THE SERIAL SPACES OF ANA MENDIETA

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THE SERIAL SPACES OF ANA MENDIETA

S U S A N B E S T

The Silueta Series is widely recognized as the most important work by the

CubanAmerican artist Ana Mendieta. Arranged in roughly chronological

order, from 1973 to 1980, the images reproduced here (plates 3.13.12) represent a

good cross-section of the photographs, slides and films that make up the series.

In particular, this selection highlights the very variable appearance of the silueta,

or silhouette, in the landscape. For example, Untitled and Anima (see plates 3.6

and 3.7) are clearly female figures, whereas an early image, a film still from

Flower Person (see plate 3.3), is not an identifiably female form, just as many

of the later images are not identifiably female bodies (see plates 3.8, 3.11 and

3.12). To those unfamiliar with this series, it may come as a surprise, then,

that much of the debate about the series has turned on the depiction of the

female body and its meaning. In particular, Mendieta has been criticized for

embracing a conventional alignment of the female body and nature, thereby

presenting an ahistorical, essentialist conception of woman. More recently, the

Silueta Series has been defended against these charges by emphasizing the

absence of the female body; that is, in the later images from the series, we see

only traces of the female body, rather than an image of the actual body. This

argument is hard to reconcile with the selection of images I examine in this

article Mendietas body is present in several works from 1975 and the later

images are not all recognizably female. The peculiar mismatch between the

images of the series and their interpretation suggests a need for reassessment and

reinterpretation. More specifically, there is a need for an interpretation of the

series that can encompass the full range of images. Surprisingly perhaps, I think

revisiting the meaning of Mendietas essentialism is the most promising

approach.

In recent feminist art history essentialism has generally been regarded as

a term of abuse or an approach to avoid at all costs. In feminist philosophy,

however, the inescapability of using essentialist, or universalist notions has been

widely canvassed. If essentialism is inescapable, as many argue, then one of the

challenges for feminist theory is to distinguish between varieties of essentialism

and their efficacy for feminist ends. Mendietas deployment of essentialism, I

would suggest, serves such ends.

Mendietas essentialism can be characterized as a reliance upon an ahis-

torical idea, mother earth, to generate the Silueta Series. Thus the traditional

link between the female body and nature is supported and a received idea

about sexual difference is retained. More precisely, Mendieta subscribes to an

ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 1 . FEBRUARY 2007 pp 57-82& Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 579600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


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idea of feminized nature, or what I have described elsewhere as feminized

space.1 Using this particular idea, however, allows her to posit alternatives

to patriarchal culture in the name of the feminine, that include a kind of

ecological sensibility that emphasizes the reciprocity between body and land, a

resistance to colonialist conceptions of land and territory, and a complicated

intertwining of terms that are traditionally polarised, such as transcendence and

objectification, presence and absence and so forth. In other words, she uses an

essentialist notion (that women and nature are aligned), and an essentialist

position (that there is a fundamental difference between the sexes) in a highly

generative way.

This article begins with a reconsideration of the limits of the Silueta Series, a

crucial issue that partly accounts for the problems of interpretation with which I

began. Then briefly I outline the key feminist approach to essentialism and sexual

difference that I believe best suits an analysis of Mendietas project. In the second

half of the article I examine the alternatives to patriarchal conceptions of nature,

dwelling, space and identity generated by Mendietas deployment of a feminized

conception of nature or space.

W I T H O U T E N D : T H E S I L U E TA S E R I E S

Of all Mendietas works the Silueta Series has garnered the most critical atten-

tion. It is widely acknowledged as Mendietas key aesthetic achievement: Mary

Sabbatino has argued that it is the core of her practice, and Guy Brett has called it

her great contribution to art.2 Generally, it is dated from 1973 to 1980, and can be

described as including those works which resulted from Mendieta either placing

her body, or constructing a surrogate form of herself, on what she regarded as the

maternal earth. The resulting images, documented on Super-8 film, slides and

photographs, visualize the idea of a feminized earth by showing the female body

incorporated into various natural environments: rivers, the air, the land and the

liminal zones of seashore and riverbank.

Whereas there is a consensus about the importance of this series, surprisingly

little critical attention has been given to its limits, or rather as I will argue below

that they are not easily ascertained or fixed. It is as if the theoretical pull of her

work has led to less attention to basic art-historical questions, even one as

fundamental as what constitutes the objects of study, or whether that object of

study can be constituted with any sense of surety or finality.There are a number of uncertainties about the limits of this series, some of

which further research might resolve and others which are less amenable to

resolution. They include: the starting date, which I believe is a movable feast and

will be approached differently by different scholars depending upon what they

want to emphasize; the relationship of the films to the photographs, and, in

particular, the distinction between silueta documentation and what Charles

Merewether calls the action films, these two issues can be addressed or at least

explored with further research; the extent to which similar series should all be

assembled under the silueta rubric; and whether the series should only

include lifetime prints (photographs printed during her lifetime), be extended toinclude estate prints (prints made after her death), or whether it should

encompass all the slides while she made over 100 silhouettes, according to Mary

Sabbatino, there are thousands of slides in Mendietas archive.3

T H E S E R I A L S P A C E S O F A N A M E N D I E T A

58 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007


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3.1 Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973. Lifetime colour photograph, 50.8

33.7 cm. Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.


59& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007


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The starting date of the Silueta Series, 1973, may seem to be beyond conten-

tion; Mendieta posits this date as the beginning of the series both in an interview

with Linda Montana and in a statement about her work.4 This date is based on

Mendietas retrospective designation of Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) as the

beginning of this series; most critics adhere to this starting date, even though it is

not a silhouette as such but Mendieta herself who appears in this image, albeit

obscured by flowers (plate 3.1).5 Julia Herzbergs recent research into Mendietas

early years introduces a level of equivocation about the status of this image as the

first silueta; she says of Image from Yagul that it might be considered her first

silueta predating the next by a year. (authors emphasis).6 Herzberg notes that

the first actual outline of the body was produced the following year (1974),

documented both by slides and the film Untitled (Laberinth Blood Imprint) (plate 3.2).

The starting date for the series could thus be 1973 or 1974, depending upon

whether a silueta is defined as an actual tracing of the bodys outline. Herzbergs

equivocal attitude to Mendietas dating opens the way for other interpretations ofwhat constitutes the core of the series. For example, the sporadic production

of these first two years there appears to be a further hiatus between the work of

1974 and the more dense production of siluetas from mid-1975 onwards could

3.2 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta

Series, Mexico), 1974. 35 mm

colour slide. Photo: r the Estateof Ana Mendieta Collection,

courtesy Galerie Lelong,

New York.




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be used to argue that a serial attitude had not yet been adopted, to use Mel

Bochners terms, if not his meaning.7 When the density and frequency of her

investigations of the silueta proposition become more pronounced, it could be

argued that Mendieta begins to work serially. Something like this attitude

informs Charles Merewethers approach to the Silueta Series. Merewether makes

a qualitative argument about what should be regarded as the first major auton-

omous silueta made in 1975,8 considering that there are two decisive shifts in her

practice in this period: working directly in the landscape and removing her own

body from the works. While Merewether is careful to distinguish this particular

period of production from what follows, most critics are not as attentive to the

shifts in her practice; the characterization of this period is generalized. That

the body is absent (or mostly absent) from the Silueta Series could be called the

classical interpretation of this series, adhered to by many of her key critics.9 For

Merewether, the first major silueta is the film referred to variously as Silueta de

Yemaya or Untitled (Flower Person) (plate 3.3).

