ENERGY CHARGE:

Connecting to Ana Mendieta

ANA TERESA FERNáNDEZ

KATE GILMORE
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
SEPTEMBER 24 – DECEMBER 31, 2016

CURATED BY

AN A M ENDIETA
Heather Sealy Lineberry
Julio César Morales SIMONE LEIGH
TEXTS BY
Heather Sealy Lineberry
Julio César Morales
Anuradha Vikram
Raquel Cecilia Mendieta
GINA OSTERLOH

ANTONIA WRIGHT

2 3
ENERGY TRANSFER
ANURADHA VIKRAM

To understand Ana Mendieta’s influence, her brief but enduring career must be viewed as a
crossing of conflicting ideas about what art can be. The symbolic and the phenomenological
compete for primacy in most discussions of her work. Symbolic readings often dominate,
perhaps because the traditional forms of art history and criticism, as well as political activism,
are dependent on them. Though consideration of phenomenological approaches in her work has
been less prevalent, it is very much warranted. The title of the ASU Art Museum exhibition,
Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta, speaks to the affective and emotive power of the
artist’s work, which is apparent across distance, time and photo-digital reproduction.

Historical analysis aside, the most immediate response to the work of Ana Mendieta is one of
grief. Tragedy of historical and personal proportions characterizes the artist’s life and imagery.
But in order to understand her practice through this lens, it helps to ask, as Judith Butler does,
“whose lives are to be regarded as grievable?”1 Mendieta and her sister Raquelin arrived in Iowa
as refugees from Cuba, the middle-class daughters of U.S. sympathizers who anticipated the Bay
of Pigs invasion shortly to occur. The evacuation along with Mendieta’s education and social
conditioning prepared her for the expectation that her own life would be grievable — worthy
of the expenditure and generosity of others to sustain. The refugee camps that greeted her on
arrival told a different story. Her personal narrative was displaced by the social perception that
she was alien, or enemy.

Later, as a student at the University of Iowa, Mendieta began to explore this question of whether
her life, or the lives, histories, and cultures of women of color, could be grieved for. Initially
she sought to provoke grief, and to implicate those who could experience it only selectively. In
Rape Scene (1973), she challenged the University of Iowa community on its inability to mourn
a female student raped and murdered on campus the previous year. Using her own body at the
center of this scene, Mendieta challenged the viewer to grieve for the violence that the collective
has failed to prevent, or to avenge.

Sweating Blood (1973) complicates the dynamic of the earlier work. As blood seeps from the
artist’s hairline, Mendieta appears impassive. It is unclear whether the violence is externally
or internally inflicted. The work is uncanny, evoking a state between life and death. Judith
Butler writes of interventionist states that would utilize “democracy” as a pretense to advance

