“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source…In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche.”
Ana Mendieta’s evolution into an artist who works directly with the material of life physically and conceptually serves as a precedent to my own practice as I too am fueled by my curiosity and what it means to be a human on this earth. Her fearless exploration into more ephemeral modes of work with only her knowledge of composition from painting instruction and the application of her masterful intuition continues to propel me forward in my own work as a young female artist. During Mendieta’s time in college her art transformed from a rebellious primeval style of portrait painting to spiritual meditations on the human experience through impositions of her own body on the landscape. I explore her relationship to the camera as a participant in these rituals with my own artistic growth in mind, focusing on how her revelation of body movement and expression lead her to make work in which her own body is the subject and object of the Earth.
Ana was always conscious of making art that spoke from a universally stimulating perspective, her art is “the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs grounded on the primordial accumulations, the unconscious urges that animate the world” (Oransky 150). By inserting her artistic process directly into nature Ana was able to maintain this earnest human perspective in her work, which allowed her to address universally affective topics like death, sex and violence.
I am especially motivated by Mendieta’s intuitive approach to the formal aspects of her creative process as she applies her painting knowledge of composition and color with her deep interest in primitive art and cultures to perform the ephemeral ceremonies we see in her Silueta series and throughout her work. Ana’s fascination with primitive art and cultures started during her childhood in Cuba, she felt as though “these cultures are provided with an inner knowledge, a closeness to natural resources. And it is this knowledge which gives reality to the images they have created. It is this sense of magic, knowledge, and power, found in primitive art, that has influenced my personal attitude toward art making” (Mendieta 41). Ana’s work truly flourished with the introduction of firsthand subject matter, something I also experienced while studying abroad and now insist on being part of my artistic practice. While studying under Hans Breder Ana traveled to the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico for an archeological excavation of Pre-Columbian Aztec figurines(Herzberg 115). She returns again later with her class to continue her exploration in ritualistic site specific performance pieces which develops into her Silueta series (Breder 209).
The turning point in Ana’s work came when she was 24, when she realized that her paintings were not real enough for what she wanted the image to convey, “and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic. I decided that for the images to have magic qualities I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth” (Oransky 146). This time in Ana’s artistic development reflects and motivates my own practice as I return from Rome with my class feeling my own work shift forms as painting no longer seems real or dynamic enough to address the ideas that occupy my mind. I can’t help but wonder what a sense of relief or liberation she must have felt as her work began to transition from material product of her body to ephemeral documentation of her body as the subject. This transition to performance, or a combination of sculpture, theater and body art allow the artistic energy to be devoted to the conceptual aspect of the work rather than the painterly frustration of material struggle. It allows the artist to address matters of real life head on with the environments they are most provocative in. I have experienced the beginning tastes of the liberation that comes with being truly committed to the work I am making, feeling myself learn from it. In my most recent pieces I have began to understand what Ana means when she says that “when the work is really going well, the work is leading you” (Oransky 174).
Both Ana and I make art to address what it means to be a human on earth, a question that permeates every second of real life, but seems isolated from the ostentatious art world. The notion that Ana “liked to think that someone hiking in the area might discover one of her weathered Siluetas and believe that they had stumbled upon a prehistoric gravesite, carving, or painting” is compelling to me in the sense that Ana is always comparing her work to prehistoric art, validating art’s significance to the human experience by showing its continued importance in our culture from the very beginning (Oransky 38).
This summer I will be exploring my own shift to site specific performance pieces, drawing energy from being in direct contact with nature, the source of life, specifically the ocean. In this work on the ocean I will be focusing on the ritual aspect of my artistic practice, which remained an intimate coping mechanism for dealing with the anxiety of being a human body of organic material that will inevitably return to the earth.
Ana Mendieta was greatly influenced by the artists she was exposed to her while studying under Hans Breder at the University of Iowa’s Multimedia program and Center for new Performing Arts (Herzberg 104). Her participation in the pieces Handbill and DeafmanGlance had a huge impact on her artistic practice. In preparation for these performances she took a body and movement awareness workshop with S.K. Dunn, who’s work involved getting people to discover their vocabulary of movement (Herzberg 108). This notion of having a vocabulary of movement has greatly shaped my entire perspective on life as I started dancing at the age of three, guiding me to think in a visual/sensual movement based language as I began to ponder the world around me and what my role in it may be.
Mendieta’s exposure to the arresting, graphic work of artists like Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists early in her studies shows in her work’s fearlessness of material, subject and concept. Ana drew from the Actionists’ use of blood and organic materials that push the limits of taboo, as well as the ephemeral nature of performing outside, inserting the body as art into the real world.
Ana began to unleash the rebellion she felt throughout her life of exile through a series of performances with blood and a conscious assertion of her right to push the limits of what was socially acceptable to present.
Ana did pieces in response to the rape murder that took place at her school
She is said to have done a project in which she stuck a bean up her nostril and kept it there for 2 weeks until it sprouted and began to cause her sinus problems.
In my future and present work I focus on finding a means of equilibrium, a return to the divine balance of nature through a ritual act of movement performed in the ocean. Ana’s last video work Ochun explores the ocean as maternal source, nature’s womb. This is of particular interest to me right now as I am reading about the deep sea as the origin place of consciousness, a laboratory for evolutionary experiments. She was searching for the “oceanic feeling” as discussed by Freud and Rolland as “the simple and direct fact of a feeling of ‘the eternal’ (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic) (Vermorel and Vermorel, 1993, p. 304). My work with the ocean this summer will focus on reconnecting with the earth through the water similarly to how Mendieta becomes one with the earth through her earth/body sculptures. Both of us work to become an extension of nature “and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs…[in] an omnipresent female force, the after image of being encompasses within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being.”
As I move forward in my artistic practice I find myself approaching my relationship to the camera with Ana Mendieta’s level of burning curiosity, relishing its potential to provide a new perspective from which to see myself and the world. With every step forward I look all the way back to the beginning of art and humanity before placing my foot firmly on the earth. This constant redefining of my perspective serves as a reminder of the temporality of life in relation to the earth it exists on. Ana states that “art must have begun as nature itself,” if there was nothing but pure interaction with nature,” a dialectical relationship with humans and the natural world from which we cannot be separated” then it is my goal to find this eternal oceanic purity again now amidst the modern condition of the world (Oransky 66).
Works Cited
Breder, Hans, and Stephen C. Foster. Intermedia. IA City, IA: Corroboree, Gallery of New Concepts, School of Art and Art History, U of Iowa, 1980. Print.
Herzberg, Julia P., “Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A Critical Study, 1969 through 1977” (1998). CUNY Academic Works.
http://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1431Mendieta, Ana, and Bonnie Clearwater. Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works. Miami Beach: Grassfield, 1993. Print.
Oransky, Howard, and Ana Mendieta. Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. Berkeley: U of California, 2015. Print.
Vermorel, Henri, Vermorel, Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland, AndreÌ Bourguignon, Pierre Cotet, and ReneÌ LaineÌ. Sigmund Freud Et Romain Rolland Correspondance 1923-1936: De La Sensation OceÌanique Au “Trouble Du Souvenir Sur L’Acropole. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France, 1993. Print.