The film documentation of the Silueta Series introduces another question

about our understanding of the limits of this series. Until very recently, the films

have not been substantially included in the literature; most critics have concen-

trated on the photographs. Occasionally, the existence of the film documen-

tation is mentioned, but the films themselves are rarely mentioned by name or

analysed Merewether is the exception here. Mendieta made over eighty films, as

Chrissie Iles recently noted, more than any other artist in the 1970s.10 Curiously,

3.3 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Flower Person), 1975. Still from Super-8 colour, silent film, 6 min.

Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.




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on two occasions when Mendieta referred to the reception of her earth body

sculptures, she only refers to the photographs.11 How then should we regard the

films?

The recent exhibition of Mendietas work curated by Olga Viso, Ana Mendieta:

Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 19721985, held at the Whitney Museum in

New York in 2004, foregrounded the importance of her films. Several films were

included in the room devoted to the Silueta Series Genesis in Mud, Flower Person

and Corazon de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) as well as other films related

to the series in other sections of the exhibition. Genesis in Mud slowly reveals

Mendietas form breathing below a layer of mud. She appears in the classic pose of

this early period of the Silueta Series with arms outstretched (plate 3.4).12 Rock

Heart with Blood re-uses an ash silhouette (plate 3.5). Mendieta with spare,

untheatrical gestures pours red pigment over a heart set in the chest area of the

silhouette, and then places her naked form face-down into the cavity, uniting the

body and its double in a glove-like fit. According to Merewether, Genesis in Mud and

Rock Heart with Blood are part of a suite of four works which he classifies as

actions; the other two films are Silueta Sangrienta (Bleeding Silhouette) and Alma

Silueta en Fuego (Soul Silhouette in Fire). These films, as his term action indicates, are

not simply documenting the silhouettes; they are further works.13

If these films are included in the Silueta Series, then this constitutes the

greatest disruption to established interpretations of the limits of the series and

its meaning. The Silueta Series is not just concerned with traces of the body or the

3.4 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Genesis in Mud), 1975. Still from Super-8 colour, silent film, 4 min.





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absence of the body, an argument that applies well to most of the photographs,

but it also includes the body itself. By positing an image of the body as the

starting point for this series (Image from Yagul, plate 3.1), Mendieta certainly shows

that she was not using the term silueta in a narrow sense. In both English and

Spanish, silueta or silhouette has the secondary meaning of perceiving an object

as an outline, usually, of course, as a dark outline against a light background. This

secondary meaning shifts the emphasis from how the image is rendered tracing

an outline to how it is perceived relative to its surroundings. Following this

secondary meaning, the idea of the silhouette could be taken as a kind of

direction for viewing: to attend to how the contours of the body are produced by,

and in relation to, an environment.

Acknowledging the persistent presence of the body in the Silueta Series also

underscores the coherence of Mendietas oeuvre. What might have been seen as

an aberrant reappearance of the body in The Tree of Life Series, in which

Mendietas body appears covered in mud in several photographs from 1976 and

1979, can now be seen as another continuity. Further to confuse matters in thefirst retrospective of Mendietas work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in

New York in 1987, both the Fetish Series and the Tree of Life Series were presented

as part of the Silueta Series.14 Most scholars tend to distinguish sharply between

3.5 Ana Mendieta, Corazon de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood), 1975. Stills from Super-8 colour, silent

film, 3 min. Photo:r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.




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the different series, no doubt guided by the idea that a different title indicates a

separation, while exhibition catalogues tend to present them together, guided in

turn by the strong visual relationship between them. Olga Viso suggests a way

through this impasse of separation/inclusion. She makes a more nuanced

distinction between the Silueta Series with which these other series are closely

associated and what she calls the Silueta Project which includes all of the

series, although she has also noted that a definitive answer to the question of the

limits of the Silueta Series is difficult to give.15

With these accumulated uncertainties about the Silueta Series, there remains

the peculiar situation of analysing an object or objects whose exact limits cannot

be specified. This boundlessness or indeterminacy could be regarded as simply

another face of Mendietas elusive, fugitive art. Indeed, Mendieta herself referred

to the Siluetas in 1977 as a long series that will never end.16 Guy Brett interprets

this statement as showing the influence of minimalist seriality and this may

indeed be the case; the interminable quality of minimalist work much lamented

by Michael Fried there is no end because there is nothing there to exhaust is,

however, at odds with the infinite variations of the Silueta Series.17 The desire for

boundlessness suggests not interminability but a desire for infinite extension and

variability, like the appearances of nature. That the very parameters of the series

also have this diffused and variable quality is not then very surprising, although

deeply troubling for interpretations which attempt closure.

In what follows, I work between the classical understanding of Mendietas

Silueta Series as emphasizing the absence of the body and the new understanding

of the series as including the body, foregrounded by Olga Viso and by Charles

Merewether. It might be argued that the persistence of her body adds weight to

the charge of essentialism. In my view, however, this does not substantially shift

the terms of the debate. What the film works do complicate is the depiction of

nature and time.

T H E O R I Z I N G F E M I N I N I T Y

It may seem somewhat perverse to consider Mendietas relation to essentialism,

given that so many of her recent critics have attempted to disentangle her work

from precisely this reading.18 In particular, there has been a concerted effort to

read her work through notions of performativity, thereby aligning her work witha kind of postmodern sensibility and the destabilization, deconstruction or

subversion of identity.

Mendietas silueta works are able to sustain this reading because they

emphasize repeated actions, a key issue in Judith Butlers idea of gender as

performance, and they repeat one of the abiding narratives which has determined

an understanding of femininity: the link between the body of woman and nature.

For Judith Butler, agency resides in the capacity to alter such narratives by

unfaithful repetition.19 Following the classical interpretation of the Silueta

Series, we could say that the repetition also varies the narrative by making the

female body at once present in outline and yet absent in actuality. Certainly,unlike the work of many body artists, in most of her earth bodyworks Mendieta

does not use her body itself as a material.20 In these works, the action the

repeated imprinting of Mendietas silhouette on the earth is doubly displaced




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from her body: a model of her body is used either to build up or gouge an image

into the earth and the results are seen only through film or photographic

mediation. Mostly, we see then, traces of traces of the body.

When the withdrawal of the body is emphasized, the siluetas can be argued

not only to sidestep the overdetermined meanings of the female body in art, but

also to follow Judith Butlers idea of focusing on the deed rather than the

doer.21 The emphasis on the deed is the linchpin of Butlers idea of gender as

performance; as she puts it, there need not be a doer behind the deed, the

doer is variably constructed in and through the deed.22 As a theoretical

concept, performativitys greatest purchase is perhaps in queer theory, where it

functions to emphasize sexual practices rather than embodiment. Within that

context, the political efficacy of emphasizing action makes perfect sense; it

highlights the contribution of sexual practices to ideas about identity. However,

when this idea is utilized in art history it often loses this political edge and

functions predominantly as a way of avoiding the so-called risk of essentialism.

