rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:08 Uhr Seite 1 rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:08 Uhr Seite 2 2 rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:09 Uhr Seite 3 UNSEEN MENDIETA THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF ANA MENDIETA OLGA VISO PRESTEL MUNICH BERLIN LONDON NEW YORK rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:09 Uhr Seite 4 Cover: Documentation of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 x111⁄4 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, 2008 All photographs of works by Ana Mendieta are courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York, unless otherwise indicated. Prestel Verlag, Königinstrasse 9, D-80539 Munich Tel. +49 (89) 242908-300, Fax +49 (89) 242908-335 Prestel Publishing Ltd. 4, Bloomsbury Place, London WC1A 2QA Tel. +44 (020) 7323-5004, Fax +44 (020) 7636-8004 Prestel Publishing, 900 Broadway, Suite 603, New York, N.Y. 10003 Tel. +1 (212) 995-2720, Fax +1 (212) 995-2733 www.prestel.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2008932512 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Deutsche Bibliothek holds a record of this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographical data can be found under: http://dnb.dde.de Prestel books are available worldwide. Please contact your nearest bookseller or one of the above addresses for information concerning your local distributor. Editorial direction: Christopher Lyon Design, layout, and typesetting: Holzwarth Design Origination: ReproLine Mediateam Production: Simone Zeeb Printed and bound by Passavia Druckservice GmbH Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-3-7913-3966-5 005_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 21.07.2008 13:18 Uhr Seite 1 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 rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:09 Uhr Seite 6 rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:09 Uhr Seite 7 BEYOND THE VISIBLE 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 Body Tracks, 1974 (Intermedia Studio, University of Iowa). Lifetime color photograph from 35 mm color slide, resisted being labeled Hispanic, Latina, or feminist, or de- 10 x 8 in. Collection Igor da Costa 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. Opposite: Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks), 1982. Blood and tempera paint on paper; one of three works, each 38 x 50 in. 7 Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., Rose Purchase Fund 007-023_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 21.07.2008 13:21 Uhr Seite 8 Resisting the terminology that she felt the art world her work outside of both modern and emergent postmodern establishment tried to impose on her, Mendieta developed her tra ditions. She stated in 1984, “My works do not belong to own vocabulary to describe her approach to art-making. She the modernist tradition. ...Nor is [my art] akin to the commer- used the term “earth-body work” to describe her performance- cially historical-self-conscious assertions of what is called post - based actions in the landscape, which she documented on mod ernism.”1 Despite Mendieta’s attempts to clarify her art Super 8 mm film and in 35 mm still photography. Such terms and identity, her work and contributions to late- twentieth- cen - recognized the hybrid nature of her practice after 1974— tury art were often misunderstood. The tragic circum stances her particular fusion of performance/body art and land/earth surrounding Mendieta’s untimely death at age thirty-six helped art. Although Mendieta’s mature work was “performative” perpetuate misperceptions of her work during the following (it was time-based and ephemeral), the artist did not consider decades. her art to be “performance” in a strict sense; she did not re- On September 8, 1985, Mendieta fell from a window quire an audience or public platform for the work to be activat- of an apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise ed or completed. Indeed, Mendieta was not drawn to the building in New York City that she shared with her husband, improvisational energy of live performance, nor was she inter- the well-known American sculptor Carl Andre. In the years ested in the kind of audience interaction it afforded. She had following her death, Andre was tried for her murder and ulti- experimented with live performance as a graduate student at mately acquitted, but the incident polarized the American the University of Iowa in the early 1970s and preferred to art world (and the New York art community in particular) for execute her sculptural tableaux and actions in nature and in well over a decade.2 The characterization of the artist in the private. She would doc ument these performance-based works media as an aggressive feminist Latina who anticipated her using film and would then share that documentation with own death, through her body-oriented art and fascination with audiences. “occult” rituals, reflected the myriad power imbalances then The language Mendieta evolved to describe her art also operative in the art world—imbalances between men and recognized the syncretic nature of her practice, one that freely women, whites and minorities, “first-” and “third-world” borrowed archetypal symbols from a variety of cultures as nations, established and emerging artists, privileged individuals well as her own mixed heritage as a Cuban American. The and the disenfranchised—which were especially pronounced artist was especially interested in Amerindian and Afro-Cuban in the United States during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presi - tra ditions and the indigenous cultures of Mexico, a country dency. The scandal around Mendieta’s death also erupted she viewed as a surrogate homeland before her return to Cuba during a period in contemporary culture dominated by discus- in 1981 after eighteen years of exile. Mendieta felt strongly sions about center versus periphery, early debates about multi- that these cultural references and free appropriations placed culturalism, and growing awareness of an emerging global 8 rl-001-076_Mendieta_Lay.qxd:Layout 1 15.07.2008 16:09 Uhr Seite 9 culture. Through the 1990s, aspects of Mendieta’s life and her made by the artist in Iowa and Mexico in the 1970s.4 For well art were frequently made to serve the personal, political, and over a decade after Mendieta’s death, her art was known and social agendas of others—Andre’s defense attorneys, factions understood primarily through these photographic prints and of the New York art world, women’s groups and feminist coali- a selection of drawings and sculptures presented in a survey tions, and art and cultural historians. In this charged critical exhibition organized by the New Museum of Contemporary landscape, the integrity of Mendieta’s art, her evolution as an Art, New York, in 1988.5 artist, and her place within a broader context of art than that It was not until the mid-1990s that works created at the defined under the rubrics of feminism and multiculturalism, University of Iowa in the early 1970s by the artist, including remained relatively unexplored.3 photographs and short films of live actions and studio perfor - A complete picture of Mendieta’s production as an artist mances, were seen. The avid interest of scholars researching was obscured until the late 1990s not only by an unfavorable Mendieta, including the American art historian Julia P. critical climate, but also by limited access to the full range of Herzberg and Spanish curator Gloria Moure, led Galerie Mendieta’s visual production because of the need to organize Lelong to provide greater access to the archive by organizing her archive and preserve original photographic materials.