rl-001-076 Mendieta Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:08 Uhr ... · Ana Mendieta produced some of the most compelling images of body- and identity-oriented art of the 1970s. ... well

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THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS

OF ANA MENDIETA

OLGA VISO

PRESTEL

MUNICH BERLIN LONDON NEW YORK

UNSEENMENDIETA


Cover: Documentation of Feathers on Woman, 1972 (Iowa). Detail of 35 mm color slide

Back cover: Documentation of an untitled performance with flowers, ca. 1973 (Intermedia studio, University of Iowa). Detail of 35 mm black-and-white photo negatives

Page 1: Untitled (detail), c. 1978. Blank book burnt with branding iron, 13 3⁄16 x 11 1⁄4 in. overall. Collection Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections, purchased with funds from Rose F. Rosenfield and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc.

Frontispiece: Ana Mendieta (foreground) and Hans Breder in a field of flowers, Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa, 1977. Detail of 35 mm color slide

© Prestel Verlag, Munich · Berlin · London · New York, 2008© for the text, © Olga M. Viso, 2008© for the illustrations, © Estate of Ana Mendieta, 2008All photographs of works by Ana Mendieta are courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York, unless otherwise indicated.

Prestel Verlag, Königinstrasse 9, D-80539 MunichTel. +49 (89) 242908-300, Fax +49 (89) 242908-335

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2008932512

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Editorial direction: Christopher LyonDesign, layout, and typesetting: Holzwarth DesignOrigination: ReproLine MediateamProduction: Simone ZeebPrinted and bound by Passavia Druckservice GmbH

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-3-7913-3966-5


CONTENTS

7 BEYOND THE VISIBLE

14 CHRONOLOGY

22 INTERMEDIA

77 THE LURE OF MEXICO

109 RITUALS OF REBIRTH

153 PURIFYING FLAME

199 ISLANDS

229 ANCESTRAL RETURN

279 IN THE PUBLIC REALM

296 ARTIST STATEMENTS

300 ADDITIONAL READING

301 PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

302 INDEX

304 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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BEYOND THE VISIBLE

Opposite: Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks), 1982. Blood and tempera paint on paper; one of three works, each 38 x 50 in.

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., Rose Purchase Fund7

Ana Mendieta produced some of the most compelling images

of body- and identity-oriented art of the 1970s. The tracks

made by the artist dragging her blood-covered arms down a

wall, and the pigment-filled void of her silhouette pressed into

a sandy beach, consumed by advancing waves, resound in the

histories of feminist art, performance, and land art. Other

potent images—Mendieta’s bodily outline drawn by ignited

gunpowder on the earth, or set alight with fireworks against

the night sky, fetishistic goddess and mummiform shapes

molded in soil and adorned with flowers, and ritualistic actions

per formed by the artist using animal blood and feathers—

are icons of art of the 1970s and late twentieth-century art of

Latin America. Mendieta the artist, and the art she pro -

duced during a brief yet prolific career covering a thirteen-year

period (1972 to 1985), have often defied easy classification.

Working across media (live performance, film, photography,

and sculpture) and between cultures (North America, Central

America, the Caribbean, and Europe), Mendieta vehemently

resisted being labeled Hispanic, Latina, or feminist, or de-

scribed as solely a performer, sculptor, photographer, or con-

ceptual artist. She was an artist first and foremost, one with

a transcultural identity and multimedia sensibility, who

explored complex issues of human sexuality and identity. Her

art emerged before the critical language employed today to

describe such an interdisciplinary and hybrid practice had

fully evolved.

Body Tracks, 1974 (Intermedia Studio, University of Iowa).

Lifetime color photograph from 35 mm color slide,

10 x 8 in. Collection Igor da Costa


8

Resisting the terminology that she felt the art world

establishment tried to impose on her, Mendieta developed her

own vocabulary to describe her approach to art-making. She

used the term “earth-body work” to describe her performance-

based actions in the landscape, which she documented on

Super 8 mm film and in 35 mm still photography. Such terms

recognized the hybrid nature of her practice after 1974—

her particular fusion of performance/body art and land/earth

art. Although Mendieta’s mature work was “performative”

(it was time-based and ephemeral), the artist did not consider

her art to be “performance” in a strict sense; she did not re-

quire an audience or public platform for the work to be activat-

ed or com pleted. Indeed, Mendieta was not drawn to the

improvisational energy of live performance, nor was she inter-

ested in the kind of audience interaction it afforded. She had

experimented with live performance as a graduate student at

the University of Iowa in the early 1970s and preferred to

execute her sculptural tableaux and actions in nature and in

private. She would doc ument these performance-based works

using film and would then share that documentation with

audiences.