For example, in Jane Blockers highly nuanced discussion of Mendieta, she

acknowledges the reappraisal of essentialism by Diana Fuss and others, but

nonetheless aims to avoid essentialism by embracing the central tenet of

performativity, namely, the shift away from the doer as the origin of the act. She

argues, no one true identity precedes the act and that no one identity remains

stable in and through performance. Even the possibility of agency depends upon

action, she states: Mendieta negotiated among identity possibilities that them-

selves emerge with the act of performance.23

A similar strategy is adopted by Amelia Jones. She makes an ingenious

transposition of Butlers argument to art history; she moves the opposition of

doer and deed into the more art-historical terms of intention and production.

The subject, she says, is never fully coherent in his or her intentionality.24

Uncoupling this link between intention and production, she argues, destabilizes

gender as the ground or origin point of production. In Mendietas reiteration of

norms such as woman and nature, she argues, citing Butler, sex is both produced

and destabilized.25

Clearly essentialism is avoided by both of these theoretical constructions, but

so, too, is any kind of specificity for feminine identity. Feminine identity can be as

unstable, indeterminate and unfixed as any other. But what if Mendietas goal is

precisely to fix the subject, to claim a place for feminine agency and identitybefore, during and after the act? Her work could then be positioned in relation to

what Elizabeth Grosz calls feminism of difference, which rather than valorizing

indeterminacy, has attempted to valorize femininity and to construct or explore

female specificity.26 Feminism of difference with its utopian goal of revising or

transvaluing the historically given attributes of femininity, shares similar aims

and theoretical sources to Butlers model of performativity, where it departs

from her stated aims is in retaining sexual difference as a crucial ontological

distinction.27

Feminism of difference is most closely associated with the work of Luce Irigaray

and her key commentators in the 1980s and early 1990s: Elizabeth Grosz, NaomiSchor and Margaret Whitford. This approach can be considered essentialist in so

far as it is committed to the idea of sexual difference as a meaningful distinction,

and is similarly committed to the utopian goal of thinking about women and




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femininity in what Elizabeth Grosz has called autonomous, self-defined terms.28

For these feminists, indeterminacy is the problem, not the solution, for the iden-

tity of woman.29 In other words, alongside the debate about essentialism versus

social constructionism, there is another crucial divide within feminist approaches

using poststructuralism: one pole favours Kristevas idea of the disruption of all

identity and the other follows Irigarays utopian project of reconstructing female

identity. Irigarays project is a complicated one and it is perhaps worth briefly

unpacking her ideas about female identity and her relationship to essentialism,

before considering how the approach inspired by her work illuminates the work of

Mendieta as well as other feminist artists of this period.

First, it should be emphasized that the autonomous self-defined terms

required to reconstruct female identity cannot be sought in some hitherto

unknown attributes of woman. In other words, such terms are not presumed to be

newly minted, as Irigaray poetically puts it: Its not that we have a territory of our

own; but their fatherland, family, home, discourse, imprison us in enclosed

spaces where we cannot keep on moving, living, as ourselves.30 Irigaray

acknowledges that there is no alternative account of femininity but she none-

theless consistently expresses the utopian desire to think what has not been

thought womans specificity.31 As the quotation above indicates, paradoxically

Irigaray sees womans specificity as already existing hence there is a notion of

living as ourselves in opposition to patriarchal accounts as well as being a

future project to realize, as she puts it: One day well manage to say ourselves.32

Naomi Schor concludes from this that the feminine can only emerge from within

or beneath to extend Irigarays archaeological metaphor femininity, within

which it lies buried.33

Irigarays commitment to femininity is precisely what aligns her work with

essentialism, and, in turn, it is Irigarays essentialism that has generated most

criticism and debate. For example, Toril Moi argues, her superb critique of

patriarchal thought is partly undercut by her attempt to name the feminine. If . . .

all efforts towards a definition of woman are destined to be essentialist, it looks

as if feminist theory might thrive better if it abandoned the minefield of femi-

ninity and femaleness for a while.34 Innumerable efforts have been made to

defend Irigaray against the charge of essentialism, suggesting a very interesting

parallel with the efforts to defend Mendieta.

Elizabeth Grosz, however, points out how difficult it is to refuse the categoryof woman. Grosz argues that Moi represents a typical response to feminism of

difference and asks:

. . . if women cannot be characterised in any general way, if all there is to femininity is socially

produced, then how can feminism be taken seriously? What justifies the assumption that

women are oppressed as a sex? If we are not justified in taking woman as a category, then what

political grounding does feminism have?35

Groszs own work focuses on the body as the basis of subjectivity precisely becauseit brings the question of sexual difference most insistently to the fore.36 Here the

strategy Naomi Schor attributes to Irigaray, namely productive mimesis, is well

demonstrated.37 Productive mimesis transforms the dichotomous terms that




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have aligned woman with all those things meant to fortify, complement or

support the role and position of man: nature as against culture, space rather than

time, reproduction rather than production, body instead of mind. In Volatile Bodies

Grosz uses the focus on the body, a term traditionally aligned with femininity, to

transform our conceptions of subjectivity and embodiment. Mendietas work can

be understood to perform a similar function for the alignment of woman and

nature. In other words, both demonstrate how to retain a commitment to sexual

difference and sexual specificity while also transforming the historical meaning

of these distinctions. In this way, their work demonstrates how feminism of

difference serves both a critical function and a constructive purpose.

As model of feminist theory, feminism of difference, with its commitment to

female specificity, also makes sense of the utopian pursuit of feminine difference

evident in much feminist art of the 1970s. Now that feminist art of the 1970s is

being reviewed as an historical moment in exhibitions and publications38 it is

timely to reconsider the complexity of essentialist positions. Feminism of differ-

ence, I would argue, allows us to see what was productive about essentialism and

utopianism.

F E M I N I Z E D N A T U R E

Ana did not rampage the earth to control or dominate or to create grandiose

monuments of power and authority.39 Nancy Speros description of Mendietas

practice brings out what could be called an eco-feminist orientation. In this

ecological orientation, Mendietas work is distinct from most earthwork prac-

tices. While Robert Smithson also referred to the world as mother earth, Suzaan

Boettger has very convincingly argued that he, and the other key figures in the

land art movement (Heizer, Oppenheim, Morris, De Maria, Kaltenbach) were not

motivated by an ecological ideal. She argues that their practices embodied a deep

ambivalence about nature which she acerbically characterizes as going to nature,

but relating to it as dirt.40 Indeed, Smithson strongly objected to the idea that

one should not interfere with mother earth, contending that what underpinned

this idea was an inappropriate projection of the incest taboo onto nature, what he

called, equally acerbically, an ecological Oedipus complex.41

Mendieta, on the other hand, linked an ecological sensibility with an anti-

colonial stance. In two of her lectures, Mendieta links the domination of nature tothe project of colonization: To establish his empire over nature it has been

necessary for man to dominate other men and to treat part of humanity as

objects. This has had a detrimental effect on both man and nature.42 In prehis-

toric beliefs about nature the artist seeks an alternative to the appropriative

masculinist relation to land, space and earth. Of her Silueta Series she says: The

work recalls prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts

made the earth a living creature. In essence my works are the reactivation of

primeval beliefs at work in the human psyche.43 She resuscitates a link between

the female body and space, and its correlate a belief in a maternal world, a belief

that Freud would argue is both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, that is, it lies inboth the prehistory of races and individuals.

