On September 8, 1985, Ana Mendieta fell from the 34th-floor window of the apartment she shared with her husband, artist Carl Andre. The details of the incident are controversial. She was 36. Except for a passing reference in its catalog, the recent Whitney Museum retrospective wisely chose to downplay the event. Art, as we know, should speak for itself Perhaps unwisely, I draw attention to it. Not for its frisson--the curious can find the details on the Internet--but for what the shattering loss of this artist's life means in the context of her doggedly evanescent work.
Mendieta was born in Cuba in 1947. Her politically active family and her experiences with post-colonialism and exile am pall of the ghostly backbone of her creative investigations. A cursory glance aligns her with the major avant-gardes of the Sixties and Seventies, including conceptual, performance, earth, and body art. Although film and photography play a necessary role in these types of endeavors, it comes as a hit of a shock to learn that Mendieta, one of the era's least-known figures, is responsible for creating the largest number (80-plus) of films.
One of her first signature works is the "mixed-media performance" Untitled (Grass on Woman) (73). While a naked Mendieta lies face down on a lawn, participants glue blades of grass to her back in an act that combines artistic volition with nature. In a contemporaneous journal entry, she laments the inadequacy of paint to transmit the magic of reality: "I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth." This piece survives only as photo documentation--the trace of an idea fixed in time and place by emulsion. Much of Mendieta's work exists in this precarious realm--an ontologically muted setting available to the eyes but no longer present. This is why she remains on a periphery of art history. It's telling that her body in Grass merges into the elements, verging on an abyss of dissolution. She was engaged with the fleeting nature of life in general, and what it means to be female within that flux, in particular.
As a whole, the retrospective created an eerie, natural-history sensation, the sort of hermetic aura associated with taxidermy, dusty dioramas, scratched and faded nature films. Mendieta's art doesn't feel comfortable in the rarefied atmosphere of spotless gallery architecture. (In addition to the films and photographs, drawings and sculpture were on display--mostly made from organic materials such as earth, tree trunks, and leaves.) She wanted to be part of, if not the cosmos, then at least the primordial landscape. Although nature clearly beckoned, she had too strong a sense of social injustice to abandon herself to the merely cosmic. Numerous early works utilized graphic and unequivocal images of rape and other forms of female victimization.
Mendieta's pedagogical outrage over the "site" of an abused body eventually gave way to a motif that remained an ongoing preoccupation until her death: the silhoueta (silhouette). Dirt, rocks, flowers, and, in a particularly resonant format, burnt, smoking craters mark the outlines of life-size female forms. During her quest for this ephemeral template of universality, Mendieta reenacted variations on what is now seen as a seminal act: the Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks) (82). Filmed by a Super-8 camera, the artist approached a blank wall, outstretched arms laden with blood and pigment, and then marked the surface with an indelible smear--a physical act with the body in question now missing. Call it concrete expressionism.
Instances of artists' lives cut short by tragedy are legion. There's even a subset of those who died young and have a direct aesthetic connection to Mendieta's work: Robert Smithson (with his earthworks), Hannah Wilke (and her focus on her body's impermanence), and Cordon Matta-Clark (a photographer of the soon-to-be-nonexistent). Another name stands out (at least to me) by virtue of a shared belief in art as a certain kind of life: Bas Jan Ader, who, in his last performance piece, In Search of the Miraculous (75), attempted to pilot a small boat across the Atlantic. The journey (lid not end well. Rescuers found the vessel, but his body was never recovered. History continues the process of recovering Mendieta's.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Film Society of Lincoln Center
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
