Janine Antoni on Licking an Eye: The Story Behind Her Icons Cover

Janine Antoni's photograph of her tongue touching the eye of her ex-husband, artist Paul Ramirez Jonas, now graces the cover of the Icons issue — and the story behind it is as unsettling as the image itself.

Antoni made the work, she says, to reverse an anatomical expectation. "For this image, I wanted to reverse the anatomical expectation when it comes to penetration," she explained. "I'm the licker, and my tongue is touching the eye of my ex-husband, artist Paul Ramirez Jonas."

The impulse came from desire — specifically, an impossible one. "A lot of the works I make stem from a desire," Antoni said. "In this case, I wanted to know the taste of his vision. Of course, it's an unrealizable desire, as are some of the most interesting desires we have."

The image reads differently to different viewers. To Antoni, it carries tenderness. "To me, there's something very sweet about this photograph, because I thought it was an act of trust for him to let me lick his eye," she said. "But I learned that people have phobias around eyes, and that some people have a hard time even looking at the image."

The photograph engages a confusion of the senses, which Antoni compares to synesthesia — the rare neurological condition in which stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another. She also connects it to infant behavior. "Children also go through a stage where they put everything in their mouths as a way of knowing and exploring their world," she noted.

Antoni shot the image with an 8-by-10 view camera. "I like to say the view is a little closer than intimate," she said. The original print is square — neither portrait nor landscape — a format choice she says "slows the viewer down and creates a bit of disorientation." She printed it as large as she could at the time without a break in the paper: 4 by 4 feet. "Which seems small now that we're so used to enormous images," she added.

Her imagination, Antoni says, is fired by what she cannot know — "like looking into the eyes of a lover and trying to understand what they're seeing when they look back at me." Her original plan was more aggressive than the result. "When I first had the idea for this piece, I really wanted to block his vision with my tongue — to lick the pupil. There's so much to say about the gaze and what it means. But as so often happens, when you actually make the piece, it reveals to you what it wants to be," she said.

The making of the work presented real physical problems. Antoni assumed licking the pupil would be difficult, so she asked her father, a doctor, for something to numb Jonas's eye. Fear stopped her. "The more I thought about it, though, the more it scared me: If he couldn't feel my tongue, I could cause damage. We decided not to use it," she recalled.

A second obstacle emerged at the shoot. The union of eye socket and mouth formed a dark cave, without enough light for the detail Antoni wanted. The solution: an external flash. "That meant Paul not only had a tongue in his eye, but also a bright flashing light," she said.

The accident proved decisive. When Antoni saw the sheet of negatives, she found that Jonas's eye had rolled back — avoiding both tongue and light — and the reflex transformed the picture. "It made the image feel much more like a conversation between the eye and the tongue," she said. "I thought about the many saints depicted in ecstasy, with their eyes rolled back, too."

What began as an attempt to possess another artist's vision ended as something stranger: an image where discomfort, trust and a body's involuntary response carry equal weight — and one that viewers who fear eyes will still have to meet on the newsstand.