“My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the material source.” – Ana Mendieta
There was a time when I thought a lot about violence against women and children. My boyfriend threw a teen-age me out into the snow with my pj’s on. Soon after I was raped by a stranger who broke into my apartment. A 40-year-old me went into classrooms to discuss patterns of domestic violence with the students. I even made a public service announcement for TV that begged people abused at home to “tell and tell and tell until someone believes you”. My son’s joke was that I taught family violence. Ouch. I hadn’t thought about it much for some time until 2 years ago when I read Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, in which she poetically catches the arc of a relationship with an abusive partner. It sounded achingly familiar until she wrote “Carl Andre almost certainly shoved Ana Mendieta out the thirty-fourth-story window of their Greenwich Village apartment and got away with it.” How did I not know?
I love Ana Mendieta’s artwork. I must have become aware of her work in the late 1970’s when I followed feminist artists closely – when I WAS a feminist artist. She was a performance artist/photographer who created relational rituals between her body and the earth. Those earth/body photographs moved me deeply. I wondered why I hadn’t seen any new work of hers for some time, but I don’t follow the art world like I used to, and I never followed artists in a “People” magazine kind of way. When I read this, all I could think of was, “I hate Carl Andre’s work for all the same reasons I love hers. How could they have been a couple?” Apparently still living 35 years after Mendieta’s death in 1985, Andre is a minimalist sculptor whose works are big, simple geometric shapes that dominate the land. Minimalism was all the rage in the sculpture department when I went to art school. The students and teachers there were very into being macho, women hating and grunted a lot. I didn’t like them or their art.
I have been thinking about violence against women lately. During the COVID 19 shutdowns, many people have been trapped at home and have not been able to escape their abusers. The local family abuse center is just now seeing a rise in calls for help as people start to imagine stepping outside. At the same time, Turkey withdrew from the European Council treaty protecting women from violence and the US Congress is conflicted about continuing the lapsed Violence Against Women Act even as one of the recent mass shootings was a deadly act of violence aimed at women. So, I have been obsessed with Ana Mendieta.
Some people think that her work is ever more popular because of the terrible story of her death during (according to the 911 call) a fight with her husband about their careers as artists. He was tried for her death and was found innocent for lack of evidence that her fall was not an accident. But her death does not define why I love her work. Her work shows what it feels like to have a profoundly interconnected relationship with the rest of the earth. It is erotic in the sense that it is fully integrated, sensual, alive. That relationship is not romanticized. Her earliest pieces unflinchingly show how cruelly that erotic relationship is violated through violence against women and the earth.
In 1973 Mendieta was finishing her art studies at the University of Iowa when another student was brutally raped and murdered. Some of the students formed one of the country’s first rape crisis lines. One of them assisted Mendieta in showing the emotional impact of the campus rape. Mendieta staged “Rape Scene” in which she tied herself to a kitchen table with her underwear around her ankles, dried blood down her legs and on broken furniture and dishes on the floor. In 1973 I was still trying very hard not to see the violence I experienced as a woman. If I saw a piece like this, I would not have looked at it. I would have had to disassociate from it to survive.
Ana Mendeita used blood in her work throughout her career. She used it in pieces, for instance, that referred to domestic violence experienced by her sister. But she rejected the notion that blood = violence. Like all symbols, she used the blood in a much more nuanced way: signifying the life force, natural cycles and the mysterious spiritual force of the Catholic sacrament of Communion.
As spring light lures me back out into the world, I have been feeling through images the things that are important to me: human bodies, the rest of nature, erotic relationships that enliven us, violent relationships that kill us. Since I think through images, it is art like Ana Mendeita’s that help me feel more consciously. Her images help me (in her words) ‘reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe….to return to the material source.’
As the growing light lures us towards quickening the erotic life force, what enlivens you? What helps you see, feel, hear, be conscious of, think about those things that deaden your senses and/or stir them fully to life? What unites you to the Universe? What helps you return to the material source?