This interview was conducted in the spring of 2007

published in a book documenting Father in the winter of 2008 by Art in General

Janine Antoni: When I think of Father I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes of Louise Bourgeois, she said,

"Once when we were sitting together at the dining table, I took white bread, mixed it with spit, and molded a figure of my father. When the figure was done, I started cutting off the limbs with a knife. I see this as my first sculptural solution."

What strikes me about this quote is that she must kill the father in an attempt to create. As someone who has gnawed into the minimalist cube (remade in chocolate), I relate to the fact that you have remade your father from the inside out and then butchered him. Was there an exorcism in this gesture?

Melissa Martin: I love that Bourgeois quote, that impulse is something I really identify with. For me it speaks about the implications of violence that surround us and how this basic drive manifest itself within our society. We've all got it in us, the urge to kill/destroy, as is terribly evident in the neighbor-killing-neighbor genocides all over the world. As a sculptor when you follow such a frightening impulse, you may arrive at an interesting sculptural solution. I followed a desire to know my dad, as literally as I knew how, while hoping the result would speak about the deep taboos carried right below the surface of our skin.

Creating Father definitely was an exorcism of patriarchal ideals for me, specifically those within the tradition of figurative sculpture. Classical figures are all about depicting the ideal form, they are literally so superficial… never going beyond the surface. It is a tradition with a legacy of distorting the image of the body and ideals of human beauty. I wanted to create a sculpture that tore the monolith into thin shreds, which went beyond the surface of an object and instead depicted the structure that gives the surface its shape.

JA: Maybe we should step back a moment, can I ask you to describe how you made Father?

MM: I started by bringing a photo of my dad to a butcher and asking him "If you were going to butcher this man, how would you do it?" Then, together we developed a diagram of cuts, which included all of the edible organs. Then I traveled back to my hometown of New Palestine, Indiana and made a full-body cast of my Dad in plaster. It was a very intimate procedure that took a few days because he's a big guy, 6 feet 6 inches tall! Then I returned to my Brooklyn studio, and began to create his flesh. I literally chewed several pounds of gum that would become his fat while I harvested several gallons of my spit into bottles. Then I "chewed" the gum for his bones, muscles, tissues, blood vessels, marrow, and so on in an industrial mixer while blending in my saliva—a sort of "test-tube baby" process. Then I sculpted, as realistically as possible, the inner anatomy of my dad. Each slab of meat was a depiction of butchery yet simultaneously a hand crafted object. Next, I placed each piece in a styrofoam tray, wrapped them in plastic, weighed and labeled them for sale by the pound. Finally, I arranged them, like fallen dominoes, in proximity to their anatomical origin creating a human form.

JA: Why Gum?

MM: Well, I like that gum is one of the few foods that we put inside of our bodies with the intention of taking it back out again. Chewed gum is waste, a byproduct, a delivery system, which once delivered; we no longer have a use for. Gum in a sense, is a visual object that stands for sweetness, therefore chewed gum represents that which is spent, no longer sweet. So, to me, chewed gum seems appropriately positioned as the material for a corpse, a dead material for a dead man. A symbol of both nourishment and death. In addition, I found that chewed gum has the uncanny ability to depict disturbingly realist-looking cuts of juicy "meat".

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