Ana Mendieta, the Body Artist

 

 "The certainty of destruction was an essential dimension of Mendieta’s art. The outline of a body that Mendieta stamped into river mud would inevitably be eroded by weather and water; the feathers that she stuck to her skin could disperse as she ran naked along a beach. Like all art that incorporates elements of performance and temporality, Mendieta’s is not always easy to access or appreciate, and the films she made documenting her work—the digitization of which has been painstakingly overseen by her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who now heads the Ana Mendieta estate—can’t fully capture the moments of execution. There are few artists whose pieces more keenly make a viewer wish that aroma could be conveyed by digital reproduction: the vegetal scent of mud, the heady perfume of flowers, the iron reek of blood. Much of Mendieta’s work has a striking visual effect at its core: in “Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints),” a series from the early seventies, photographs capture her through a sheet of glass onto which she has pressed her face and body, smearing her nose or cheek or mouth into a distorted fleshy mass—a gesture that the British artist Jenny Saville would echo some twenty years later, in her collaborations with the photographer Glen Luchford. Other Mendieta works are more private, even secretive, including the “Rupestrian Sculptures,” made in the early eighties, in which Mendieta carved figures into the walls of limestone grottoes in Cuba. Mendieta was active at a time when female artists, especially female artists of color, had so much less currency than their male counterparts that being overlooked, however much it was resented, offered its own kind of freedom. It’s impossible to view Mendieta’s output and not think about the physical stamina and cultural daring that she must have had—not only to make art from her exposed body but also to hide herself away and make work that might only ever please or satisfy herself."

 READ ARTICLE BY REBECCA MEAD