Ana Mendieta: Femenist Body Art Pioneer

Hi everyone!

Ana Mendieta definitely fits the theme for our symposium being that she's all about feminism and using the body as a medium. She's connected to Carl Andre (the minimalist we studied in class). Researching her interests me because like her, my family was exiled from Cuba and much of her "Silueta" body art is based on her feelings of displacement. I think I'd like use her as a platform and find similar artists who are more contemporary; see what avenue it takes me. I've gotten the OK from Professor Ryan and she thinks I should also tie in Mendieta's association to Carl Andre (specifically the trial about her death). Let me know what you guys think!!

Here's a short bio:

Cuban-born Ana Mendieta produced performance art, "earth-body" sculptures, and photographic and video work in the seventies in which she used her own body as a medium. A common theme in her performance art was violence against the female body. She often went for the shock factor in representing sexual abuse and many of her performances involved significant quantities of animal blood. In opposition to the predominant modernist theories of the time, this concept was being used by several other women artist as a feminist assertion of female body as a vehicle for personal and social expression. These women's emphasis on the female body as a realistic tool for the woman artist, challenged the male tradition of the idealized female nude; and was a precursor to the direction toward the refiguration of the body in the rest of the art community during the eighties.

Mendieta sought to establish a "dialog between the landscape and the female body return to the maternal source." She envisioned the female body as a primal source of life and sexuality, as a symbol of the ancient paleolithic goddesses. Between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta created her signature series, entitled "Silueta" or silhouette. Here, Mendieta used her body or images of her body in combination with natural materials. The pieces were transient, created and then photographed just before or during their destruction. The materials used were highly symbolic. In one work from the "Silueta" series, she outlined her figure with gunpowder, creating a shape reminiceint of prehistoric cave paintings. By setting it alight, she incorporates the ritualistic use of fire as a source of exorcism and purification. Mendieta also used flowers as mediums in her series, quoting the folk traditions of Mexico. Her primary material was the earth itself. In her "Tree of Life" series, she covered her naked body with mud and posed against and enormous tree. Ridding herself of her color and form, she is visually united with the tree, arms raised in supplication.

Mendieta had married minimalist sculptor Carl Andre eight months before her tragic death at age thirty-six, the result of a fall from an apartment window in New York in 1985. Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder; during the trial he described her death as suicide.