Autumn Inspiration: Ana Mendieta
1st September 2020
Welcome to the first in a new sporadic series from Sarah Bolwell, Assistant Editor at the Burlington Magazine. Here she gets passionate about the work of artists inspired by the human form. The body is the most immediate and essential of all artistic mediums available to us as an expression of creativity and in turn much art has been created in order that we might better understand our bodies physically and mentally.
Since the very first cave paintings art has been inextricably linked with the body, so this series has a lot of ground to cover! We hope you’ll forgive us for jumping around a bit, but truly different artworks and artists provoke passion at different times. Enjoy!
Suddenly finding oneself with limited mobility directly heightens our awareness of our physical being. During lockdown I had brief love affairs with different types of mat-based exercise promoted on Instagram, but it was walking that stuck. Making the most of my allotted hour I’d walk through Victoria Park (and then surrounding streets when Tower Hamlets locked the gates). Not listening to music or podcasts, I felt very aware of my body. I think the reason I have felt drawn to the art of Ana Mendieta in recent months is her sensitivity to the deep connection between our bodies and nature and the magic (her word) that happens when they come together. Plus she made some very cool self-portrait photographs with male body hair stuck on her face that chimed with the feminist sentiments of her time.
Body Tracks, 1974 - Ana Mendieta
Born in Cuba in 1948, Ana moved to Iowa aged 12 after her politician father fell foul of Castro. She and her sister, Raquelin, were fostered as it was years before their mother and father would be able to join them. She enrolled in the art programme at Iowa University in 1971 and quickly moved away from traditional media such as painting to work with film. Her most potent works from this period include her staging of a rape scene in her dorm room, and Body Tracks, a short Super-8 film where a kneeling Mendieta, with her back to the camera drags her blood-soaked hands downwards on a blank white wall. Mendieta was making work against a backdrop of feminist performance art in North America that included trailblazers like Carolee Schneeman and Adrian Piper. She resisted any labels however, she rejected any association with the feminist movement at that time for its lack of consideration of Black and brown women’s rights. Mendieta’s performance works during and after art school were poignant in their subversion of the male gaze. Here was a naked woman inviting men to look at her, but the way she chose to present her body (covered in blood or chicken feathers) provoked no feelings of arousal or gratification in the viewer.
Sadly, her mysterious death in 1985 aged just 36 and her relationship with the Minimalist artist Carl Andre tend to overshadow her work in art historical narratives. She died falling out of a New York apartment building during an argument. On the phone to emergency services, Andre famously said Ana had “somehow gone out the window”.
Siluetas, 1970 - Ana Mendieta
As well as being concerned with the social messages the body could tell through art, Mendieta felt a deep connection with the natural world. She explored this in her most famous series of works, Siluetas (Silhouettes), created on multiple trips to Mexico in the 1970s. She would lay down in grass or other natural landscapes and use her body to make an impression, then she might fill the void with flowers or twigs or other natural material from nearby. Sometimes she would create body-shaped marks in the landscape and set them alight. The photographs she took serve as the only records of these ephemeral works. I think she was making a point that although our bodies are solid and grounding, they are ultimately ephemeral.
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant), 1979 - Ana Mendieta
I was recently reminded of her work on a visit to the Barbican Centre’s ‘Masculinities’ exhibition (thrilled that art galleries are starting to tentatively reopen). The organisers had included a piece called Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant), a 1979 series of photographs of Ana using glue to attach tufts of her fellow student’s hair to her face like a beard. The work fitted well in an exhibition dealing with the subject of performative masculinity and gender norms, but also it struck me how alongside her deeper explorations of the body her work retained an element of fun – a crucial component, I think, to keep in mind as we reset and realign our physical and mental beings.
Find out more about the life and work of Ana Mendieta at https://www.anamendietaartist.com/
Sarah Bolwell