Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made.
Ana Mendieta

For many years Ana Mendieta attempted to create a sculpture in the sky made out of smoke – a sculpture that would materialise for a very short moment, change shape, fade out and disappear, leaving a trace on the camera film and in the memory. This unrealised work characterises the spiritual and ephemeral nature of Mendieta’s work and its resistance to categorisation. Throughout her life, Mendieta fought to cast off established classifications (body art, land art, performance art, feminism), and by never quite fitting into any of these recognised forms, she located herself in areas that had previously remained unoccupied. This yielded a body of work that served as a surface onto which diverse ideas, impressions and theories could be projected.

The ‘in-between’ nature of Mendieta’s work also stemmed from the way in which she saw art: as inseparable from her body, her life and her cultural heritage. Indeed, a central source of its power is her radical exploration of her own roots and the rigid conceptual language she developed to address them. This, in turn, saw her investigating the fundamental connection between human beings and the earth. Her works – subtle, small-scale, at times almost invisible – are imbued with what she understood as a very real magic, relating to the religion and ritualism of her native Cuba; a magic that arose from her capacity to tap into ancient knowledge and ritual while constantly challenging the divisions between nature and her own body.

Mendieta’s artistic credo was lived out on a variety of levels and the media she used to produce and record her work were central to the liminal nature of her practice. She was part of that generation of artists whose works no longer fitted the conventions of exhibition making and the collecting of art. This meant that the ways in which artists presented their work took on a new importance and led inevitably to a blurring of the line between documentation and artwork.

Photography served as a nuanced means of reframing her works, creating a hermetic seal and enveloping them in an aura of archaism. For her first key solo exhibition at the Corroboree Gallery of New Concepts (Iowa University in 1977) Mendieta chose to present her works in the form of photographs. All 27 colour photographs in the exhibition were single images selected from slides that Mendieta had used to document works made between 1976 and 1977 in the landscapes of Iowa and Mexico. In a statement for the exhibition she explained her intentions: ‘The viewer of my work may or may not have had the same experience as myself. But perhaps my images can lead the audience to [speculate] on their own experiences [of] what they might feel I have experienced. Their minds can then be triggered so that the images I present retain some of the quality of the actual experience. This was the first presentation of the Silueta series, which Mendieta had started to work on in 1973.

The Silueta series marked the beginning of Mendieta’s principal body of work, although one piece, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), which she later designated as her first Silueta, was not shown in the Corroboree exhibition. Instead, she exhibited later works from the series, which explored the theme of Silueta in sand, grass, clay and water, with flowers, rocks, pigment and gunpowder. Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) was created in 1973 during her second visit to Mexico, when she stayed in Oaxaca. Mendieta, who had emigrated from Cuba, developed a completely new artistic language during this trip: ‘Plugging into Mexico was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there. Mendieta lay down in one of the open graves in Yagul and instructed her partner, Hans Breder, to cover her body with flowers that she had bought at the market, so ‘that the flowers should seem to grow from her body. This moment marked a turning point in Mendieta’s work; Mexico inspired her to work outside, in direct contact with the natural world: ‘The thing that really struck me about the Mexican site, was the fact that they were overgrown with grass, and bushes and things […] It just seemed to me it was nature’s reclaiming of this thing, of this site, taking over. And I wanted to get in touch with my body. So, I went out and bought a bunch of flowers in the market […] and set it up. It was a tableau, but just set up […] Actually, the way I really thought about it was having nature take over the body the same way that it had taken over this symbols of past civilizations. For Mendieta, who was fascinated by Mexican burial rituals and funeral decorations, the differentiation between a performance and a tableau was essential. The form of the ‘tableau’ would become a central aspect of her practice.

Mendieta had first started making 35-mm colour slides of her works in 1972, generally using an entire roll of film for each work. The process was always the same: a project was developed, a tableau was created (later Mendieta referred to these as ‘sculptures’) and this tableau was filmed or photographed. For some years now it has been possible to access her collection of slides, which provide a detailed insight into her working methods, the documentation of the works and the selection process. In these early years, she shot her films using a Bolex camera, which meant that her films were limited to three minutes and twenty seconds, prescribed by the length of the film roll. At the beginning, the pictures were often taken by Hans Breder, who was teaching on the Intermedia course at Iowa University that Mendieta was enrolled in. It was through this programme that she learnt about the latest developments in performance and new media and became familiar with the work of artists such as Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Keith Sonnier, Allan Kaprow and Hans Haacke.

It was on the Intermedia course that Mendieta realised her first performance and also her first earth-body sculpture, Untitled (Grass on Woman), 1972. These were followed by performances, such as Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) and Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant), which explored transformations affecting her own body, and Blood and Feathers and Chicken Piece (Chicken Movie), which tapped into both Viennese Actionism and the rituals of Santería, the syncretic, Afro-American religion practised in Cuba. These works turned Mendieta into something of an outsider in Breder’s class. As well as being the only student who was not producing conceptual art in the usual way, she was also the only woman: ‘I really would get it,’ she once said, ‘because I was working with blood and with my body. The men were into conceptual art and doing things that were very clean. Even at this early point in her career, her practice already did not quite ‘fit in’ and she found herself operating in her own in-between space, which would become her characteristic artistic approach.

