The piece Ill be writing about is Gnaw by Janine Antoni.

My reason for
choosing this piece was because of the backstory of the piece. This
piece was created in the 1900s. The way the piece was created is
what caught my attention. Gnaw had a three piece Installation. This
included 600 pounds of chocolate gnawed by the artist, 600 pounds of
lard gnawed by the artist, the display was created with 130 lipsticks
made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed up lard removed from the
lard cube.
Looking through the book, nothing really caught my eye. It seemed as
if all of the art used was different in a way, but they still seemed to
have some sort of similarities. Janine Antoni is incredible for how she
created this piece. She went out of her way to be different, and by
doing this she created an iconic art piece. Some people may think
shes crazy for going such a distance to create this sculpture, but in my
eyes shes very creative. My role models in life are people who chose
to be different. People like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. For me Janine is
different because of the style of her art.
There were many different elements of art featured in this sculpture.
Lets begin with the shape. The main shape of this painting is a cube. It
isnt a clean cut cube either. The sculpture itself has a little bit of rough
patches featured in it. The color of the painting was the color of
chocolate. So it was brown. If you look up modern day images of the
painting, the brown color has almost began to turn into an almost black

color. To create this piece Janine was working with 600+ pounds of
chocolate, so you must wonder how long it mustve taken her to create
the final product.
Recreating this piece was hard for me, so I could only imagine what
Janine went through creating the original. To create this piece I needed
about a quarter block of the clay we were given in our Art 1010 class. I
had to hollow out the clay and created a square structure and began to
imitate Janines piece as accurately as I could. Although my work
wasnt spot on, it was still a decent piece. I tried to recreate the image
as closely as I could.
As I stated before, the piece is primarily a cube. But the top part of
Gnaw almost has a triangle shape to it, which shapes up into a cube
ship. Although it sounds confusing, it makes more sense when you see
an image of the piece. Its not a very clean cut cube.
What makes this piece so iconic? I think the answer is a very simple.
Not a lot of artists back than (or now) would be willing to take a risk on
creating such an abstract piece of art. Dont get me wrong, nothing
about this piece is beautiful, but what makes it stand out is how it was
created. This is what separates the good artists from the bad artists,
which is their ability to think outside of the box. In art youll see a lot of
pieces and think to yourself Well I couldve made something like that
and chances are, yeah you couldve, but you didnt. Great artists have
abstract minds. Dont get me wrong, there are times I look at certain

pieces of art and wonder How and why is this piece in a art gallery
the answer to this is that it has its own creative idea to it. Just because
we dont see creativity in something doesnt mean that many others
dont. Art is like music, every person has there own idea of what good
music is. There really is no wrong answer in this case. Thats what
impressed me about Gnaw lots of people probably told Janine that
she was crazy for even thinking about sculpting such a piece. She
didnt let that get to her and she went on to create the masterpiece.
What separates the Van Goghs from the average artists? I personally
believe that it is there ability to create something different. There are
many talented artists in the world. But the reason they arent
categorized among the best is because they all create the same things.
All good artists can create human faces, nature, and buildings, etc.
that just makes them all the same.

To conclude this paper, Ill say that Janine is an amazing artist for
creating this sculpture. It has allowed me to gain a more broad
perspective on creativity. Thats what a lot of people lack. Everyone
wants the easy way out, they dont want to take the road less
travelled. These piece is an example of taking the road less travelled.
Instead of being like every other artist, she took the long road, and
created a piece that is shown in museums until this very day.