The language Mendieta evolved to describe her art also

recognized the syncretic nature of her practice, one that freely

borrowed archetypal symbols from a variety of cultures as

well as her own mixed heritage as a Cuban American. The

artist was especially interested in Amerindian and Afro-Cuban

tra ditions and the indigenous cultures of Mexico, a country

she viewed as a surrogate homeland before her return to Cuba

in 1981 after eighteen years of exile. Mendieta felt strongly

that these cultural references and free appropriations placed

her work outside of both modern and emergent postmodern

tra ditions. She stated in 1984, “My works do not belong to

the modernist tradition. . . . Nor is [my art] akin to the commer-

cially historical-self-conscious assertions of what is called post -

mod ernism.”1 Despite Mendieta’s attempts to clarify her art

and identity, her work and contributions to late- twentieth- cen -

tury art were often misunderstood. The tragic circum stances

surrounding Mendieta’s untimely death at age thirty-six helped

perpetuate misperceptions of her work during the following

decades.

On September 8, 1985, Mendieta fell from a window

of an apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise

building in New York City that she shared with her husband,

the well-known American sculptor Carl Andre. In the years

following her death, Andre was tried for her murder and ulti-

mately acquitted, but the incident polarized the American

art world (and the New York art community in particular) for

well over a decade.2 The characterization of the artist in the

media as an aggressive feminist Latina who anticipated her

own death, through her body-oriented art and fascination with

“occult” rituals, reflected the myriad power imbalances then

operative in the art world—imbalances between men and

women, whites and minorities, “first-” and “third-world”

nations, established and emerging artists, privileged individuals

and the disenfranchised—which were especially pronounced

in the United States during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presi -

dency. The scandal around Mendieta’s death also erupted

during a period in contemporary culture dominated by discus-

sions about center versus periphery, early debates about multi-

culturalism, and growing awareness of an emerging global

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9

culture. Through the 1990s, aspects of Mendieta’s life and her

art were frequently made to serve the personal, political, and

social agendas of others—Andre’s defense attorneys, factions

of the New York art world, women’s groups and feminist coali-

tions, and art and cultural historians. In this charged critical

landscape, the integrity of Mendieta’s art, her evolution as an

artist, and her place within a broader context of art than that

defined under the rubrics of feminism and multiculturalism,

remained relatively unexplored.3

A complete picture of Mendieta’s production as an artist

was obscured until the late 1990s not only by an unfavorable

critical climate, but also by limited access to the full range of

Mendieta’s visual production because of the need to organize

her archive and preserve original photographic materials.

The sudden death of Mendieta, who had no formal gallery

representation, had left a devastated family uncertain of how to

manage her estate and legacy. The archive of her work com-

prised thousands of 35 mm slides, eighty-one Super 8 film

reels, hundreds of printed photographs, black-and-white nega-

tives, and contact sheets, as well as loose drawings, sketch-

books, and correspondence, in a state of relative disarray.

Mendieta was, after all, an emerging artist who was establish-

ing her career. Consumed by the trial of Carl Andre, the

Mendieta family did not begin to comprehensively assess the

contents of the archive until after Galerie Lelong in New York

assumed representation of the estate in 1991. At that point,

scholars began to investigate Mendieta’s legacy, and a growing

number of Mendieta’s works were made available to the public

through exhibition, publication, and the production of a

posthumous photographic edition of twenty images of Siluetas

made by the artist in Iowa and Mexico in the 1970s.4 For well

over a decade after Mendieta’s death, her art was known and

understood primarily through these photographic prints and

a selection of drawings and sculptures presented in a survey

exhibition organized by the New Museum of Contemporary

Art, New York, in 1988.5

It was not until the mid-1990s that works created at the

University of Iowa in the early 1970s by the artist, including

photographs and short films of live actions and studio per for -

mances, were seen. The avid interest of scholars researching

Mendieta, including the American art historian Julia P.

