"Lick and Lather" by Janine Antoni

"Lick and Lather" by Janine Antoni is an awesome example of conceptual unity and using performance as means of creating visual unity. Antoni created this piece by casting a mold of herself and then pouring chocolate for the left side busts and soap for the right sides. Most interestingly, she sculpted the chocolate ones with her tongue (thus the LICK) and spent time in the bathtub sculpting the soap ones (thus LATHER). It was an important performance piece in making it a conceptual unity piece because it represented a loving, somewhat exotic process of licking alongside a process of erasing and deteriorating of an outer layer of the body. She states that it is an ironic, love-hate relationship because on the one hand she is loving and licking her image and on the other she is literally rubbing away what she does not like about her self-image. She also states that it is a very humorous piece in that she is playing around with bust images, which is a very classical, serious idea.