The Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta was 36 when she died on September 8, 1985. She had, in the words of her husband, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, “somehow gone out the window” of their 34th-floor Manhattan apartment. Andre was charged with her murder but later acquitted due to insufficient evidence to prove he had pushed her during a drunken row. Deliberately, and rightly, Mendieta’s grievous end is not referenced at all in her triumphant exhibition at Tate Modern — the artist’s largest in the UK. There is just one mention of Andre: in an illustrated book of lithographs made by both artists, titled Pierre Foglie.
Yet it is hard not to view the raw, elemental force of Mendieta’s life and work through the lens of her death. In one video her face looms out of the dark, eyes closed, blood trickling down her forehead. In another piece, Ñañigo Burial (1976), black ritual candles are arranged in the outline of a person, to be lit in accordance with the cycles of the moon for the duration of the show. A section titled Threshold reminds us of Mendieta’s preoccupation with the transference of energy and the cyclical nature of being — birth, life, death, regeneration. The exhibition closes with a video of Mendieta covered head to toe in white feathers, running along a beach as if returning in spirit form.
Using the body as art
Though she grappled with the biggest themes, death and displacement among them, Mendieta was not above humour. At times her wit was deliciously irreverent. In a series of photographs taken in a 16th-century former monastery in a town outside of Oaxaca in Mexico, Mendieta plays with Catholic symbols and spaces. For one black-and-white shot, the artist climbed inside a baptismal font, only her legs and an arm visible sticking out over the top. Holy water glistens on the floor. In another series, she pranked passersby in Iowa by pouring animal blood on the pavement. Mendieta and her sister Raquelín then sat in a parked car to document people’s reactions.
Other photographic self-portraits show Mendieta distorting her face with a pane of glass or gluing on a moustache using hair trimmed from the head of a male classmate. Mendieta’s performances of the 1970s and early 1980s earned her widespread acclaim and the newly remastered Super 8 films documenting some of these are electrifying. In one well-known work, which took place on the banks of the Iowa River, Mendieta poured cow’s blood over her head before rolling in white chicken feathers, transforming herself into something beyond human.
Some of her Silueta series are captured on film, too. For these works, created between 1973-1980, Mendieta inscribed the outline of her body in landscapes using natural materials: flowers, fire, sand, mud and snow. They are, as Mendieta herself said, “basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art”. Many of the Silueta works, as well as her Rupestrian Sculptures, carved directly into the walls of the limestone caves of Jaruco Park in Cuba, evoke the curvaceous forms of the Willendorf Venus. Less well-known — and less accomplished — are her oil paintings, a handful of which are on show. Far more beautiful are her simple acrylics and graphite drawings on amate paper, a bark found primarily in Mexico and commonly used in Mayan contexts.
The power of her legacy
If Mendieta’s work feels timelier than ever, it is because she pioneered an artistic practice that combined performance, land art and an instrumental use of her own body that was cutting edge while remaining rooted in ancient ritual. She also wrestled with contemporary concerns: environmentalism, colonialism and feminism. Writing in the exhibition catalogue for a show at A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 1980 (and reproduced as a wall text in the exhibition), Mendieta noted how the feminist movement of the mid to late 1960s was intended to “end the domination and exploitation by the white male culture”, but instead it “failed to remember us”. American feminism, she added, “is basically a white middle-class movement”.
In 2016, feminist activists from the WHEREISANAMENDIETA collective and the domestic violence group Sisters Uncut staged a protest at Tate Modern over a display of Andre’s work and the historical exclusion of Mendieta’s. With this exhibition, the Tate at last rightly recognises her as one of the 20th century’s most singular and visionary artists: the poetic, primordial power of her work undimmed, its influence still resonating down the generations.
Until January 17, tate.org.uk