Herzberg and Spanish curator Gloria Moure, led Galerie

Lelong to provide greater access to the archive by organizing

the artist’s inventory of 35 mm slides in 1998–99. Complete

rolls of date-stamped slides made by the artist between

1971 and 1983 were gathered and put in chronological order,

revealing the artist’s working process and method of re cord ing,

selecting, and editing the image documentation of her time-

based actions in the studio, architectural settings, and in

nature. In early 2000, the Mendieta family and Lelong also

began to restore the eighty-one Super 8 films in the archive,

a process that is ongoing. This expanded archive informed

Moure’s pioneering survey of the artist’s work organized by

the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de

Compostela, Spain, in 1996; Herzberg’s 1998 doctoral disser -

tation on the artist; and my research for the 2004 touring

retrospective exhibition that I organized for the Hirshhorn

Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., which

included for the first time a significant presentation of

Mendieta’s independent film works.6


10

These projects and subsequent investigations led to

a reevaluation of Mendieta’s art over the past decade. Now

Mendieta’s contributions to the evolution of major interna-

tional movements in art of the 1970s, including feminist art,

conceptual photography, and land art, are more fully recog-

nized. Mendieta has joined the roster of performance-based

artists of her own generation—Marina Abramovic, Rebecca

Horn, Adrian Piper and Hannah Wilke—and that of her

immediate predecessors active in performance and environ -

mental art: Vito Acconci, Hans Breder, Joan Jonas, Richard

Long, Bruce Nauman, Hélio Oiticica, Dennis Oppenheim,

Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Robert Smithson,

among others. We have a deeper understanding of Mendieta’s

pio neering work as an intermedia artist, who did not see the

need for hierarchies of media or form in defining artistic

practice. Her actions, captured in photographs and films, her

sculptures, and her drawings all provide rich ways to experi-

ence her art.

Despite the growing recognition of Mendieta’s art over

the last ten years, a great deal of her production remains un -

seen. Hundreds of earth-body works produced between 1972

and 1985, which she documented in 35 mm slides, black-and-

white photography, and Super 8 film, have never been pub-

lished and remain unknown even to knowledgeable scholars

of contemporary art.7 These unseen Mendietas, in which the

artist is shown performing or inscribing her silhouette with an

array of pigments, gunpowder mixtures, and local rock, earth,

and plant materials, represent some of the most breathtaking

and ethereal works of her career. In addition to the slides,

there are hundreds of black-and-white photographic negatives

and contact sheets that document unknown sculptural works

produced in the early 1980s, along with sketchbooks and

proposals for public works, all unseen and many unrealized.

The fact that these works have remained hidden is not sur -

prising; in most instances, Mendieta had not resolved how to

present these works publicly. This is partly because she lacked

exhibition opportunities and financial resources to have prints

of her photographs made or public works realized. In most

cases, the unseen works presented here exist solely as visual

documentation—slides, photographic negatives, film stills

and reels, and drawings—and written project proposals.

Over the last decade, the artist’s representatives, as

well as curators including the author, have struggled with

how best to present this unseen aspect of Mendieta’s produc-

tion. Post humous selections of images have been made into

limit ed photographic editions by Galerie Lelong, a practice

with precedents in the field of photography. In the case of

Men dieta, however, such a practice, though done judiciously,

may be frowned upon by art historians and critics knowl -

edgeable about the work and concerned by a lack of clarity

regarding the degree to which the artist’s intent may be re -

flected in decisions about which images to print. A given

earth-body work, for example, may be documented by one

or two, or as many as thirty-eight related slides or negatives;

it remains unclear in many instances whether the artist, if

given the opportunity, would have chosen to print any of the

images. There are few notations on the slides or test prints in

the archive to verify the artist’s intentions. While there are

precedents in her art that might provide some guidance, such

decisions remain fraught with speculation and uncer tainty.


Documentation of an untitled work from the Silueta series, 1976 (La Ventosa, Mexico). 35 mm color slide. Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York11


12

It should be noted that in the few instances of Mendieta’s art

being posthumously published, the artist’s in ten tions are much

clearer. Notations on slides and evidence of dupli ca tion and

test printing indicate Mendieta’s aesthetic prefe rences and

choices. Still, the bulk of Mendieta’s experi menta tion and pro -

duction has remained unseen because of these dilemmas.

This volume is thus an earnest attempt by the author

to bring to light the rich body of Mendieta’s unseen works in

a manner that respects the integrity of the artist’s practice.

Drawn from the full extent of her archive, the images pre -

sented here were filmed or photographed by Mendieta unless

otherwise indicated.8 My aim is to make available more of

the artist’s prolific production and reveal her tremendous spirit

of experimentation and demanding and rigorous methods.

Mendieta’s careful planning and execution of her pieces, her

relationship to the locations in which she executed them, and

the manner in which she composed and documented her

actions in nature can really only be understood by exploring

the full extent of the archive, which includes many views of

works in progress and field notations. Hundreds of completely

unknown images are reproduced in this book as well as pre -

viously unpublished views of more familiar pieces, in cluding

Rape Scene and People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, both 1973

(pages 55–59 and 47–53), which deepen our understanding of

these unsettling sculptural tableaux and the artist’s intentions

in creating them.

