REGARDING ANA Roselee Goldberg Tania Bruguera's First Performance in 1986 Was a Reconstruction of Ana Mendieta's Performance

REGARDING ANA RoseLee Goldberg Tania Bruguera’s first performance in 1986 was a reconstruction of Ana Mendieta’s performance “Blood Trace,” which the Cuban-born artist Mendieta first performed in Iowa in 1974. Dipping her forearms into a bucket of pig’s blood, Mendieta raised both hands above her head and then dragged them to the floor, leaving a V-shaped stain on the wall. Bruguera would perform this same work at the Fototeca de Cuba, in Havana, in front of an audience of approximately 70 artists and student friends at the opening of the exhibition “No por mucho madrugar amanece mas temprano.” For Bruguera, who at 18 years old had just graduated from La Academia de Artes de San Alejandro in Havana, it was her way, she explained, of “bringing Ana Mendieta back to Cuba.” Bruguera would re-perform several of Mendieta’s performances over the next decade, using later an exhibition catalog from Mendieta’s retrospective at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1987 as a guide. Bruguera’s re-performances of another artist’s works were remarkable for their entirely new approach to performance history. Not only was Bruguera paying homage to an artist with whom she strongly identified, but her systematic reconstruction of each work gave Bruguera insight into the timing and emotional content as well as the iconographic motifs of Mendieta’s work. Such re-enactment of the older artist’s work would prove to be a rich and productive reference for Bruguera’s own performances. It also would shape Bruguera’s views on performance documentation, on curating performance exhibitions in a museum context, and on how one might bring history back to life. “Ana Mendieta: Earth Body,” an exhibition curated by Olga M. Viso and presented at the Whitney Museum in summer 2004, was the starting point for the conversation that follows. 8 INTERVIEW RoseLee Goldberg: Let’s begin with your first impressions of the Ana Mendieta exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Tania Bruguera: It was wonder- ful and very moving to see Ana Mendieta’s work at the Whitney. It was a very comprehensive show, with a broad cross section of ma- terial, which was pretty amazing. I liked seeing the many images of performances that have been talk- ed about frequently, but haven’t been seen so much. In particular, the work in which she recreated a rape scene that had taken place on campus when she was a student, (Untitled Rape Scene, 1973) and the presentation of groups of slides of a street work that she had done (Untitled, People Looking at Blood, 1973). These were displayed in vitrines along with other docu- ments related to the work. I was told that Ana had set up those pieces [to be photographed] as if they were crime scenes, or mystery nov- els, and it’s clear from the way ther were shot that they have a specific hyperrealistic narrative. RG: Do you think she had intend- ed the slides to be exhibited in this way? TB: I don’t know. The way the slides were displayed felt so contemporary, those early pieces were so urban, so contemporary, while the rest of the show was beautiful but more … not old but … 9 RG: You mean it felt dated? TB: Yes, dated. Maybe because I’m too close to her pieces and know them by heart, I am not so sensitive to them anymore. But it was very nice to find these moments in the show that were less familiar. To find pieces that were like little doors to other narratives, that formed a link with later works, like that of Sophie Calle. I also really liked “Rupestrian Sculptures,” 1981, [Mendieta carved anthropomorphic shapes into limestone grottoes in Cuba], because of the way they give a different per- spective to Land Art. In the ’70s, Land Art was “God-sized.” It was about not being defeated by the scale of nature. It also was very masculine. I really enjoyed how Ana turned the idea of Land Art upside down. In her rock and silhouette pieces, she made Land Art into a “micro” system. She reduced it into personal, internal “explosions” [indenta- tions of her body in the land], which became part of nature. She was the measurement by which to see the universe. At the same time, she was connecting Land Art more directly with its mystical, historical and cultural aspects. I mean, most Land Art is mystical in a way, but she put the mystical aspect in a cultural context –the Taínos– in a specific place –Cuba– and a specific heritage –her own–. This was a very nice subversion. She captured not only a kind of dialogue with nature, but the pow- er of nature itself, and she showed that these were site-specific pieces. RG: It’s interesting how you respond to Mendieta’s narratives. TB: I think she worked in two different ways with narrative. In the rape piece, or in the other work, when she poured blood on the ground outside her house and took pictures of people step- ping over it seemingly quite unconcerned (Untitled, People Looking at Blood, 1973), she was creating situations that would provoke a strong response in the viewer, who was an element of the piece itself. The presentation, the strategy, is hyperrealistic, a hyperrealism that doesn’t try to represent reality but to be inserted in it. Also, the documentation looks more like a po- lice report than an artistic shot. I really liked that. That was one form of “narrative.” The other is more anthropological, cultural, about the heritage of ritual and custom. I find those pieces in which she sets the viewer up for a response more interesting. It is all about the viewer’s experience. 10 RG: What about the use of film, which was strongly featured in this exhibition? Several of Mendieta’s more than 70 films were transferred to video, and projected almost life size, alongside drawings or still photographs from performances. TB: I think the way they installed the films was very success- ful. I even liked the room where three different films, all related but from separate pieces, were playing at the same time. But at one point the exhibition became too clean for my taste. Some pieces looked two-dimensional, like the wood pieces (Untitled, Totem Grove Series, 1984), as though they were made for galleries. The energy, the experience was lost. It was transformed into objects. But that’s the way of art history, it’s a vacuum cleaner. RG: Which are the key pieces for you, since you actually be- gan your performances in 1986 by reconstructing Mendieta’s early pieces? TB: Almost all of them, at different times, have been impor- tant for me, and I reconstructed most of them, at least the ones that were available at the time through documentation mainly from the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s retrospective catalog from 1987. I did all the silhouette pieces that were on the floor at the Whitney. I re-did all of the photos and I reproduced the performance in which she traces blood with her hands on the wall. And I invented others. Then I destroyed them all. I don’t have much documentation, because the idea of the piece was not about the object but about my gesture. I do have some photos of the last one, which I made as a kind of farewell. It was a piece in which I combined a lot of her ele- ments and a lot of my own. RG: Did you do them in her name? TB: Yes, I used her name and titles but changed the date. They were dated after the year I reconstructed them, like 1986 or 1996. It was an attempt to try to make her live again, in a way. RG: To bring her back to life? 11 TB: Yes, to bring her back to life through her work. RG: You once told me that remaking her work was a way of bringing her back to Havana. TB: Yes, to Cuban culture. At the beginning it was a kind of homage to her, a very emotional homage of trying to actually connect with her, through her work. But then it became something else, more like I was trying to avoid the fact that she was dead, a form of denial probably. And then it became a political gesture about the people who left Cuba, and about trying to put Ana into Cuban art history. Of course Ana did that herself, and she was part of Cuban art history by reputation, but I wanted to make it a fact. I decided to finish the project the day two art history students from the University of Havana came to me because they were writing a thesis about Ana’s in- fluence in Cuba. Then my work was done. This is what I wanted, for people to acknowledge her significance. I think for me, reproducing her work was not so much about individual pieces but more a feeling about the work in general. I wasn’t keen on “nationalism,” but rather with a connection to culture as a continuity. And i asked myself how can you do something that is Cuban at its core, but at the same time, belongs to others without being exotic? RG: How is Mendieta viewed in Cuba in 2005? TB: Now she is an inevitable reference and everybody acknowledges her.

Load more