This link between the female body and nature conventionally goes in two

directions: the idea of women as closer to nature, which might be the more




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problematic link; and the gendering of nature as feminine. It is this latter

connection that Mendieta consistently and explicitly emphasizes. Neolithic

beliefs in the elements as deities are endorsed by Mendieta as powerful and

important. She argues I dont know why people have gotten away from these

ideas. It seems as if these cultures are provided with an inner knowledge, a

closeness to natural resources.44 Many commentators have linked Mendietas

interest in prehistoric cultures to her interest in the beliefs of Afro-Cuban

Santera and the indigenous cultures of Cuba. But although she performs a kind

of syncretic assimilation of many different ideas of the earth mother, her

iconography is largely derived from Mexican, European and Middle Eastern

sources.45

Her most legible imagery recalls the pose of the goddess with outstretched

arms familiar from statues of the Minoan snake goddess amongst many other

ancient sculptures and reliefs, and which we also find in the work of her

contemporaries Mary Beth Edelson and Carolee Schneemann (plates 3.6 and

3.7).46 Mendieta had a longstanding interest in the art of ancient cultures, which

suggests her familiarity with such imagery.47 Alternative Mexican and Latin


Series, Mexico), 1976. 35 mm

colour slide. Photo:r

the Estateof Ana Mendieta Collection,


New York.




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American sources have also been cited. Charles Merewether suggests that the pose

is redolent of a popular Latin American Catholic image of the soul in purgatory.48

Olga Viso notes that such images were readily available in markets and shops in

Oaxaca in the years Mendieta visited the region. She also cites another possible

Mexican source, reproducing a photograph of Mendieta taken in 1976 with a pair

of candles made in Teotitlan del Valle which represent earth and nature spirits in

an identical pose.49 Mendieta herself states that when I first started working this

way, I felt a very strong Catholic connection, but as I continued to work, I felt

closer to the Neolithic.50

The goddess pose is both striking and unnatural, the exact meaning of the

arm gesture unclear. Often referred to as invocatory, it is uncertain in Mendietas

case to whom such a gesture is addressed, whether to the elements, herself, the

camera, or to us. In the Catholic tradition, Merewether notes, the set of associated

meanings are self-sacrifice, submission and a quest for redemption.51 This reli-

gious meaning would be tempered for contemporary audiences by the appro-

priation of the Neolithic gesture by artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, in whose

works it suggests jubilation, or a celebration of feminine power, energy and

divinity. Mendietas images seem to partake of aspects of all of these meanings,

while also retaining something of the opacity of the gesture, its refusal orinability to be rendered directly into speech.

While gestures are usually considered as always intending to communicate, it

is the muteness of gesture relative to speech that Giorgio Agamben posits as

3.7 Ana Mendieta, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks), 1976. 35 mm colour slide.





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crucial to current understanding of gesture. His intriguing idea that gesture is

both a kind of gag intended to hinder speech and a compensation for an inability

to speak is underpinned by the idea that a natural repertory of gestures is no

longer available to us.52 Whether one agrees that Western society has lost its

gestures Agambens dating is from the end of the nineteenth century it is

certainly true that the gesture Mendieta uses is denaturalized. It comes from a

depictive vocabulary, not the bodys movements in everyday life; thus its meaning

cannot be discerned with reference to our own bodies. It is precisely because it

escapes this kind of mimetic corporeal decipherment that its meaning remains

opaque or enigmatic, despite the innumerable iconographical sources that can be

found for it. The meaning of the gesture is muted, almost deliberately so, as

though it has a private meaning that is not available to us.

This aspect of the gesture is particularly pronounced in the film Rock Heart

with Blood, which records a private ritual witnessed only by the camera

(see plate 3.5). After covering the rock heart with red pigment, Mendieta merges

her naked body with the silhouette, lying face down inside the form. In this act,

she reveals what could not be clearly seen until this point, that the pose of this

silhouette is not quite the same as the goddess pose in Anima, Silueta de Cohetes

(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks) of 1976 and many other works (see plate 3.7). The upper

arms are not outstretched here; they are bent closer to the body. The gesture is

similar to the goddess pose, but with the arms closer to the body the emphasis

falls on the actual contact with the earth, rather than the more abstracted or non-

specific sense of invocation conveyed by the fully extended upper arms. Once this

subtle shift in posture is noticed, it becomes clear that a number of other

silhouettes also use this modified goddess pose.

The film underscores another aspect of the silhouettes that is not often

noticed the recto verso possibilities of the siluetas: the goddess pose could be

read as facing the earth or the sky. Perhaps most importantly, the pose presents

intimate contact with the earth, not quite an embrace or a caress, but certainly in

the domain of some kind of close, private communion. Because Mendietas

movements and gestures are simple, almost restrained or deadpan, and certainly

not expansively expressive, and yet the final action of touching the earth is

extraordinarily evocative, we are left with the sense of witnessing something

deeply moving but without a clear sense of its affective meaning.

This kind of splitting of gesture from expressive meaning is, of course, acharacteristic of much dance and performance art of this period; the inex-

pressivity of the gesture makes it a literal, concrete movement which, when also

shorn of associational meaning, serves to secure it in real space and time. In

Mendietas film this inexpressive strategy serves a slightly different purpose: by

de-emphasizing the bodys expressiveness but emphasizing the expressivity of the

action, feeling is subtly diffused across the whole scene rather than being

concentrated in the figure of the artist. In other words, one has to deduce the

feeling from the whole scene rather than having it conveyed solely by expression

and the gesture. In this way the importance of the earth comes forward as the

affective meaning of the figures actions recede or are withheld.There are at least three other key poses used by Mendieta for the silhouettes.

The goddess pose does not appear in the late 1970s, as Viso notes, when Mendieta

favoured non-gender-specific figural references, such as the mummy-like




15/26

form (plates 3.8 and 3.11).53 Mendieta referred to some of these works from

1977 as her Tut-inspired work.54 She had visited the Treasures of Tutankhamun

exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.55 Her other two poses,

one with arms by the side, and the more contained mummy-like form with

truncated arms that Mendieta also frequently uses, have a less clear provenance;

the latter may be modelled on Neolithic statuettes with folded arms or the

Sardianian Great Mother figure discussed by Lucy Lippard (plates 3.9, 3.10

and 3.12).56

All the poses, irrespective of their degree of legibility when used to construct

an outline of the body, suggest a play between a generalized depiction of the body

and a representation of Mendieta in particular. As outlines without individua-

lized features, made directly on and with the elements, the immediate associa-

tion is with ancient forms of depiction of the body (rock carvings and earthworks

etc.) and the idea of cultural expression embedded or nested in nature. Mendieta

puts the case for this relationship to nature in stronger terms: art must have

begun as nature itself, in a dialectical relationship between humans and the

natural world from which we cannot be separated.57

3.8 Ana Mendieta, Untitled

(Silueta Series, Iowa), 1977. 35 mm

colour slide. Photo: r the Estate

of Ana Mendieta Collection,


New York.