The selection of more than two hundred unseen works

presented here is organized in seven thematic groupings, each

arranged in a roughly chronological sequence. “Intermedia”

surveys Mendieta’s experiments with live performance as a grad-

uate student in the early 1970s. It considers her relationship

to Intermedia, an artistic movement of the 1960s and early

1970s to which the artist was introduced through the Univer -

sity of Iowa’s Intermedia Department and Center for New Per -

forming Arts, which had recently been founded by the artist’s

mentor and partner Hans Breder, together with other univer -

sity colleagues.9 There Mendieta experimented with a variety

of performance-based practices before her own earth-body art

took form. “The Lure of Mexico” explores the importance of

Mexico in the development of Mendieta’s signature Silueta

series, made between 1973 and 1981, and includes works made

in Mexico, Iowa, upstate New York, and Cuba. “Rituals of

Rebirth” considers the significance of funerary themes in the

evolution of Mendieta’s art and traces the artist’s fascination

with burial customs across cultures and particularly in the

Valley of Oaxaca , which she frequented in summer during the

1970s. “Purifying Flame” examines the artist’s experiments

with fire and gunpowder between 1976 and 1981, when she

repeatedly exploded the outline of her silhouette and more

generalized female goddess forms in a variety of locations in

nature across the country. “Islands” considers Mendieta’s use

of the island as a metaphor for her own body as well as her

experience of exile from Cuba. “Ancestral Return” traces the

evolution of Mendieta’s practice after the culmination of her

Silueta series in 1981 and her embrace in subsequent works

of more universal themes related to cultural history and ances-

try. “In the Public Realm” presents documentation of her

public art projects from 1978 to 1985, all for locations in the

United States. It includes project proposals, renderings, and

maquettes for public works, some never realized. This final

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Creek #2, 1974 (San Felipe, Mexico).

Still from Super 8 color silent film

13

chapter suggests Mendieta’s potential evolution as an artist

had she lived beyond her thirty-six years.

The sketchbook pages reproduced in this book show

how Mendieta translated her ideas and research into realized

works of art. They confirm that Mendieta’s works were gener-

ally not spontaneous actions, but well-planned and thought -

fully executed endeavors. The selection of photographs shows

that Mendieta developed variations on her Siluetas and often

returned, year after year, to favorite work sites, such as Old

Man’s Creek in Iowa City and the “Dead Tree Area,” a wildlife

pre serve in Amana, Iowa. The chronology of Mendieta’s life

and career on the following pages further underscores the

importance of the artist’s working sites and how after 1978

she made use of a greater variety of natural locations. As an

artist who did not have a conventional studio in which to

work for most of her career, she relied heavily on opportunities

to travel to rural environments where she could execute her

actions and experiments in nature. After her relocation to

New York City in January of 1978, Mendieta made works in

upstate New York, New Mexico, Indiana, Massachusetts,

Canada, Cuba, and Colombia. She accepted a variety of visit -

ing artist opportu nities and teaching and exhibition engage-

ments each year that afforded her work sites outside New

York City, and in fall 1983 she moved to Rome to take up a

resdency at the American Academy. There Mendieta radically

shifted her practice, creating studio-based work, including

a series of sculptures and numerous drawings, in an effort to

make more permanent kinds of art. She also prepared project

proposals, a selection of which are reproduced for the first

time in the final chapter of this book.

It is important to reiterate that the unseen works pre-

sented here were not chosen by the artist, but by an individual

curator, myself. The choice, however, is informed by more

than five years of extensive research, intimate knowledge of the

artist’s archive, and approximately one hundred interviews

with Mendieta’s family, artist-peers, curators, and friends. My

aim is simply to reveal the raw originality of one of the most

inventive and iconoclastic artists of the late twentieth century.

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1948 Ana Maria Mendieta is born November 18 in Havana,

Cuba.10

1959 President Fulgencio Batista flees Cuba for the United

States as revolutionary Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his

followers march triumphantly into Havana on January 8.

1960 Castro begins to nationalize U.S.-owned oil refineries,

sugar mills, and utilities.

1961 Castro declares his government “socialist” and later

“Marxist-Leninist.” U.S. breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba

in January and a mass exodus of 215,000 Cubans begins.

Ana’s father Ignacio, an early Castro supporter, engages in

counterrevolutionary activities when asked to renounce his

Catholic faith and join the Communist party. Ignacio discov-

ers Ana, age 12, and Raquelín, age 15, also participating

in clandestine efforts. Fearing for their safety, he sends his

daughters to the U.S. on September 11 as part of Oper ation

Pedro Pan, a program facilitated by the Catholic Diocese of

Miami that granted visa waivers to unaccom pa nied Cuban

minors seeking political asylum in the U.S. Three weeks after

their arrival in Miami, Ana and Raquelín are placed in a

group home in Dubuque, Iowa, until foster care is arranged.

