Mendieta’s Conceptual Performative Practice

Americas Society, New York, June 2005 | Miami Art Museum, Miami,Oct. 2005

Ana Mendieta [1948-1985] is renowned for pioneering a genre of art that combined performative actions, body art, photography, and sculpture. Born in 1948 in Cuba, she emigrated with her sister to the United States in 1961 as part of the Pedro Pan exodus; the Mendieta sisters were resettled in Iowa where they were raised by different foster families until their mother joined them in 1968 and their father in 1979.

From 1970 to 1972, Mendieta was a graduate student at the University of Iowa majoring in painting and drawing.

From 1972 through 1977, she was enrolled in the Intermedia Program where she began by doing performative body art, which quickly evolved into earth-body sculpture. Working in Iowa during the academic year and in Mexico during the summers, Mendieta used her body or its outline, the silueta, to create what is today considered her hallmark work.

In 1978 Mendieta moved to New York where she began to broaden her art world connections. On her frequent return trips to Iowa, she worked in nature, reconfiguring the body outline with a variety of natural elements.

As her work evolved in the ‘80s, the silueta referred to an archetypal female image that is both self-referential and of mythical origins. The artist’s diverse aesthetic modes simulated a sense of magic, ritual, and power that she found in the art and celebrations of non-western peoples. 

I will focus on Mendieta’s formative period, her evolution in Iowa and Mexico from ’70 through ’77, during which time the artist’s work set the parameters for her subsequent development.

[Then I will indicate the shifts that occurred as her work continued to mature from 1978 until her death in 1985]

Mendieta’s formative period, from 1970 through 1977, has multiple strands: she stopped painting and began conceptual body work in the Intermedia Program; she taught art to elementary students at experimental schools (Kirkwood and Sabin) in Iowa City (from 1973 to 1975) where she integrated ideas from her own practice; and she concentrated on site-specific work in Mexico and Iowa.These strands were connected conceptually, and thus reinforced the work she did from place to place.

Mendieta used her body to create “narrative environments” addressing: religion, ritual, history, archaeology, art—both past and present—identity, memory, and the connections between art and life.  She embraced the notion that the body was both subject and agent of her work, that she could perform an action or ceremony; record or mark the traces of a site or place, or allude to a life cycle, thereby suggesting the transcendence of all things.

Her work found form and encouragement in the Intermedia Program under Hans Breder, the program’s founder and one of the professors who initiated the Center for New Performing Arts (CNPA). Mendieta is one of the dance performers in Breder’s Mnemonicist, conceived for the CNPA in 1974. Although Mendieta began to take Intermedia classes in 1971 when she was still a graduate painting student, she became aware of Breder’s new ideas for an interdisciplinary arts program in early 1970 when they began a romantic relationship that lasted for ten years. Intermedia emphasized an interdisciplinary approach to art-making, which included an exploration of unconventional materials and supports such as Plexiglas constructions, structured canvases, painted sculptures, light projection on sculptures, and other combinations of materials and surfaces. Breder also emphasized the use of kinetic and environmental elements. Students from different areas in studio art, performing arts (dance, theater, music), writing, and film were encouraged to integrate aspects of their individual disciplines into the development of more conceptual forms of expression. For several years, from 1970 through 1975, the Intermedia Program partnered with the CNPA, which was also officially inaugurated in the fall of 1970. The CNPA developed a singularly innovative interdisciplinary arts program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. During those five years, avant-garde artists and performers were invited to the university to teach, perform, and lecture on new developments in the arts.

Marjorie Strider, Scott Burton, and Robert Wilson came to the university in 1970, Willoughby Sharp in 1971. They were among the first to perform or lecture during the first two years of both programs. Strider and Burton were sculptors; Wilson was a director and choreographer of experimental performance and theater; Sharp, a critic and curator. Each of them contributed to Mendieta’s early formation.

Strider and Burton encouraged making art outside the studio in unexpected places. That notion, central to Breder’s teaching as well, became central to Mendieta’s practice beginning in 1973.

This is Burton’s Furniture Landscape, a three-dimensional sculpture-performance-installation that he presented in a wooded area of the Iowa campus. Truckloads of faculty, students, and Iowa residents went out in the woods to look for the work, which was partially camouflaged by the surrounding vegetation. I think that the hide-and-seek quality of Burton’s work had a lasting effect on Mendieta.  

These are a few examples of her outdoor work, which she hoped passersby would chance upon and take notice. And if that happened, a passerby would certainly wonder about the work’s form, location, and meaning.

Marjorie Strider’s polyurethane foam sculptures became a model for Intermedia students who wanted to try making sculpture in that medium. With a special machine, obtained by Breder, Mendieta did a series of foam sculpture attached to canvases that she exhibited in early 1972 at the end of her first Intermedia course. Her work with polyurethane foam was short-lived, but her experiences with it seemed to have made her aware of the importance of process and timein the making of art.

In fall 1970 the CNPA invited Robert Wilson as an artist in residence to produce Handbill and Deafman Glance. Mendieta performed in both. Wilson’s living quarters became an intermedia community where students, faculty, Iowa City residents, and occasionally performers from New York discussed how artwork could bridge the boundaries between art and life. His daily workshops in body awareness and movement provided several important learning experiences: one, they stressed the importance of the body in creating a scene, a notion she exploited to its limits; two, they affirmed the necessity of spontaneity within a well-rehearsed framework; and three, they taught the importance of being in control of one’s body while performing—an action that required delicacy, balance, and concentration. These ideas were reinforced by Breder as well as by other artists who taught or lectured in both programs.

