacted Loving Care in front of an audience at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, England. One might ask, though: if her viewers are effectively chased out of the space, or otherwise craning to see—why was it important that they were there at all? To Antoni, those present were not passive observers but collaborators whose reactions, ranging from interest to disappointment, she can never totally anticipate. They’re “the wild card,” she has said.

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1993. Performance with Loving Care hair dye, Natural Black. Dimensions variable. Photographed by Prudence Cumming Associates, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992-1996. Performance with Loving Care hair dye, Natural Black. Photographed by Prudence Cumming Associates at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, England in 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992-1996. Performance with Loving Care hair dye, Natural Black. Photographed by Prudence Cumming Associates at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, England in 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Among the documentary photographs from Antoni’s original 1993 performance, one of the most intriguing images is one in which she has left the room. The window panes reflect Antoni’s audience, who stand apart from her painted surface, unwilling to disturb the artwork. The gallery floor is covered with swirls of her hair dye tracings and scattered hand and footprints. These are marks that could be made by a mop or washing cloth, but her viewers have witnessed a far more intimate form of labor, in which she is both maestro and tool.

This photograph also demonstrates how Antoni’s material traces take on a life of their own. Through hair dye, she has distributed her own vitality over the floor, rendering it hairy. The texture of Antoni’s hair is perceptible on her head as an attenuated, glistening mass; its fibrous identity can be seen with greater clarity in the impressions she has left on the floor. These wending tendrils pulse with a sensual texxture, a term introduced by Renu Bora and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe tactile, enlivened stories of how surfaces, materials, and interpersonal connections are made. The concept of texxture intertwines perfectly with Antoni’s process, in which she braids together information and affect, conceptualism and a desire to caress.

Antoni has said that she seeks to create objects that “hold” the gestures that she puts into them. In Loving Care, that holding became literal.  Her texturization of the floor was a momentary communion: I find myself empathizing with Antoni’s brushed tracings as much as the artist’s working body. In using her hair as a brush-mop, Antoni invited tenderness—fulfilling a dye product’s promise of loving care through her devotion to her viewers, her body, and her art making.

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Rachael Schwabe is an arts educator and craft historian living and working in New York City. Her writing explores craft’s affectual impact on process-based art and performance studies, and her research focuses on the work of Janine Antoni, Trisha Brown, and Lenore Tawney. After receiving her m.a. from the Bard Graduate Center in 2020, Rachael served as a design history instructor for the BGC Lab for Teen Thinkers, the New York School of Interior Design, and The New School. She currently works at the Museum of Modern Art, where she manages the Museum’s online learning courses.