1962 President John F. Kennedy declares an embargo on trade

with Cuba that remains in place to this day. Ana resides in

three foster homes and one boarding school until her living

situation stabilizes.

1965 Ana’s father Ignacio is arrested in January for allegedly

collabo rating with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency prior

to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He is sentenced to twenty years’

im prisonment in Cuba. Ana graduates from Regis High

School and enrolls in Briar Cliff College, Sioux City, Iowa.

1966 On January 29 Ana’s mother Raquel and younger

brother Ignacio leave Cuba on a Freedom Flight. They settle

in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, near Ana and Raquelín, whose father

remains in prison.

1967 Mendieta transfers to the University of Iowa, Iowa

City, and studies the art of primitive and indigenous cultures

during the fall semester.

1969 Mendieta begins graduate studies in painting at the

University of Iowa and meets artist Hans Breder, a professor

of art at the University with whom she develops a profes sion -

al and romantic partnership that lasts through the summer

of 1980.

14

CHRONOLOGY

Ana Mendieta at the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological

Zone, outside Mexico City, 1971


15

Mexico City

Mexico

City of Oaxaca

Puebla

Chiapas

Veracruz

Gulf of Tehuantepec

Salina CruzLa Ventosa

Pacific Ocean

Zaachila

San Felipe

El Tule

Dainzú

Teotitlan del Valle

Yagul Mitla

Tlacolula

Cuilapán de Guerrero

Monte Alban

Guerrero

Oaxaca

Pacific Ocean

United States of America

Gulf of Mexico


16

1970 Breder establishes the Intermedia Program as a formal

degree program at the University of Iowa and co-founds the

Center for New Performing Arts (CNPA) there. Mendieta

models for Breder and participates in Robert Wilson’s

CNPA workshops in body movement. She performs in

Wilson’s productions of Deafman Glance and Handbill at

the University.

1971 Mendieta travels to Mexico for the first time and does

field research in archaeology as summer coursework for the

University of Iowa.

1972 Mendieta completes her first MFA, in painting, but gives

up painting to concentrate on mixed media and performance.

She makes Grass on Woman (page 77), her first earth-body

work, in which she lies face down on a green lawn and appears

to fuse into the natural landscape. She presents Death of a

Chicken (pages 43–45), her first perfor mance-based work, at

the Intermedia studio, holding the flailing carcass of a de -

capitated chicken as the blood splatters across her body.

1973 Using blood increasingly in her work, Mendieta creates

pieces about violence against women, a series precipitated

by the rape and murder of a University of Iowa student, Sarah

Ann Otten. Mendieta travels to Mexico in the summer with

Breder and a group of his Intermedia students and executes

her first Siluetas in the archaeological zone of Yagul, 20 miles

outside Oaxaca.

1974 Returning to Mexico with Breder, Mendieta makes

Siluetas at Yagul and the church complex at Cuilapán de Guer-

rero, also outside Oaxaca. Traveling with Breder’s students to

the fishing village of La Ventosa in Salina Cruz, she films Bird

Run and Ocean Bird Washup (pages 96–97).

1975 After creating Siluetas at Old Man’s Creek, Mendieta

returns with Breder to Oaxaca and La Ventosa in the summer.

She begins to work with fire in the fall with the assistance of

University of Iowa professor Julius Schmidt, who advises her

about pyrotechnics.

1976 Mendieta travels with Breder to Europe and performs

Blood and Feathers (pages 19–20) there in the spring. In the

summer she returns to Mexico with Breder and creates a

number of Siluetas using natural materials found at La Ven-

tosa. She commissions a local fireworks maker in Oaxaca to

execute her silhouette with fireworks, which are ignited one

evening as the sun sets (page 152). In Iowa in the fall, she

initiates the Tree of Life series.

1977 At the beginning of the year, Mendieta creates several

Siluetas in snow and ice. Increasingly fascinated by goddess

imagery and funerary themes, she commences the Fetish and

Ixchell series at Old Man’s Creek, and in the summer also

creates Tumbas (tombs) there (pages 130–35). She con tinues

to experiment with pyrotechnics, burning figures into the

ground, tree trunks, and grass. At the end of the year, she

again works in ice and snow.

