CONFUSION about modern art is a shocking thing, and deeply embarrassing.

Say you go down to the current IMMA exhibition and are confronted with the work of Janine Antoni, recent winner of the £15,000 Glen Dimplex award, and famous for works involving the gnawing of chocolate and lard, for using her hair as a paint brush and casting her nipples in solid gold.

But you don't understand the artistry.

Never fear: Dan Cameron's here.

Dan is the man who has an explanatory essay in Slip of the Tongue/Janine Antoni, a glossy book accompanying the artist's work, and I am going to quote Dan verbatim for I know he wouldn't want it any other way.

Tell us Dan, why does Janine seem so obsessed with her body? Is it that she feels that in a society which attempts to dictate the terms by which pleasure is incorporated into one's life, the "disputed" realm of the body offers both the opportunity to put up a symbolic resistance to this control, and the means to refer to other issues, which function as part of the critical context in which its effect is felt?

Oh, right. And you say the pleasures of the body are characteristically the hardest to represent?

In viewing a beautiful landscape, for example, the direct feed from eye to brain seems to bypass finger tips, stomach and genitals completely. As a result, the pictorial representation of that same sunset...

Hold on Dan, what sunset? As the New Yorker checking department would say, "not previously mentioned".

. . . rings truer, not so lost in translation, in relation to the memory of the experience itself By contrast, even the notion of capturing the essence of a good meal or a good f*** through visual art seems all but imponderable.

Well, thank God for that, and I'm sorry about the asterisks, which aren't yours, but I am old fashioned in that regard. Listen, Dan: I have a soft spot for that contemporary artist who in pursuit of his aesthetic vision got his assistant to shoot him. Remember that genius?

. . . in the 1970 `following' piece of Vito Acconci (in which the artist followed a passerby on the street until it no longer became possible to do so), or in Chris Burden's act of having his studio assistant shoot him...

Good old Chris, gave the people what they wanted and they turned out.

...the emphasis is on identifying both the body's social or physical boundaries, and the best way to extend them. In this sense, while their material could not have been more intimate, their approach remained formalistic to the core.

I see. Tell us, there must be some art object you can tell us about which makes a "wry comment" on life. Say in Loving Care, where Antoni used her hair?

By scrambling the historically loaded image of scrubbing the floor on one's hands and knees with the equally over determined notion of updating one's hair in order to ward off the effects of ageing, Antoni seems to be forming a wry comment...

Good man!

... on the history of women's self abnegation, in which menial Ia hour is transformed...

Oh my God, not into a metaphor?

. . . into a metaphor for the straitjacket definition of beauty as a by product of youth.

The horror. The horror.

A similar use of cultural metaphors related to makeup can be found in the work "Butterfly Kisses", which uses Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara and the socially codified act of winking to create a form of drawing whose roots are in pure coquetry.

Dan, I feel the need to expand my knowledge of body related issues in terms of the principles of feminist thought. Can you help?

Although a mere decade separates Yves Klein's well known mid 1950s performances painting on a dropcloth using the nude body of a female model as his "brush", and Carolee Schneemann's performance works throwing slabs of meat onto a floor full of barely clad, writhing performers (Meat Joy, 1964), or reading from a written scroll as it is slowly pulled from her vagina, the difference.

Thanks Dan, sorry to cut you off there but I'm running out of stomach. Janine's overall contribution to modern art?

In the end, she has been seen to revamp some of the most familiar tenets of both conceptual art and feminism, so that they emerge in her work as fresh alternatives to a received history that is generally perceived as dry and impenetrable.

Dry and impenetrable? Good Lord, why? Dan? Dan!