16/26

These departicularized or generalized images, nonetheless also represent

Mendieta herself; it is her own body that provides the template for the silhou-

ettes, in the minimal form of her height or the more exact form of an outline of

her actual body. The muted form of this self-representation means that it is at

once her in particular, and potentially every person that is reconnected to the

earth. This play between the legible iconography of prehistoric beliefs and her

own particular quest to reconnect with the earth is also evident in how she

describes the works. She describes the Silueta Series alternatively as a dialogue

between the landscape and the female body and as an ongoing dialogue

between me and nature.58 The work then functions to assert her place in the

world, an issue that had particular force for her as an exile from Cuba, and to

suggest an ethic of dwelling more generally, that is a kind of co-existence with

nature.

Claiming space is always difficult to disentangle from possession, appropria-

tion and exclusion. It is precisely this problem that Emmanuel Levinas

acknowledges in the epigram from Pascal that opens Otherwise than Being, which

reads: That is my place in the sun. That is how the usurpation of the whole

world began.59 Mendieta addresses this problem by asserting a feminine claim

on space in opposition to usurpation. She notes that men artists working with

nature have imposed themselves on it. Definitely my work has that feminine

sensibility.60 Against the idea of dominating nature she posits the siluetas as a

search to find my place, my context in nature.61 The siluetas only temporarily

claim territory. Mendieta very colourfully describes her practice of marking the

3.9 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1979. 35 mm colour slide. Photo:r the Estate of

Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.




17/26

earth as like a dog, pissing on the ground.62 This territorial action of claiming

the earth is counterbalanced by what she describes as a kind of submission to the

earth: a voluntary submersion and total identification with nature.63 Similarly

she describes her actions as at once transcending the self becoming one with the

earth, through this identification and as a way of making manifest an

objectification of her existence.64 In short, the siluetas show her form as both

continuous with nature and differentiated from it, claiming and claimed by

nature.

In one of her most succinct formulations of this double action, she described

the siluetas as visualizing the body as an extension of nature and nature as an

extension of the body.65 One could summarize her approach then as a non-

appropriative relation to nature and space: a kind of reciprocal insertion of one

thing in another, to use Maurice Merleau-Pontys phrase.66 Merleau-Ponty

develops an account of the interimplication of terms, such as body and world,

which he calls the intertwining or the chiasmus. His work can be understood as

questioning the sovereignty of man over the world precisely through this

emphasis on reciprocity and interrelation.


Series, Iowa), 1978. Lifetime colour

print, 25.4 20.3 cm. Photo:r

the Estate of Ana Mendieta

Collection, courtesy Galerie

Lelong, New York.




18/26

In her analysis of Mendietas work, Amelia Jones has also pursued this link to

Merleau-Pontys idea of intertwined or reversible relations. She argues that the

Siluetas turn the earth itself into flesh and vice versa, and that this instantiates

Merleau-Pontys observation that: There is no limit or boundary between the

body and the world since the world is flesh.67 These descriptions, which suggests

the merger or dissolution of body and world, actually shift Merleau-Pontys

argument quite substantially. His project emphasizes both individuation and

continuity of the body and the world. Joness account of the intertwining of body

and world captures only one part of Merleau-Pontys project, namely continuity,

and misses the equal stress on individuation. The intimacy between subject and

world remains for Merleau-Ponty only as close as between the sea and the

strand.68 This suggests a fluid relation of ebb and flow, coming forth and

retreating back. In this way differentiation is never finished. But by maintaining a

line, albeit a fluid one, the subject is given a sense of embodiment as well as a

sense of becoming. It is precisely this separation or individuation alongside

continuity with nature that Mendietas work performs. A feminine attitude to the

living land thus allows nature to be embodied and female embodiment to have a

place.

This mutuality of figure and ground is difficult to achieve, given our

tendency to focus on the human figure. The desire to emphasize nature as much

as the body might account for the very tight framing of the Silueta Series.

Rarely do we see an expanse of landscape which could be interpreted as the

roomy habitat for the body, or the backdrop for the figures actions. Rather

the picture plane is tipped upwards, allowing nature to appear on the same plane

as the body: horizontal earth versus vertical body is rarely in evidence. Nature in

this tight framing then ceases to be a landscape and becomes figured more as

matter, force, growth, decay (mud, ice, fire, waves, water or growing things). In

other words, nature is not glamorized through photography or presented as an

enticing scene we might want to enter. Mendieta uses the deskilled mode of

photographic documentation prevalent at the time to cut across the pastoral

ideal of nature made into a picture. Claiming territory is not then sovereignty

over the earth, but an inclusion of the body in the natural cycles of birth, growth

and decay.

T E M P O R A L I T Y , S E R I A L I T Y

The use of photography also enables the two desired states described by Mendieta

namely objectification and transcendence of her existence to be given a

further temporal elaboration. Photographs, as Roland Barthes notes, embody the

illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly.69 In Mendietas photographs

the presence and disappearance of the moment recorded is powerfully linked to

the presence and the inevitable disintegration of the figures. This predicable

disintegration adds another temporal dimension to the photographs: not just the

present and the past, but also the future. Unlike most photographs, where the

future is not certain or known, Mendietas insistently impermanent construc-tions make us think of the inevitable future of these images, the time after the

images, or to bring these two moments together the future anterior. In other

words, we can say with absolute certainty when looking at the siluetas: this one




19/26

will have melted, that one will have been washed away, that one will have been

eroded. In short, we know, as Mendieta puts it, that the sites are eventually

reclaimed by the earth.70

Many critics have emphasized this disappearance of the figure, at the

expense of the appearance of the figures.71 And certainly disappearance with

its intimations of mortality is an overwhelming idea that is very powerfully

evoked by the siluetas. But the photographs balance appearance with disap-

pearance. It is here that the power of the serial method Mendieta employs is

particularly evident. Repetition works to assert the present and the appearance

of the figure alongside disappearance. The sheer quantity of repeated actions

the artist made over 100 siluetas insists upon the presence of the body in

nature, underscoring the constancy as well as the variability of the depiction of

the body. In short, the photographs permanently hold onto that series of

moments when Mendieta was there, as well pointing us forward to the work of

time and nature.