1978 Mendieta relocates to New York City in the hope of

developing her career as an artist. She does a public perform-

ance of Body Tracks at Franklin Furnace and attempts to create

Siluetas within a museum by making a natural tableau, using

grasses, branches, and plant material, at the College of Old

Westbury. She makes Siluetas in the upstate New York land-

scape, and in summer travels to Iowa and makes Siluetas using

natural materials, algae, and fertilizer, as well as volcanic

mounds fired with gunpowder.


17

1979 Mendieta is reunited with her father Ignacio after eight -

een years of separation and begins to pursue opportunities to

travel to Cuba through various cultural organizations in New

York. She returns to Iowa in the summer and creates variations

on the Volcano and Tree of Life series. She teaches at the

College of Old Westbury, New York, in the fall as an adjunct

professor and makes works in upstate New York. She becomes

a member of the women's gallery A.I.R. On November 12,

during her first solo exhibition there, she meets American

minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.

1980 In January Mendieta returns to Cuba, traveling under

the auspices of the Círculo de Cultura Cubana, an organiza-

tion founded by Cuban exiles to promote cultural exchange

and relations between Cuba and the U.S. In the spring semes-

ter she teaches at the College of Old Westbury, New York.

In April she creates several outdoor works as a visiting artist at

Kean College, New Jersey. She creates a gunpowder piece in

the Harlem Meer in Central Park for the group exhibition

Art Across the Park. In the summer she returns to Oaxaca and

La Ventosa with Breder, films gunpowder works at San Felipe,

and carves figures into earthen embankments. Her ro man tic

involvement with Breder ends after the trip, and her relation-

ship with Andre deepens.

1981 Mendieta is a visiting artist at the School of the Art Insti-

tute of Chicago. She makes gunpowder works in the sand

dunes on the border between Indiana and Illinois. In March

she creates a Silueta in a Georgetown cemetery for the Wash-

ington Project for the Arts (page 111) and in May she makes

one at La Cuarta Bienal de Medellín, Colombia. Returning to

Cuba in January and July, she makes carved and painted works

Ciudad deLa Habana

La Habana

Jaruco

Varadero

Pinar del Río

Isla de laJuventud

Cardenas

The Bahamas

Cayman Islands

Jamaica

MatanzasVillaClara

CienfuegosSancti Spíritus

Ciego deÁvila

Camagüey Las Tunas

Granma

Santiagode Cuba

Holguín

Guantánamo


18

in limestone rock in Varadero and Jaruco, respectively. In Sep -

tember she is a visiting artist at Alfred State University, New

York, and makes a goddess figure outdoors at a nearby hill site.

In the fall she travels to Miami and creates Ceiba Fetish (pages

288–89) and Ochún as a guest of the Frances Wolfson Gallery,

Miami-Dade Community College. She begins to make draw-

ings in her apartment in New York.

1982 As a guest of Real Artways and the Hartford Art School,

Mendieta makes Arbitra, a female witness figure carved and

burned into a seven-foot-tall tree trunk (pages 285–87).

She works in a Fogels ville, Pennsylvania, rock quarry through

the assistance of businessman Arthur Rodale. In Scarborough,

Ontario, outside Toronto, she carves Labyrinth of Venus into

the rocky side of a cliff overlooking Lake Ontario. She

begins to make leaf drawings and commences a book project

in the fall to document the Rupestrian sculptures made in

Cuba at Jaruco National Park. In October she creates four

inde pendent sculptures of moss, plants, and stone for a solo

exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, Miami Beach. She

exhibits out door mud coil sculptures at the University of

New Mexico, Albuquerque, as a guest of the University Art

Museum.

1983 Mendieta creates outdoor spiral figures in sand on Cape

Cod and Long Island beaches. She makes a series of sand and

stone works in Miami, and spends time in the summer with

her parents in Iowa, where she makes a series of mud coil

works near Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center. She is awarded

the Rome Prize, which gives her a one-year studio residency

at the American Academy in Rome, which begins in October

1984. Mendieta creates a series of low-relief floor sculptures

made of sand and earth mixed with binder, which she ex hib -

its at Galleria Primo Piano in Rome. As a visiting artist at the

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, she

creates Furrows (page 283), an undulating outdoor earth work

on the lawn of the RISD Museum of Art. She works with

an Italian craftsman outside Rome to create freestanding

totemic sculptures of burned and carved wood. Extending her

stay in Rome beyond her residency, she rents a studio and

apartment on the Academy grounds. She travels exten sively

in Europe with Carl Andre and visits Cerveteri, Pompeii, and

Hadrian’s Villa, in Italy, and prehistoric sites in Malta

and at Newgrange, Ireland, which serve as potent inspiration

for the development of large-scale artworks. She participates

in Land Marks: New Site Proposals by Twenty-two Original

Pioneers of Environmental Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-

Hudson, New York, with Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Mary

Miss, and Robert Stackhouse; she pro poses La Maja de Yerba

(pages 292–93).