Mendieta adopted these ideas, as noted in two very different works, “Body Piece in Baptismal Font” (summer 1974) and “Ape Piece” (June 1975). In the former, her body sculpture was performed in an unused baptismal font in the sixteenth-century Dominican Cuilapan church outside Oaxaca, Mexico. The church complex was built on the site of a former Zapotec temple. In conceptualizing this body sculpture, the artist referenced multiple sources: the sacrament of baptism in the Catholic Church; the forced conversion of native peoples by the Spanish; and the kinectic body sculptures of Breder, who photographed live models with mirrors in another area of the same church.

In “Ape Piece, performed at the All Iowa Fair in Cedar Rapids in June 1975, Mendieta developed her version of a gorilla parody common in circus sideshows in which a person dressed as a gorilla moves through the aisles under the big top. Mendieta, along with Ann Zerkel audited Breder’s summer-school course in which the students were assigned to do work at the fair.

Zerkel, assisted Mendieta in dressing for the ape role. Mendieta had finished all but one requirement, and therefore audited the course. However, she continued attending Intermedia classes because they gave her the opportunity to use the studio, to show her work to graduates in the program, and to further her practice, which was evolving outside the formal curriculum. Mendieta’s “Ape Piece” piece recalls Joseph Beuys’s, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in which the felt-wrapped artist lived with a coyote in a cage for several days in the Rene Block Gallery in New York City. 

The critic Willoughby Sharp came to the university to lecture in spring 1971 on the most recent developments in body art, a term he coined in his first magazine article “Body Works” that appeared in Avalanche in fall 1970. The magazine was a critical vehicle for disseminating new directions in the various forms of body, conceptual, and minimalist art. Students became very familiar with the contents of the magazine in the Intermedia studio, where copies were available (1970-1976). Sharp showed videos and lectured on the work of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, William Wegman, among many other innovating artists.

Franklyn Miller, a professor of film and video at the university and a collaborator in the CNPA performances, commented that Sharp was an “important vector” in disseminating knowledge of some of the recent artistic modes. He also provided the language and critical framework with which the students—and faculty as well—could articulate their visual explorations. The work Sharp showed, in conjunction with the discussions that took place in the Intermedia studio, inspired Mendieta with new expressive possibilities for using her body as a performative medium. After Sharp’s visit, Breder focused on the body as an agent in art. In  Rubbing Piece  of 1970, Acconci rubbed his left forearm for an hour until he had a sore. The notion of inflicting pain or causing discomfort by pushing the limits of the body was an objective of many early performance works. Mendieta did not subscribe to that aspect of practice.

Mendieta’s Facial Cosmetic Variations was among her first performative works documented in the Intermedia studio in spring 1972. One of the artist’s objectives in this series was to perform a piece in which she could re-present her everyday look to get a different sense of self. In this frame Mendieta alters her appearance by forming a weblike mass over her face, and in another her hair is twisted on top of her head. Intermedia students One of the artist’s objectives in this series was to perform a piece in which she could re-present her everyday look to get a different sense of self. In this frame Mendieta alters her appearance by forming a weblike mass over her face, and in another her hair is twisted on top of her head. Intermedia students were discussing the work and ideas ofMarcel Duchamp. Mendieta’s series recalls Man Ray’s Marcel Duchamp with Shaving Lather, a study for Monte Carlo Bond. Facial Cosmetic Variations also calls to mind the later piece, Loving Care  by Janine Antoni, a performance in which the artist mopped the gallery floor with her dye-soaked hair, conjuring images of gestural painting, a la Jackson Pollock.

From spring 1972 through 1973, Mendieta continued her experimentation with body change. In her Facial Hair Transplants, she transferred the facial hair of a friend, Morty Sklar, onto her own face in a slow, deliberate ritual, suggesting a gender transformation, similar to Duchamp’s famous L.H.O.O.Q whose image of the Mona Lisa he altered by adding a moustache and beard. Because Duchamp radically transformed the appearance of the enigmatic woman, he was an important model for Mendieta, who cited him in her master’s thesis. Body art was about creating new identities, however temporarily.  

1973 marked a period of transition. Mendieta finished most of her formal coursework for her master of fine arts degree, although she continued attending Intermedia classes. She began producing site-specific work, participated in CNPA programs, and began working in Mexico. In 1973 she did a year-long exploration on the subject of rape and violence. This is one of thirty-five shots featuring different positions of Mendieta performing a rape-murder in a private wooded area in front of the camera. She combined ideas from various sources: the actualcampus murder of a female student, Scott Burton’s site-specific Furniture Landscape, and Duchamp’s view of a naked woman through a peephole in Etant donnée.

In viewing the slides in the sequence they were shot, one senses the detailed planning of a crime that no one discovered, because it was staged privately. But in creating the performance piece, Mendieta relied on fact, fiction, and theatrical know-how. The work is characteristic of the way she had begun to instill the element of surprise into her work wherever it was produced. Mendieta's performance work concerning rape places her in the vanguard of contemporary women artists such as Suzanne Lacy who did several works on that subject. Lacy's artist's book Rape Is of 1972 is a textual chronicle defining physical violations.

In Mourning and in Rage is a performance piece that features women dressed in black robes silently protesting in front of a public building. Neither, however, graphically alluded to the physical violence implicit in Mendieta’s tableau.

That same fall Mendieta directed “Freeze,” a movement piece with her fifth- and sixth-grade art students from the Sabin school, in a CNPA performance. Mendieta periodically called out “freeze,” at which point each child stopped and held his or her position for a brief time without moving. One of the ideas behind the piece was to capture a series of natural body movements while communicating the notion of the body as a sculptural form. In the program Mendieta wrote a brochure in which she set forth her conceptual approach to art-making, stating that time, process, and ephemerality are elements of artistic creation.