The temporality of her film documentation is somewhat different. Henry

Sayre argues that film is a less satisfactory form of performance documentation

than photography because of a less complex relation to time. Drawing on Roland

Barthess distinction between film and photography, he claims that film gives us a

sense of being there, of actually experiencing the scene, thereby losing the tension

between here and formerly, presence and absence.72 While it is certainly true

that film cannot strongly evoke this simultaneity of different temporal orders,

film has its own temporal complexity which turns on the tension between

unidirectional and cyclical time. In films, such as Mendietas, which emphasize

change or process, the passage of time is clearly registered, there is no need to

imagine the natural processes of disintegration or efflorescence (birth in the case

ofGenesis in Mud), the irreversible processes are shown. This is particularly marked

in her films involving fire where we witness a kind of magical ignition (we do not

see Mendieta light the fire), full blaze and the fires eventual extinction. Similarly,

in Flower Person, the floral body floating along the river on a slightly submerged

raft begins its journey as a coherent form and then gradually begins to break up

and lose shape.

Alongside this irreversible sense of time, however, there is also a more

cyclical conception. A film can be watched again, events retraced, the movements

re-enacted, the process reviewed. The sense of things being there before theviewer can thus be magically repeated. In other words, if projection summons

these things into existence and dispatches them again into non-existence when

the film finishes, there is nonetheless always a possibility of resurrecting them,

making them present again. The theme of resurrection that Lippard argues is

central to Mendietas oeuvre is thus inherent in the reproducibility of film

itself.73

If the paradox of photography is the simultaneous sense of here and

formerly, then the paradox of film might be more spatial: here/gone.74 In other

words, the sense of being there is always haunted by the transience of film, its

elusive, immaterial, existence only in the time of projection, just as the finitudeof film its fixed record of a particular fleeting moment in time is undercut by

its reproducibility: the strange unanchored timelessness of this infinitely repea-

table record. Presence is thus accompanied by a kind of incipient absence and vice




20/26

versa. It is precisely because Mendietas films emphasize time passing through

irreversible natural processes that a sense of loss is strongly evoked alongside

presence. Repetition does not resolve loss but it does bring forth the cyclical sense

of time, that these natural processes occur over and over again. The eternity of

nature is evoked as well as the immediacy of experience, to cite Mendietas own

thoughts on the matter.75

In the photographs this tension between irreversible time and the repeated

cycles of nature is not as easily conveyed. One might say that the most powerful

sense of animate nature belongs to the future of the image when the body is

reclaimed. The full strength of animate nature, then, is not so much pictured as

anticipated. So while the body is seen as an extension of nature, nature as an

extension of the body is more imagined than figured. The reversible relation

between the body and nature posited by Mendieta is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it,

always imminent but not realised in fact.76 In other words, reversibility is

always incomplete; as Sue Cataldi explains, the two relations do not become one

another.77 If the reversible relations truly became one, there would be the

undifferentiated condition described by Amelia Jones where the body and the

flesh of the world are indistinguishable. In Merleau-Pontys and Mendietas work,

however, the divergence between the two relations is emphasized as well as the

intertwining and interdependence of the two terms. In other words, the earth as a

female figure and the female figure as part of nature do not coincide or

become reduced to a single proposition. The earth as animate makes the spectator

regard it as powerful or as an unstoppable set of processes, while the solitary

figure as part of nature calls up vulnerability and mortality, being subject to theprocesses of nature, as well as a kind of determined resilience. If the films

highlight the eternal circle of nature birth, growth and death then in contrast

the photographs emphasize the brevity of life. Viewing the films in conjunction

3.11 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series Iowa), 1978. 35 mm colour slide.

Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong,

New York.




21/26

with the photographs allows these two sides of animate life to be dovetailed

together.

One could say, then, following Mira Schor, that Mendietas assertion of the

bond between her body and that of mother earth is an enviably simple idea, butthat its actual instantiation is quite complex. Her resulting images do not, as

Schor asserts, display a problematic lack of ambivalence.78 While it is certainly

true that some of Mendietas statements do at times appear unambivalent and

3.12 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series Iowa), 1980. Lifetime colour

photograph, 50.96 33.18 cm. Photo:r the Estate of Ana Mendieta

Collection, Galerie Lelong, New York.




22/26

romantic, the images themselves undercut this romanticism. Her reference to the

shelter of the womb as a model of dwelling is a case in point. She describes her

works as a return to the maternal source. She says: Through the making of

earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by

nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb.79 One might

think of this oneness with the earth as a mystical experience in a romantic vein

an evocation of oceanic bliss. Yet oceanic bliss is not the predominant feeling

evoked by these images, even if it may have been Mendietas experience when

making them. When larger amounts of landscape are visible the locations are

deserted, and often desolate, suggesting a challenge, if not a threat, to human

dwelling and existence (plates 3.11 and 3.12). Similarly, the traces of the solitary

figure in these images evoke a strong sense of isolation, aloneness, even lone-

liness, alongside the assertion of a temporary place in nature.

Furthermore, the idea of being encompassed by the earth can just as easily

mean being swallowed up by it, as being supported by it. This ambivalence about

enclosure makes its way into Mendietas images. The tight framing of the figures,

coupled with the persistent tilt of the picture plane, makes the siluetas just a

little disorienting and claustrophobic. These negative and positive meanings of

being encompassed or enclosed are well explained by the American psychologist

Silvan Tomkins. The positive meaning Tomkins has called claustral joy; it conveys

the sense of a supportive enveloping environment such as one might experience

in solitude communing with nature, or the claustral interpenetration of the

mutual embrace where each person is inside the other. Equally, being encom-

passed can mean the unpleasant sense of restriction, suffocation and confine-

ment that comes from claustrophobia. Tomkins notes how the memory or fantasy

of the intra-uterine state underpins these contrasting senses of enclosure.80

Mendietas images combine, then, a kind of ritualized communion with nature

a celebration of its power and diversity in which the body participates and

paradoxically, alongside the sense of transience, also a faint sense of immobility,

and restriction.

This ambivalent sense of enclosure constricted and threatening as well as

supportive is perhaps why Mendietas images are frequently described as chil-

ling, powerful, moving or uncanny. Indeed this ambivalent sense of enclosure

adds yet another duality to the complex weave of oppositions that characterizes

Mendietas work: transience and permanence, life and death, agency and deter-mination. In the simple act of reclaiming a feminine link to space the siluetas

manage, then, to call up an extraordinarily complex range of feelings and ideas

about our relationship to nature, our place in it, the power of the elements, and

the resilience and vulnerability of embodiment. If, as Naomi Schor argues, much

can be gained by reinventing the essentialist terms in which women have been

characterized, then Mendietas siluetas are clear evidence of this proposition.

Schor argues womans specificity is to be achieved through a strategy she assigns

to Irigaray: namely, transvaluation of essentialist terms through productive

mimesis. Mendieta achieves this goal for the link between nature and femininity.

According to Schor, transvaluation suggests, rather than a repudiation of thediscourse of misogyny, an effort to hold onto the baby while draining out the

bathwater.81 Mendietas Silueta Series follows this formulation. Mendietas

capacity to generate images that hold in tension such contradictory states




23/26

demonstrates that the essentialist link between the female body and nature is not

to be repudiated.

Notes

Special thanks to Olga Viso and Charles Merewether for their very helpful

responses to my queries about Mendietas work.