1985 Mendieta marries Carl Andre on January 17 in a private

ceremony in Rome. She develops a commission for the Mac -

Arthur Park Public Art Program for the Otis Art Institute

of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, that includes seven

outdoor totemic sculptures titled La Jungla. She returns to

New York City in August. On Sep tember 8 she falls to her

death from a window of the thirty-fourth-floor apartment

on Mercer Street that she shared with Andre.

1989 The first retrospective exhibition of Mendieta’s work

opens in November at the New Museum of Contemporary

Art, New York, and travels to LACE, Los Angeles, and the

Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, through 1990.


19

1993 Members of the Women’s Action Coalition protest the

absence of women artists in the opening show of the Solomon

R. Guggenheim Museum’s new SoHo branch (now closed)

with signs that read, “Where Is Ana Mendieta?”

1996 A retrospective organized by the Centro Galego de Arte

Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, opens and

travels to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Fun-

dació Tápies, Barcelona, through 1997.

2004 A retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and

Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, opens in June at

the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and travels

to the Hirshhorn Museum, the Des Moines Art Center, and

the Miami Art Museum through early 2006.

Blood and Feathers, No. 2, 1974 (Old Man's Creek,

Sharon Center, Iowa). Still from Super 8 color silent film


20


INTERMEDIA

In the early 1970s, Ana Mendieta experimented with aspects of

performance art before evolving the concept of “earth-body

works” and the signature Silueta series in which she integrated

her body (or its impression) with the land. As a student at

the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Mendieta was introduced

to conceptual art and experimental new media such as video.

In 1971, before completing a degree in painting, she made a

decisive move away from conventional easel painting to per-

formance. This shift was fueled by her deepening engagement

with the University’s new Intermedia program and its recently

opened Center for New Performing Arts, both founded in the

late 1960s by the German-born artist Hans Breder, a pro fes -

sor at the University who would become Mendieta’s mentor

and lover throughout the 1970s.

Breder’s Intermedia program fostered cross-disciplinary

collaboration among students, faculty, visiting artists, and

schol ars in a workshop setting modeled on the University’s ac -

claimed Writer’s Workshop. In the 1970s the Intermedia pro -

gram was one of the most progressive university-based arts

pro grams of its kind in the country. Breder introduced Mendi-

eta and other notable students, including Charles Ray and

Sandy Skoglund, to new forms of body art (later called per-

formance art), Viennese Actionism, and kinetic, street, air, and

land art. Between 1968 and 1978, Breder brought an impres-

sive array of visiting artists and critics to Iowa City, including

Robert Wilson, Vito Acconci, Willoughby Sharp, Ted Victoria,

Scott Burton, Mary Beth Edelson, and Lucy Lippard. Many

were invited to create performances at the University’s Center

21

Documentation of an untitled work, 1972 (Intermedia

studio, University of Iowa). 35 mm color slide

Opposite: Documentation of Blood and Feathers, 1974 (Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa). Lifetime color photograph

from 35 mm color slide, 10 x 8 in. Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust


22

for New Performing Arts. Between 1969 and 1971, Mendieta

modeled for Breder, observed the activities of the Intermedia

workshop, and sometimes performed for workshop partici-

pants. She studied body movement with the theatrical director

Robert Wilson and in 1971 appeared in two of Wilson’s pro-

ductions. In 1972 Mendieta enrolled in the Intermedia program

and began to document her own private actions in 35 mm

slides and Super 8 films (each reel was approximately three

minutes long). Breder urged his students to develop a three-step

working pro cess: concept development, execution, and docu-

mentation. Mendieta followed this approach methodically

through out her career.

In Mendieta’s experimental works made between 1972

and 1974, she sculpts her hair with shampoo, reshapes her

phys iognomy with makeup and wigs, isolates or frames facial

features through a hole in a door, projects anatomical slides

onto her body, appears to sweat blood, secretes milk from a

breast, and paints and writes with blood on the wall of the

Intermedia studio. These experiments reveal her familiarity

with the works of pioneering performance artists Vito Acconci,

Bruce Nauman, Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppen-

heim, and the Viennese Actionists, as well as Breder’s own

performance-based works using mirrors and live models, which

he posed in the landscape. In Mirage, 1974 (pages 74–75), an

action unusual in being docu mented solely on Super 8 film.

Mendieta is seen in a mirror sitting naked in the grass and

gazing at her reflection before cutting through a prosthetic

belly filled with white feathers.

