Post 3: Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta best known for her “Earth-body” work was born on November 18th 1948. She was the second of three children and was raised as a Catholic, but was exposed to the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria through the beliefs of the household servants. Mendieta’s later artistic use of organic materials in natural environments, as well as Catholic and Afro-Cuban imagery, is rooted in these childhood experiences. She was born and raised in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s governance and came into the United States as a refugee in 1961 at the age of twelve.  In 1967 she enrolled at the University of Iowa. She participated in the Intermedia Program and Center for New Performing Arts and later received a BA (1969) and MFA (1972) in painting. She later shifted towards performing and ephemeral, mixed-media art. That is how she found her artistic style, melding her nude body or its outline with nature, she called these “earth body” works.

In 1969, her first year of graduate school, she began a decade-long affair with the artist Hans Breder, who founded the Intermedia program at Iowa, a special interdisciplinary arts program in which Mendieta studied and taught. The pieces from this period are truly inter-media, combining performance, photography and film, and conceptual art, without any genre taking precedence as the art object which was shown in her series of headshots in "Facial Cosmetic Variations" 1972.

Her experiences were portrayed through her art work. Like many other female artists she used her body as an instrumental part of her artistic practice makes the distance between art and life appear to shrink even further. She 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 1970s. Her 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. (Chadwick 374)

Violence fascinated Mendieta. She worked on “Rape Scene” in 1973 as she recreated the scene of a real violent rape-murder of a young woman that had been reported abused on the news. This caused a catastrophe as people passed by in front of a doorway where Mendieta spread animal blood to show the effect of the effect of violence and how she interpreted this woman experienced. Intentionally, there was an absence of causality in these images to displace the viewer’s ability to comprehend each scene as a narrative. The images were meant to challenge the viewer, mediating any sense of transparency in Mendieta’s use of her own body in the work.

Mendieta was a very unique artist, one of the many few who would engage her body into her art work. She would engage her body in an “on-going dialogue” with nature, investing her image with spirituality through private ritual, and the use of materials associated with Afro-Cuban ceremonies such as earth, blood, and chickens. Her life ended mysteriously one night after a violent fight with her lover, artist Carl Andre, as she fell to her death from the thirty-fourth floor window of their apartment in 1985

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/09/art/ana-mendieta-earth-body-sculpture-and-pe

http://latinartjournal.com/ana-mendieta-latin-american-art/

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/09/art/ana-mendieta-earth-body-sculpture-and-pe