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imperialist interests, such as in the Bay of Pigs, “here I am wondering whether there is not also
a differential way of regarding populations, such that some are considered from the start very
much alive and others more questionably alive.” If, as Butler argues, the “human” or “grievable” is
attributed to certain populations and withheld from others based on a collection of characteristics
including cultural similarity, political allegiance and competition for resources, then those who
are not included are perceived as uncanny, half-alive and a direct threat to the survivability of
the dominant culture or social order. Mendieta consistently disrupts the signifiers of alike and
unlike in her work, holding space on both sides of this binary as a manner of stretching, rather
than attacking, a cultural paradigm that reinforces certain expectations of humanity according
to Humanist concerns.
The question of disappearance, of who grieves the disappeared, is asked again by Antonia Wright
in Are you okay? Havana, Paris, Miami (2011-2015). Each of the urban landscapes in which
Wright performs the piece bear their own memories of grief, and of disappearances. Havana and
Miami share a community of Cubans, and all three cities share a history of indigenous genocide,
slave immigration and civil war. Havana, Mendieta’s birthplace, was established as a colonial
capital and is now the base of a post-revolutionary totalitarian regime. Miami, el Dorado, is the
dream city of the Conquistadors, home to refugees of U.S.-backed dictators in the Caribbean.
Paris is the epicenter of Enlightenment Humanist philosophy, built atop catacombs, much as
Enlightenment rhetorics of rationality and universal progress are built atop the bloodshed of the
Age of Empire. As locals walk by, their failure to connect with the artist’s display of emotion, or
to behold her humanity in the periphery of their vision, is a method of self-preservation from a
collective grief that is overwhelming.
When Ana Teresa Fernández paints her skin black to invoke the disappearance of the 44
murdered students at Ayotzinapa in her native Mexico in Erasure (2015), she applies the
discourse of painting to performance in a way that descends from Mendieta’s application of
sculpture discourse to performance. Using her own body as a canvas, she takes a position of
political solidarity with the indigenous communities of her homeland while acknowledging
that the most valuable act she might offer them is to erase herself. In her work, Fernández has
repeatedly explored the labor of expectations that marginalized people, including women of
color, are expected to perform. Her performances, which are always realized in the idealized
female uniform of a black minidress and heels, allow the artist to question why we continue
to allow female identities and lives to be sacrificed to violence. More recently, she took this
gendered labor of care to the U.S.-Mexico border. Against a bright blue sky, the artist painted
posts along the border fence sky blue while dressed in her high-femme uniform. In the new work,
Fernández foregrounds the acts of erasure that underlie her practice as a whole, disappearing in
front of our eyes as Mendieta often would.
Like Mendieta, Kate Gilmore usually performs alone with a camera and cinematographer,
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creating video works that question male-dominated cultural values through ritual action. Her
use of paint and clay in the video works in Energy Charge is a satire of the macho rhetoric that
inflates the artistic contributions of men and devalues those of women. Gilmore emphasizes
traditionally feminine characteristics in her appearance while engaging in these acts of rigorous
physical endurance. Mendieta prefigures these artists in her use of explicitly female-identified
imagery, her political engagement, and the high level of physical difficulty in her performance
work.
Given her site-based practice, Mendieta can be situated within the scope of the history of Land
Art. This movement first made waves in the late 1960s, in part by appropriating aspects of Latin
American art and architecture already present in the Americas. Mendieta’s Mexican Siluetas of
the 1970s respond to that historical context and to the deconstructed Romanticism of works
like Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969). Her interest in phenomenology is
evident in Ñáñigo Burial (1976), a silueta sculpture made of 47 black candles that burn away
to reveal the artist’s body outline. When lit, the work’s presence in the galleries demonstrates
the titular “energy charge” of works such as Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (1976).
This digital transfer of a Super-8 reel, in which a silueta made of fireworks ignites and fizzles in
the Mexican desert, anticipates the event-based land art of artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who made his
first firework piece in 1990.
As a performance artist, Mendieta is among the pioneers of the genre, helping to develop its
specific vocabulary of spiritual inquiry through physical self-negation in the 1970s. Videos
from the artist’s estate lent for Energy Charge such as Creek and Burial Pyramid (1974), and
photographs in this vein, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints) (1972/1997) and Untitled (Silueta
Series, Mexico) (1973-77), depict Mendieta in situations that are physically challenging in
the extreme, such as buried under a pile of rocks, or submerged in a running stream. These
works are in line with the aggressive physicality of the artist’s performance art contemporaries,
including Chris Burden, Marina Abramović and Vito Acconci, and establish these parameters
in the first wave of this mode of practice. In fact, her performance works exploring landscape
and site specificity establish an interest that Acconci, and to a lesser extent Burden, would only
later identify.
Another way that Ana Mendieta should be considered is in the context of the Pictures Generation
of artists alongside whom she came to prominence in New York in the late 1970s. Though she
foregoes the ironic detachment and the commercial imagery of Pictures artists like Richard
Prince or Sherrie Levine, she has something in common with them. This is most evident in the
work she makes in photography and video, using her own body, akin to Cindy Sherman. Both
artists use self-portraiture to assemble and deconstruct feminine archetypes. On a deeper level,
Mendieta is using the same cultural appropriation and remixing techniques in assembling her
figurative language from research into Afro-Latino syncretic traditions. She is “quoting” the
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same way Prince does from advertising, or Levine from art history, in that her relationship to
the source material is not “authentic” — the artist’s own upper-middle-class Catholic upbringing
did not include the goddesses or rituals that she depicts in her work. It is appropriated, and
moreover, oriented toward an audience experience that is similarly distanced, witness only via
mediated photographic and video channels. This speaks to the displacement of both social ritual
and belief onto imaging media, and away from lived experience.
Mendieta’s photo and video works similarly negotiate the mediated image and how the distance
it creates between viewer and performer reflects that created by time and memory. It is precisely
because the image quality of Mendieta’s videos and photographic is somewhat crude that the
viewer experiences the sensation of a life force, remotely transmitted. This puts Mendieta’s
