Coddle

A woman, the artist herself, cradles her lower leg in her lap, reverently gazing upon it as if a Madonna in a sacred Italian Renaissance painting looking down at her holy Child. Raking light spills over the oval tableau from the window behind, illuminating knee, shin, and foot and furthering the sense of spiritual drama. While Antoni's bearing is casual-she looks lost in a daydream-the pictorial composition of the scene is carefully deliberate, and its intimate size and hand-carved wood frame reinforce the devotional quality to which it alludes. Yet the fact that the subject of the artist's cosseting is not a child but one of her own body parts (and a usually disregarded one at that) introduces a powerful sense of dissonance.
The photograph is perhaps less overtly sensational than the work that secured Antoni's reputation on the horizon of contemporary artistic practice, including performances in which she cast herself in a bust of soap, gnawed at a massive chunk of chocolate, and pushed an eight-hundred-pound boulder in a circle with the steel pole to which it was attached. A legatee of the history of feminist performance art, the artist has also worked in sculpture, video, and painting. Yet Coddle is equally striking in its effects, and the questions to which it gives rise are similarly compelling. Perhaps the leg is a surrogate for an absent child and functions as a substitute for the attentions of motherhood. Or perhaps its formal evocation of one of the most iconographic poses in the history of western art is a comment on the state of contemporary spirituality as a force now displaced and sublimated by the body.