Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972
Examines the boundary of what is typical to men and women. The theme of gender is very prevalent in this piece. Anna is going against the norm and what is expected and is challenging the innate behaviors in regards to gender.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Ana_Mendieta_Untitled_%28Facial_Hair_Transplants%29_1972.jpg
Anna was very interesting. If the art world had a Lady Gaga she would be it. She is very "out there" so to speak. She was not afraid to stretch the boundaries. She would use her own body in her artwork as well as blood to get her point across.
In this painting Anna ties herself to the table and smears her body in blood. This was inspired by the brutal rape of a nursing student.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnzxik1qh4reMYGnTBCz6AP_jkH2FUKs0Ta1lHa_C9yje1b0jJ6rkk5Fe2kGlwQ7bhgweumRfgp4WbX6DcsDp4NVt9PkBXbsCpKwkOh8F6AcAufoWPHdsqYSQeo_3d0Nt1TkAoyYwjaWgm/s1600/kc_femart_mendiet_69.jpg
Anna Mendieta grew up in Cuba and she and her sister were exiled from the country by her parents in order to help them escape from Castro. Anna and her sister were constantly switched from foster homes in Iowa until she was finally reunited with her parents. Good thing that she was reunited with her parents but, that certainly must of had a negative effect on her as she grew up and processed everything. It certainly influenced her art. She was known to make ritualistic performances in which she inscribed her own body in nature. Blood, fire, water, and other natural elements are essential to her highly personal and often mysterious vocabulary (eai.org).
The significance of religion being in her artwork could have had something to do wit her and her sister being moved through foster homes through an arrangement of the United States government and the Catholic Charities. The things that were also transpiring in her home country also could have influenced her work. Chadwick states, "working from a different cultural perspectives that displaced Cuban living in the United States Anna Mendieta (1948-85) first used blood in a 1973 performance protesting against rape. Mendieta's artistic roots lay in feminism and in the anti-commodification tendencies of earth, performance, and process work in the 1970's. Subsequently, she began imposing the traces of her five-foot body on earth in the environs of Iowa City, Iowa, Oaxaca, Mexico, and other sites, outlining it with ignited gunpowder, stones, flowers, and firework or having herself bound in strips of cloth and buried in mud and rocks (Chadwick 373).
The painting of the artist that I am focusing on is called Untitled (Silueta Series). It is a picture of her body imprinted in the ground in what appears to be a beach. You could compare it to making snow angels but without the snow obviously. Untitled which is part of the Silueta series depicted the creation of a female Silhouette imprinted on the ground. Anna Mendieta's medium was to create the female silhouette using nature as both her canvas and silhouette. She combined land art with body art to create "earth body." The piece Untitled could represent the thought of all of humanity being dust and how we eventually will return to the Earth. Putting it into a religious context since she obviously was inspired by her religion which Guerrilla Girls' points out to have been Santeria, a Caribbean and Brazilian mixture of Catholic rites (Guerrilla Girls 89). Guerrilla Girls points out how she felt a connection to this belief.
Anna Mendieta
Untitled (Silueta Series) 1977
In this piece Anna has her body imprinted in the sand possibly trying to depict the fact that all humanity is dust and to dust we will all return.
http://images.tate.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/grid-normal-8-cols/public/images/ana_menieta_untitled_tp11.jpg?itok=EGU7AZJI
Chadwick points out that Anna Mendieta's work made powerful identifications between the female body and the land in ways that annihilated the conventions of surface on which the traditions of western art rest. Only traces of the mediated interactions between body and art remained. Work in landscape often intersected with a desire by women artist to work in public places in order to affect the lives of people outside the closed confines of the art gallery and museum world. The imagery for many public art and performances, evolved in dialogue with local people to produce a socially concerned and visually strong art (Chadwick 373-379).
In conclusion, Anna Mendieta was a really fascinating artist. Her uniqueness and different approach is something to admire. She was not afraid to be "out there." She has a couple of work that is just refereed to as Untitled but what is interesting about it is that she is probably letting a person perceive her artwork as what they believe it is.
Works Cited:
Chadwick, Whitney.
Women, Art and Society, Ed.
Thames and Hudson. New
York, New York, 2007.print.
Girls, Guerilla. The
Guerilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art,
New York: La Guardia Place, 1998.print.
www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=373
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