Ana Mendieta, mark-making, criminal defense, teleology & the tides
One of those words I had to look up in the dictionary.
Ana Mendieta’s name is often invoked in the interrogative form.
Who Is Ana Mendieta?
a book published by The Feminist Press in 2011.
Where Is Ana Mendieta?
a hashtag and movement and the title of a book by Jane Blocker.
Why Ana Mendieta?
a catalogue essay from a retrospective in Italy in 2013.
I will take the simplest question first.
Ana Mendieta is an artist who worked in blood and earth, water and feathers, gunpowder and flowers, video, painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, and performance. She did not think of herself as a photographer, a filmmaker, a painter, a sculptor, or a performance artist. Artist, no qualifiers. Her mediums are process and time.
"Art is a question of vocation. I don't have a choice; I can only make what I make,” she said.
I make these essays. Ordinarily, I love reading about art, in part because I enjoy wading through the hyper-intellectual obtuse jargon of theory and academic writing until I can find something solid to hold on to, something to help me float, something you might carry too.
But this was not the case as I read about Ana Mendieta’s work. With each essay, I resisted the distant critique of academe. An intermediary or “expert” to elucidate Ana’s work felt unnecessary and even beside the point. Reading about Ana Mendieta’s work felt like listening to someone explain the moon and the tides.
I had to look up a word this week after reading Maggie Nelson. Teleology: the use of design or purpose as an explanation of natural phenomena.
The teleology of the tides is not where my interests lie.
“Spirituality, art, and poetry have, if you will excuse the paradox, one thing in common,” wrote poet/critic/artist John Perreault, one of Ana’s teachers at the University of Iowa and a lifelong friend, in his essay “The Politics of Spirituality” in Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta:
“They are beyond words. You need poetry to talk about art and spirituality; you need art and spirituality to talk about poetry.”
The language of academics and theorists, in other words, would not do. Only Ana’s:
I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. I believe this to be a direct result of my having been torn away from my homeland during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of my having been cast out of the womb. My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe.
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