The idea of home was always complicated for the artist Ana Mendieta, subject of a new exhibition hosted by Mexico’s Masa Galeria. Born in Havana in 1948, Mendieta fled Cuba and Castro’s regime with her sister as an adolescent, arriving in Miami, USA, in 1961, while the rest of their family remained. During six years studying art in Iowa, she travelled often: to Mexico, across the States and, on rare occasions, back to Cuba. Most of her life she worked without a studio and her best-known artworks are impermanent, conceptually rich performance pieces filmed on a handheld camera at different sites, where she did not stay for long.
When she at last found some manner of home in a 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York – though still splitting her time with Italy, where she was fast gaining recognition – it was not long before she fell from her window to her death in 1985, aged 36. This followed a heated argument with her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andres, purportedly regarding their changing reputations in the art world. A suspect, Andres was eventually acquitted and the court ruled the death – many believe erroneously – to be suicide.
So the thought of bringing some of her works “home” is an interesting one. Masa’s exhibition, ‘Elementos Vitales: Ana Mendieta in Oaxaca’, has collected five of the artist’s best-known films, all from Siluetas, a series of some 200 video and photo pieces depicting her body imprinted into various landscapes, and brought them to Oaxaca City, Mexico, the capital of the state where they were made.
The effect is powerful. Mendieta once described these works as a “dialogue with nature”, and by presenting them in their original context this dialogue can be more clearly heard. Perhaps her most famous piece, “Creek” – in which Mendieta lies prone, naked in a river, referencing the death of Hamlet’s Ophelia – is made to feel more present, more there, for the fact that the water, the rocks and the surrounding greenery are all of the hues and textures of the audience’s setting. In “Silueta del Laberinto” – for which Mendieta has laid the outline of her body in blood on the floor of a Zapotec tomb – the viewer recalls clearly the atmosphere of age and decay of the ruins that protrude from the region’s landscape.
Physical presence was important to Mendieta. Though diminutive, at less than five-foot tall, she asserted her body where she saw fit. However, she did not evoke the objectified feminine presence that suited the male-dominated art world of her time. (One thinks of Yves Klein using nude women as human “paintbrushes” in his film ‘Anthropometries’ in 1960.) Instead, Mendieta used her body to quietly disturb the male gaze: in “Ocean Bird (Washup)”, she lies in the sea like a corpse, covered only in turkey feathers and unflinchingly buffeted by the waves along Oaxaca’s coast.
An early leading woman artist, she continues to hold important place in feminist art circles – one of totemic significance when considered in light of her death, a plausible allegory for the violence of the male artist’s ego. The exhibition also pays homage to these associations: accompanying each of Mendieta’s films are different sets of seating, which have been designed by five artists and designers from Latin America, all of whom women.
Some of these pieces are perfectly attuned: the seats for “Silueta del Laberinto” (designed by women working for Mexico City-based Ewe Studio) are a series of toppled stone pillars. In the darkened screening room, lit only by the flickering screen’s discomfiting scene, it feels as though you yourself are involved in some strange ritual taking place.
Other designs don’t hit home. One film of Mendieta naked in a ditch, asphyxiating beneath a pile of stones (“Burial Pyramid”), requires the audience to spectate from a mound of jeans, stuffed and sewn together by the artist Pia Camil. Though comfortable, the relevance is less apparent. Fortunately, intelligent curation means the accompanying works do just that: accompany. Even when out of step, they remain in the service of Mendieta’s footage.
Mendieta gained recognition from the art establishment toward the end of her life, receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980 and exhibiting around the world. Her oeuvre is found in collections at the Tate, the MoMA and the Pompidou. There is no way of knowing what heights she might have reached if she had lived. But there is something to be said for bringing these ephemeral works to the point of their creation, giving the art what the artist had never been afforded: a place to return to, at last.
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Apologies that this is coming to you late. Too many commitments has meant that At Large has drop off, but rest assured: I’ll be continuing to (sporadically) update you with writings from my travels. Hopefully you enjoyed this week’s, even though the format was a little different.
And I’m including a couple of shots from Dia de Muertos below.
Until next time,
Louis
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