While most of these actions were executed privately,

Mendieta performed several live actions in the Intermedia

workshop before an audience of students and faculty. Fascinat-

ed by Marcel Duchamp’s notorious gender transformations,

she partnered twice with Iowa writer Morty Sklar to create

performances in which she methodically transferred the hair

from Sklar’s beard to her face. She executed a similar solo per -

formance, not previously published, using flowers that she

fanned in front of her face (pages 30–31). To create Feathers on

Woman, 1972, Mendieta worked with a fellow student, onto

whose body she glued white feathers; this “feather woman”

appeared in one of Breder’s productions at the Center for New

Performing Arts. While photographs of her (including three

black-and-white photos printed by Mendieta) are well-known,

the un published slides reproduced here (pages 34–41) reveal

additional views of the striking feathered figure. Some per-

formances, including the well-known Body Tracks, Blood and

Feathers, and Death of a Chicken, were executed on several

occasions and in different locations. The artist’s slide and film

archive reveal additional views of these events as well as pre -

viously unknown experiments using blood, including Blood

Sign #1 (pages 71–73) and Bloodwriting (pages 66–69).

Documentation of Facial

Cosmetic Variations, 1972

(Iowa). 4 of 9 35 mm color

slides


23

As Mendieta continued to evolve her practice through-

out the early 1970s, she moved from live performance to

creating sculptural tableaux. These works suggested an absent

body’s presence and would often engage passersby as un -

witting participants. In People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, 1973

(pages 47–53), Mendieta created a mock scene of violence near

her apartment in Iowa City, with blood that seemed to seep

out from under a door and bloody animal parts on the side-

walk. She surreptitiously photographed the various reactions of

passersby, from obliviousness to dismay. The piece concludes

when a workman appears four slides from the end, observes

the mess, and dutifully proceeds to remove it. Mendieta shot

an entire roll of film to document the action; the full slide

sequence is published here for the first time. A handful of un -

seen images re lated to the artist’s well-known Rape Scene (also

described by the artist as Rape Tableau), 1973, also survive

in the artist’s archive. For this action, inspired by a brutal rape

murder on the University of Iowa campus, Mendieta invited

Intermedia work shop participants to visit her apartment at a

prearranged time. As faculty and students arrived, they discov-

ered her apart ment door ajar. Inside the artist was posed silently,

doubled over a table in a pool of blood with implements of

violence scattered about (pages 55–59).

The archive contains documentation of related actions,

in which she left suitcases sullied with bloody animal parts

on campus or posed half-naked in the brush to suggest a rape

in Rape Performance, 1973. It is likely that most of those who

encountered Mendieta’s tableaux around campus were un -

aware that they were works of art, and the discovery could be

quite unsettling. Bloody Mattresses, 1973 (pages 60–61), was

reported by an Intermedia student to his class. He described

the horrific scene he found in an abandoned farmhouse near

campus only to learn that he had stumbled upon Mendieta’s

latest tableau. The artist’s intent in creating these temporary

art works outside the traditional gallery or museum was to

incite public re action and conversation about violence, which,

she felt, was often sublimated in our society.

Examining Mendieta’s known and unknown perfor -

mances, actions, and tableaux allows us a deeper understanding

of her development and working methods as an artist. We see

her experiment with different kinds of performative practices

and are able to track key decisions in which she chooses to em -

brace or discard particular conventions of performance. During

these critical formative years, Mendieta defines a more distanced

relationship to her audience and underscores the im port ance

of the document—whether short films or still photo graphs—

as a medium for witnessing her art.

Documentation of Rape Performance,

1973 (Iowa). 35 mm color slide


UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Olga Viso

Unseen Mendieta

Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, 304 Seiten, 24,0x30,0320 farbige Abbildungen, 30 s/w AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-3966-5

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: August 2008

Unseen Mendieta zeigt eine umfangreiche Auswahl bisher unveröffentlichter Werke derfrüh verstorbenen Perfomance-Künstlerin Ana Mendieta. Sie wurde in den 70er Jahren vorallem durch ihre Silueta-Serie berühmt – Arbeiten, bei denen sie mit ihrem eigenen Körperoder dessen Silhouette eine vergängliche Synthese mit der Natur zelebrierte. UmfassendeFotostrecken und begleitende Essays dokumentieren sowohl die Entstehungsprozesse ihrerWerke als auch deren schöpferische und spirituelle Spannweite im Kontext ihrer Zeit.

http://www.randomhouse.de/book/edition.jsp?edi=316335

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rl-001-076 Mendieta Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:08 Uhr ... · Ana Mendieta produced some of the most compelling images of body- and identity-oriented art of the 1970s. ... well