1 Mendietas abiding concern with the idea of

mother earth is just one example of a feminized

conception of space. I have discussed a range of

feminized conceptions of space in Sexualizing

Space, Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of

Feminism, eds Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth

Probyn, London, 1995, 18194.2 Mary Sabbatino, Ana Mendieta Silueta Works:

Sources and Influences, Ana Mendieta 19481985,

exhib. cat., Helsinki: Helsinki City Art Museum,

1996, 47; Guy Brett, One Energy, Ana Mendieta:

Earth Body, Sculpture and Performances 19721985,

exhib. cat., Washington, 2004, 186.

3 Sabbatino, Ana Mendieta Silueta Works, 47.

4 Ana Mendieta, A Selection of Statements and

Notes, Sulfur, 22, Spring 1988, 70; Ana Mendieta

Interview, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties,

compiled by Linda M. Montana, Berkeley, 2000,

395.

5 Julia Herzberg notes the retrospective descrip-

tion of this work as the first silueta. See Herz-

berg, Ana Mendieta: The Formative Years, Art

Nexus, 1:47, 2003, 59, n. 11.

6 Julia Herzberg, Ana Mendietas Iowa Years 1970

1980, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 166. Herzberg

notes elsewhere that there was another silhou-

ette constructed at Yagul in 1974, Untitled (body

contour on grass in red tempera), where Mendieta

less successfully traced her outline in a shallow

grave because of the uneven surface. The work is

documented by 35mm slides. Herzberg

concludes that Laberinth Blood Imprint is among

the first of Mendietas silhouettes, although she

also acknowledges that Sherry Buckberrough

told her that Mendieta regarded Laberinth Blood

Imprintas the first piece that used the silhouette

image instead of her body. Julia A. Herzberg,

Ana Mendieta, The Iowa Years: A Critical Study,

1969 through 1977, PhD, The City University of

New York, 1998, 2223.

7 Mel Bochner, The Serial Attitude, Artforum,

December 1967, 2833. Bochners description of

this attitude stresses a kind of impersonal,

almost quasi-scientific, method where order

takes precedent over execution and a prede-

termined process is followed until it exhausts.

This impersonal attitude to seriality is stressed

by Sol Le Witt, who states: The serial artist does

not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious

object but functions merely as a clerk catalo-

guing the results of the premise. Sol Le Witt,

Serial Project No.1 (ABCD), 1966, in Minimalism,

ed. James Meyer, London, 2000, 226. Mendietas

seriality could not be described as dispassionate

in this fashion; interestingly, she refers to the

urge repeatedly to reconnect with the environ-ment as an obsessive act. Mendieta, A Selection

of Statements, 71.

8 See Charles Merewether, Ana Mendieta, Grand

Street, 67, Winter, 1999, 49; Charles Merewether,

From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on

Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta, Ana

Mendieta, ed. Gloria Moure, exhib. cat., Barcelona,

1996, 109.

9 See, for example, John Perreault, Mendietas Body

of Work, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, exhib. cat.,

New York: The New Museum of Contemporary

Art, 1987, 13; Sabbatino, Ana Mendieta Silueta

Works, 47; Mary Jane Jacob, The Silueta Series, 19731980, exhib. cat., New York: Galerie Lelong, 1991,

17; Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geographys Visual

Culture, London and New York, 2000, 1278.

10 Chrissie Iles, Subtle Bodies: The Invisible Films

of Ana Mendieta, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 205. A

selection of Mendietas films was shown in 1996

at the Helsinki exhibition, Ana Mendieta 1948

1985. See the catalogue for a list of eighty-one

film titles, 712. Excerpts from the films are also

included in the film about Mendieta Fuego de

Tierra (1987) dir. Kate Horsfield, Nereyda Garcia-

Ferraz, Branda Miller.

11 Mendieta, A Selection of Statements, 70; Mendieta,

Personal Writings, Ana Mendieta, ed. Moure, 186.

12 Herzberg classifies this work as one of the Burial

Pieces, tracing its genealogy back to Image from

Yagul. See Ana Mendietas Iowa Years, 167.

13 Merewether, From Inscription to Dissolution,

11415.

14 In the list of works at the back of the catalogue

an asterisk indicates Silueta works, see Ana

Mendieta: A Retrospective, 64.

15 Email correspondence with the author, 12

October 2004.

16 Mendieta quoted in Guy Brett, One Energy, 184.

17 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 1967, in Art

and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, 1998,

166.




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18 Olga Viso characterizes this recent trend away

from essentialist readings of Mendietas work as

a development after 1996. The art historians she

associates with the shift are Jane Blocker, Miwon

Kwon, Gerardo Mosquera, Anne Raine and Irit

Rogoff. See Viso, Introduction, Ana Mendieta:

Earth Body, 30.

19 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity, New York, 1990, 1445.

20 Examples of artists who do use their body as

material include Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman,

Dennis Oppenheim, Hannah Wilke, Carolee

Schneemann, Gine Pane, Chris Burden, Marina

Abramovic and Valie Export.

21 Butler, Gender Trouble, 25, 142.

22 Butler, Gender Trouble, 142.

23 Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity,

Performativity and Exile, Durham, 1999, 25.

24 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject,Minneapolis, 1998, 50.

25 Jones, Body Art, 50.

26 This terminology, feminists of difference and

feminism of difference, is attributed to Eliza-

beth Grosz by Naomi Schor in Previous Engage-

ments: The Receptions of Irigaray, in Carolyn

Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, eds,

Engaging with Irigaray, New York, 1994, 6. My own

first exposure to these terms was in an under-

graduate philosophy course taught by Grosz in

1987; Grosz, however, thinks these terms were

common at the time. Email correspondence with

the author, 22 September 2004.

27 I have argued elsewhere that there is a tendency

to view sexual difference negatively. The parti-

cular case I examine is Iris Marion Youngs

examination of female spatiality and motility,

Throwing Like a Girl. See Driving like a Boy:

Sexual Difference, Embodiment, and Space,

Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and

Spatial Inquiry, eds Ruth Barcan and Ian

Buchanan, Perth, 1999, 93101.

28 Elizabeth Grosz, A Note on Essentialism and

Difference, Feminist Knowledge: Critique and

Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew, London, 1990, 341.Grosz and Schor, along with Diana Fuss, have

demonstrated the importance of thinking about

essentialism in more complex ways. See Diana

Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Dif-

ference, New York, 1989; Naomi Schor, This Essen-

tialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips With

Irigaray, Differences, 1:2, Summer 1989, 3858.

29 Irigarays project could be understood as an

engagement with the indeterminate identity of

woman; this historically received position is

precisely what she aims to overcome. This

issue was debated most rigorously in the

feminist literature on Derrida and Irigaray.See, for example, Margaret Whitford, Luce

Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London, 1991,

12340.

30 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.

Catherine Porter, Ithaca, 1985, 212.

31 The desire to bring into being a new construction

of woman is the utopian orientation of

Irigarays work noted by Margaret Whitford.

Whitford cites Marcelle Marinis formulation

of the value of utopian ideas to clarify how

this traditionally futuristic or ideal term

(utopia means, literally, no place) can also

pertain to the present. Marini states that:

the value of a utopia is not to programme

the future but to help to change the present.