work very much in dialogue with the works that Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer made in
response to reading anthropologist George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (first published in 1962),
including the former’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and the latter’s Double Negative (1969-70). Kubler’s
concept of “transmissions from the void,”2 carried over time from human ancestors to present-
day observers through archaeological objects, is derived, significantly, from his specialization in
pre-Columbian art. Similar ideas are in evidence in Mendieta’s work, in that her interventions
are modest, not monumental, and usually not permanent, unlike the architectural ambitions of
her peers. Their signal transmissions are weak, and weakened further by the added static of
video or photographic intervention.
Like Kate Gilmore, Simone Leigh is interested in how women are entrapped by femininity,
and how the celebration of women as carriers of family and cultural bonds, in opposition
to a productivity-oriented definition of masculinity, is both empowerment and objectification.
As with Gilmore, her work in Energy Charge takes the form of meditations on art objects as
a manifestation of these conflicts between systems of value. In Waiting (2016), the clay atop
a potter’s wheel forms a life-sized urn from the mouth of which extends the head of a Black
woman. Her body is a literal vessel, her head rendered decorative and her body invested with the
values of others. Through social engagement, Leigh creates nurturing frameworks to counteract
this feeling that so many women experience. Adjacent to the video is a pair of ceramic objects by
Beatrice Wood, the California sculptor, and Arts and Crafts Movement grand dame. The noted
libertine was also a student of folk art from around the globe, and like Leigh, she connected
this interest with her feminist life choices. In dialogue, the two artists’ works resonate with the
warmth of a sisterhood across time. This dynamic is one source of the titular “Energy Charge.”
Gina Osterloh’s work pushes us through Leigh’s meditation on the object, and traditional
understandings of Mendieta’s approach to embodiment, into the space of the void, where
entropy rather than energy takes hold. To embrace the void is to reject positivism. It is to
eschew constructive action, productive labor, and social conformity. In works such as Press and
Outline (2014) and Orifice and Color Field (2007), Osterloh works with a conceptual and formal
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language that invokes the ancient Buddhist principle of ahimsa, in which inaction is not passivity
but a call to non-violence.
The void is an absence at the center of abundance that speaks to the illusory nature of reality.
In the language of abstraction, it plays a role not unlike the tiny ants that overrun lush flowers
in a seventeenth century Dutch still life painting, which is to remind us of the impermanence
of pleasure and the inevitability of death. Osterloh, a Filipina descended from a culture forever
transformed by the Spanish galleon trade, is an inheritor of this tradition as she is of the Buddhist
one, and she uses the void as an allegory for the part of herself that can never be quantified,
subjugated, or assimilated. This absence is one that Mendieta carved out of earth, sand, and
ultimately rock, working too with various forms of resistance, to express the immensity of
cultural and historical loss wrought by the colonial project.
The entropy in her work reflects how, as the artist’s teacher, art critic John Perrault describes,
“Mendieta saw the earth as a living body, and she wanted to be one with that body. Nevertheless,
the tragic sense of exile that informs her artwork suggests the separateness from nature and spirit
that is almost the definition of modern life.”3 He continues, “Mendieta’s art tries to overcome
this separation, and it is this, not some formal strategy, that accounts for the power of her body
of work, for we are all in exile.” This relation in her work between cultural exile in the present
and the past, and humanity as a species in exile from harmonious coexistence with the rest of
the natural world, suggests her practice has some resonance within contemporary discourses
of the Posthuman: the understanding of human rights and agency as broadly applicable to both
humans and other living organisms; and the Anthropocene: the geological phase thought to now
be underway as a result of climate change caused by human activity.
In the context of indigenous feminisms, these futuristic-sounding concepts are actually quite
ancient, and they have corollaries in Mendieta’s practice. For her, engagement with historical
narratives eventually takes the form of archaeologically-minded permanent installations
embedded in natural environments — the Rupestrian Sculptures created in Cuba between
1981-1983. This period is represented in Energy Charge with works on paper bearing related
forms, Untitled (Amategram) (1981), La Concha de Venus (1982), and two Untitled (1983-84)
drawings in which similarly schematized female forms to those in the Rupestrians appear. These
are symbols of human embodiment becoming hybridized with other organic elements, such as
plants and stone.
This essay, like the exhibition Energy Charge, submits that an experiential and phenomenological
understanding of Mendieta’s work is essential in order to situate her practice within history,
culture, and expectations of women’s roles and contributions. The scope of her interests being
immense, and encompassing figuration and abstraction, Primitivism and the Posthuman, it seems
a disservice that Mendieta would still most frequently be described as an artist of the body.
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To reduce her work to its insertion or excavation of her own body or its schematic referent
prioritizes the work’s visual symbolism over its material or durational elements. Mendieta’s
engagement with antiquity and archives of cultural memory points toward a research-based
approach to institutional critique that would emerge as a popular means of re-imagining cultural
memories and collective narratives among artists of her generation, working shortly after her
death. Mendieta is already doing this even prior to the Siluetas, using forms associated with the
Minimalism of her contemporaries and questioning their totalizing anthropometry, as in Untitled
(Blood Sign #1) (1974), where the phrase “There is a Devil Inside Me” invokes and subverts
Robert Morris’s 1962 I Box and the orthodoxy of white male universalism while commenting
on the suppression of indigenous and femine forms of spirituality through the Catholic Church
in the artist’s native Cuba. This framing is sometimes, crudely, called “identity politics,” but is
more accurately described as a deconstructed approach to traditional systems of display, visual
narratives, and art historical and archaeological methodologies so as to foreground the implicit
reordering of values that these traditions maintain in support of colonial aims and orthodoxies.
In every object that Mendieta makes, the human condition is revealed not through its depiction
but instead through its abstraction.

1. Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” from Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2016.
2. Kubler, George. The Shape of Time. Yale University Press, 1962.
3. Perreault, John. “Earth and Fire: Mendieta’s Body of Work.” Ana Mendieta: a retrospective. New York: The New
Museum for Contemporary Art, 1987.
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