Ana Mendieta, my greater influence

Ana Mendieta has been a large inspiration in my mixed media and installation work over the past year. She is widely known for her performance-based art and photographic documentation of using the body figuratively to create outlines or imprints, but is also seen using it as a material to be deformed or manipulated. I am captivated by her ability to use the body as an investigation in order to formulate her work: a way to discover cultural and self-identity. When researching their life, it is clear that past life experiences have influenced her use of the body as a medium/tool in her work.

Mendieta was born November 18, 1948 in Havana, Cuba. At the age of thirteen, she and her older sister were exiled from Cuba under Operation Pedro Pan for her family’s opposition to the Castro regime. She studied a wide range of conceptual and performance based art practices while earning her BA at the University of Iowa from 1964-1969. Afterwards, she proceeded to earn a MA in Painting and an MFA in Intermedia (a new art form at occurring in the 1960s, which consisted of inter-disciplinary activities that occur between different genres). Throughout the next fifteen or so years, Mendieta produced work throughout the United States, Cuba, Mexico, and Italy, that investigated issues of feminism, gender and cultural identity in a manner that put her work into its own category, “earth-body art,” as she consistently mixed together the two popular 1970’s movements of “earth art” and “body art.” At the age of thirty-six, she died from a tragic fall from a 34^th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York.

Mendieta used her body as her focus in her work. Her body became both her subject and her material as she used herself in a series of explorations of the issues mentioned above. Documented through film and photography, her performances often involved her naked body intermingling with the earth, such as her most notable, the Silueta Series.

The Silueta Series involved Mendieta imposing her body onto the earth as she either extracted her silhouette from the sand that she then filled with blood, molded it out of mud, outlined it in seaweed, or even completely covered herself from head to toe in dirt and mud to blend into the bark of a tree. These silhouettes exhibited her interest in ancient cultures as she intersected them with the theme of gender and cultural identity.

She was also extremely well known for her works that involved transformation of her body as she reconstructed herself either into someone else to play with the idea of gender transformation, or into something else as she tested the limits of her body by pressing, constraining, molding, or cutting different areas of herself. Many of these tests were reflected in the deformation of her face or other body parts, causing her to become virtually unidentifiable. These pieces are her most striking to me. I am fascinated by the way she can test the limits of her body, physically and mentally. I like the idea of molding the body, seeing through documentation the ways it can be transformed and manipulated. I find myself wanting to somehow do the same to my body in my own work, thus coming up with the idea to have some possibility harm and constraint. I like that she takes her mental pain and presents it to the viewer through a physical manner, adding a new level of depth.

One of her strongest pieces reflecting the loss of identity was her Untitled piece, also known as Body Tracks, which involved her standing face to face with a white sheet that hangs against a wall. Her arms were raised above her head and stained in blood. She pressed them against the sheet and then silently slid down into her knees dragging her stained hands and arms along, leaving markings of her blood that reach all the way from the starting point to the floor. I’ve drawn much inspiration from this piece in my own previous work that also dealt with identity loss. What I found most interesting about the piece was not the final outcome, the stain left on the wall, but the process in which it got there. The way that she used herself as the tool to expel paint against the wall in a means of self-discovery, almost a manner of meditation, was inspiration for me to look at my situation from a new perspective and find answers to my own questions throughout the process of creation. It is this act of discovering that I am hoping to encounter again through my I.P. project. I also enjoyed how her performance raised so many questions from the viewers. It is the silence in the space that she performs this act that makes it so powerful. The silent abstraction being created speaks loud enough. It makes the viewer ask questions, like “Why?” “What does that mean?” and “How do I relate?” Some may have felt they could identify because they have gone through those same life experiences, while others who haven’t are at least motioned to recognize that these situation exist. I hope to draw the same reactions from my viewers.

It is obvious that Mendieta’s work was much influenced by both her exile as a young girl, along with the issues of femininity and gender identity that were of popular interest in society at the time. In writing about her Silueta Series, she expressed that she had been “carrying on 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 during my adolescence.” Before her death in 1985, Mendieta was awarded the Prix de Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which are two highly esteemed awards. She had undoubtedly left a great impact on the art world, as we see artist today continue to reenact and draw inspiration from her work, myself as one of them.