Marini, quoted in Whitford, Philosophy in the

Feminine, 20. A utopia such as Irigarays high-

lights the current lack of specificity of woman.

One begins to notice that woman is not consid-

ered in her own terms, and suddenly it becomes

glaringly obvious that woman is constantly

formed to complement man. The utopian possi-

bility of womans specificity also changes present

reality because it is constituted as a telos, the

ground of which is already deemed to be present

in reality. In Irigarays work womans specificity

is grounded in her body. This is at once a repe-

tition of patriarchal conceptions of woman and

paradoxically something that has yet to be

thought.

32 Irigaray, This Sex, 216.

33 Naomi Schor, This Essentialism Which Is Not

One, 48.

34 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary

Theory, London and New York, 1985, 148.35 Grosz, A Note on Essentialism and Difference,

341.

36 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal

Feminism, Sydney, 1994, vii.


One, 47.

38 Gloria at Whitewalls Gallery in New York (2002),

Personal and Political at the Guild Hall Museum of

East Hampton, New York (2002), as well as the

upcoming show at the Los Angeles Museum of

Contemporary Art (Wack! Art and the Feminist

Revolution, scheduled for 2007).

39 Nancy Spero, Tracing Mendieta, Artforum, April1992, 77.

40 Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and Landscape of

the Sixties, Berkeley, 2002, 225.

41 Robert Smithson, Frederick Olmsted and the

Dialectical Landscape, 1973, in Robert Smithson:

The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley,

1996, 163.

42 Mendieta, Art and Politics, and The Struggle for

Culture Today is the Struggle for Life, Personal

Writings, 167, 171.

43 Mendieta, A Selection of Statements, 71.

44 Mendieta, Personal Writings, 182.45 Olga Viso argues that the influence of Santera

has been overstated. Viso, The Memory of

History, 67.




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46 Olga Viso notes that it is unlikely that

Mendieta knew about these parallel practices

until February 1975. Olga Viso, The Memory

of History, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 247,

n. 152. Mendietas silhouettes from 1974 do

not use the classic goddess pose: the arms

are upraised but not bent. If Flower Person, made

in the summer of 1975, is the first silueta

to use this exact pose, then its adoption may

be partly influenced by Mendietas exposure

to the work of Mary Beth Edelson. For a discus-

sion of the complexities of goddess imagery,

see Gloria Feman Orenstein, Recovering

Her Story: Feminist Artists Reclaim the Great

Goddess, The Power of Feminist Art: The American

Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds

Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, New York,

1994, 17489. See also Mary Beth Edelson,

Male Grazing: An Open Letter to ThomasMcEvilley 1989, in Feminist Art Theory: An

Anthology 19682000, ed. Hilary Robinson, Oxford,

2001, 5927.

47 Viso, The Memory of History, 45.

48 Merewether, Ana Mendieta, 50.


50 Interview with Mendieta, Performance Artists

Talking, 396.

51 Merewether, Ana Mendieta, 50.

52 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, trans.

Verena Tomasik, That Bodies Speaks Has Been Known

for a Long Time, exhib. cat., Vienna: GeneraliFoundation, 2004, 111.


54 Viso, The Memory of History, 245, n. 86.

55 Viso, The Memory of History, 58. Viso notes that

Mendietas slide archive also indicates her

interest in Mexican mummies.

56 Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art

of Prehistory, New York, 1983, 40.

57 Mendieta, Personal Writings, 186.

58 Mendieta, A Selection of Statements, 70, 71.

59 Pascal quoted in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise

than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. AlphonsoLingis, Dordecht, 1991, epigraph.

60 Mendieta, quoted in Blocker, Where is Ana, 18.

61 Mendieta, A Selection of Statements, 70. In her

interview with Montana she reiterates this point:

I started doing imprints to place myself and my

body in the world. That way I can do something,

step away from it, and see myself there after-

ward. Performance Artists Talking, 395.

62 Interview with Mendieta, Performance Artists

Talking, 396.


64 Mendieta, A Selection of Statements, 71.65 Mendieta A Selection of Statements, 71.

66 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invi-

sible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, 1968, 138.

67 Jones, Body Art, 41. Merleau-Ponty does indeed

pose the question: Where are we to put the

limit between the body and the world, since the

world is flesh? Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and

the Invisible, 138. However, his answer to the

question of limits is not to deny them, as Joness

analysis tends to suggest. I have discussed this

aspect of Merleau-Pontys work and its impor-

tance for feminist scholarship in Space for

Woman: Towards Thinking in Three Dimen-

sions, in New Literatures Review, 34, Winter 1997,

5772.

68 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 1301.

In this opening section of Merleau-Pontys

description of the intertwining, he is a pains to

point out that the division between our vision

and the visible world, or subject and world, does

not disappear.

69 Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, Image/

Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York, 1977,

44. I am using Thierry de Duves more succinct

translation of the here-now and the there-then. See

Thierry de Duve, Time Exposure and Snapshot:

The Photograph as Paradox, October, 5, Summer

1978, 117.


71 See Miwon Kwon, Bloody Valentines: After-

images by Ana Mendieta, Inside the Visible: An

Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, in, of, and from

the feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher, exhib.

cat., Cambridge, MA, 1996, 168. Kwon argues:

Mendietas use of her/the body almost alwaysapproached erasure or negation: her body

consistently disappeared. Jane Blocker makes

exactly the same point and curiously also uses

exactly the same words, Where is Ana, 334. See

also Anne Raine, Embodied Geographies:

Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana

Mendieta, Generations and Geographies in the Visual

Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock,

London, 1996, 244. Raine draws out the psycho-

analytic implications of merger or dissolution

into the earth, arguing that the repetition of this

act is like a Fort-Da game and hence under the

sway of the death drive. Her provocative accountcaptures the psychological implications of

merger, the oneness with the earth desired by

Mendieta, but downplays her desire for an

objectification of her existence.

72 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The

American Avant-Garde since 1970, Chicago, 1989,

244.

73 Lippard, Overlay, 49. With all films there is always

this possibility of repetition, but with short

artists films, particularly when they are viewed

in a continuous looped format in a gallery

(which was the case in the Whitney Museum

installation of Mendietas films), it is not onlypossible, but often required. Because viewers

rarely enter the exhibition space at the begin-

ning of the film, they may stay until they at least




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reach the point at which they arrived; indeed,

film viewings in galleries tend to encourage this

circular mode of viewing.

74 Mary Ann Doane argues that the paradox of film

is the production of continuous movement with

discontinuous images. See Mary Ann Doane, The

Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency

and the Archive, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 172. She

also notes the contrast between film as perfor-

mance and film as record (24), which I am

building on here.

75 Mendieta, Personal Writings, 184.

76 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147.

77 Sue Cataldi, Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of

Sensitive Space; Reflections on Merleau-Pontys Philo-

sophy of Embodiment, Albany, 1993, 72.

78 Mira Schor, Mendieta was two months shy . . .,

Sulfur, 22, Spring 1988, 101.


80 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: Vol 1

The Positive Affects, New York, 1962, 419.


One, 47.


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