While Mendieta’s work was clearly influenced by conceptual art, minimalism, performance art, land art, feminism and even the Viennese Actionists, its iconography was rooted in the cosmology of pre-Christian religions and the Catholic symbols and rituals of Mexico. As early as 1972, when she completed her studies in painting, she stated that her aim was to create works that were infused with the magic and power of ‘pre-historic and ancient art. […] My paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the images to convey, and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic. In her paintings, there were already signs of her interest in Mexican, African, prehistoric and pre-Columbian art: they are filled with archaic forms and references to primitive art; motifs were placed in the centre of the canvas and her compositions were inhabited by figures in African dress.

The ‘earth-centred Santería’, as well as the entire religious pantheon of Cuba and the Caribbean, became an important inspiration for her work. She explains its significance to her work at the beginning of her statement for the Corroboree exhibition: ‘It seems as if these cultures provided me with an inner knowledge, a closeness [to] natural resources. And it is this knowledge that gives reality to the images they have created. It is this sense of magic, knowledge and power [that] primitive art [has] that has influenced my personal attitude toward art-making. These influences became visible in Mendieta’s use of blood, feathers, her use of gunpowder, as well as her exploration of Abakuá in Ñañigo Burial, and connections she forged with specific goddesses in the titles of works such as El Ixchell Negro (The Black Ixchell) or Untitled (Ochún), to name just a few.

Mendieta’s Silueta works allowed her to feel a deep connection between her own body and the earth: ‘I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth-body sculptures I become one with the earth […] I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really [a] reactivation of primeval beliefs [in] an omnipresent female force; the after-image of being encompassed within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being. The move from painting to earth-body sculptures was thus based on an almost physical urge for Mendieta.

In her early earth-body sculptures, Mendieta positioned her own body in the landscape and asked someone else to photograph the result. From 1975 onwards she largely ceased this practice and created a silhouette of her own body as a proxy: ‘I decided I didn’t want to be in the work anymore [because] I don’t particularly like performance art. She made prints of her own body in the earth or sand, or – as in the case of her Fetish works and her Island works – she recreated her whole body in organic and nonorganic materials, including stones, soil, grass, flowers, moss, blood, pigments and, later, gunpowder. In 1978 she started to distance herself even further from using her own body as an artistic tool and began to fashion archaic forms from nature rather than introducing these forms into nature. In the works in which she continued to use her body, such as Tree of Life, which she made in 1976, it seems to literally blur into nature. In the works created without her body, there are instead traces of it, either representing it or pointing to its absence. It is as though she had inscribed herself into the landscape.

While the relationship with her own body, ancestral past and the earth were primary inspirations for Mendieta, her formal language and artistic development also owed something to Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse. In her final-year dissertation she discussed the work of Duchamp and in 1973 she created the film Door Piece, which references Duchamp’s Étant donnés with its peephole perspective. In Étant donnés Duchamp created one of the most distinct images of the naked female body in a landscape. And it was in 1973 that Mendieta first positioned her own body in the landscape for Rape. This work was part of Mendieta’s artistic response to the rape of a fellow student in Iowa. ‘A young woman was killed, raped and killed at Iowa,’ Mendieta explained. ‘In one of the dorms, and it just really freaked me out. So I did several rape performance-type things at that time using my own body. They were tableaux […] So I guess that was the first kind of way in which I started using my body and doing something […] I did something that I believed in and that I felt I had to do.’ She lay face down on the forest floor, the lower half of her body naked, and had the moment documented in a colour-slide film. Irit Rogoff’s comment is especially apt here: ‘Both trauma and dislocation were converging on the geography of her own body. The tableau, as Mendieta later called it, was created in public under the gaze of her fellow students; in later works spectators would no longer be allowed to watch her at work.

In contrast to Mendieta’s work, Duchamp’s Étant donnés contains no obvious signs of violence; it is a highly erotic piece that arose from his relationship with Maria Martins and in which the many facets of his work are subsumed. Mendieta once said that ‘the basic instincts in a human being are eros, pleasure, life, and the death wish and that her works were about precisely these things. A distillation of these ideas pervades Étant donnés, which makes it all the more plausible that this masterpiece exerted its influence on Mendieta. Duchamp’s Étant donnés reflects his engagement with painting. Despite the fact that decades earlier his ready-mades had already put an end to painting in his output, this later work is in effect playing with the idea of a three-dimensional painting (30). It would be going too far to claim the same for Mendieta and her Siluetas, yet there are certainly connections here to her own painting and to that of Matisse. Above all, it was Matisse’s use of patterns and ornament that fascinated her, and in Mendieta’s bodies made from organic substances there are echoes of Matisse’s abstractions of the human body (as in La Danse), which are seen in an even more reduced form in his cut-outs. While Duchamp’s approach to the female body in a landscape retains a similar emotional intensity to that of Mendieta, Matisse’s influence can primarily be seen formally.

Text by Stephanie Rosenthal

Extracted from Ana Mendita: Traces, Hayward Publishing, London, 2013. For full citation, please refer to page 19 of the book.