A massive colour photograph of a ruined ancient site greets visitors outside Ana Mendieta’s engrossing exhibition at Tate Modern, immediately signalling a departure from the norm. The image feels more at home in a British Museum show about a lost pre-Columbian civilisation than in the concrete citadel of the Blavatnik wing. Yet, in her imagination, that is precisely where Mendieta belonged. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the United States at age 12 to flee the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. Home, for her, was the past, and she would excavate the very origins of art and mythology.
Primeval Substances and Fiery Silhouettes
Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers, and sand, handling these primeval substances as if they were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing human figures with gunpowder on the ground or on tree trunks, then setting them alight. The flames leave behind scorched shadows of a person, evoking victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii entombed in ash. Confronted by a row of these burnt ghosts emerging from real tree trunks, viewers almost expect them to speak like shades of the dead.
More often than not, the human shape that merges with nature is Mendieta’s own. In one photograph, she stands covered in brown mud against a tree so that her body seems to sink into the bark, vanishing into it. In another, a female figure—the artist yet also a universal, totemic being made of mud—decays slowly in a pool of water.
Dark Humour and Self-Exploration
Yet Mendieta was not above joking. She poured animal blood on a sidewalk so that it looked like a human bloodstain and surreptitiously photographed passersby as they tried to puzzle out this disturbing trace of violence. In another early work, she tries on a florid moustache, comically addressing her uncertainty about who she was and where she came from.
Return to Cuba and Rupestrian Sculptures
She returned to Cuba for the first time in 1980. Then, in 1981, just two years after her father was released from a political prison there, she carved stunning limestone sculptures in quiet nooks of a nature reserve. Her black-and-white photographs make these Rupestrian Sculptures—the name simply means “composed of rock,” a tautological joke—look like enigmatic traces of a lost civilisation. Curvaceous fertility goddesses resembling the Venus of Willendorf and other abstracted female forms, bat-like or perhaps alien, with vaginas like holy portals, rise out of rock formations as eroded yet enduring masterpieces of human culture. Mendieta created them hoping walkers would come across her works and ponder them.
Distinct from Land Art Peers
She was not the only modern artist to dream of—and even fake—an ancient, prehistoric past for the Americas. Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty aspires to be a US answer to Stonehenge, sinking and resurfacing in the Great Salt Lake; James Turrell’s Roden Crater and Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field have similarly primeval aspirations. But Mendieta is different. She eschewed massive monuments for more idiosyncratic gestures, such as a human silhouette made of flowers. Instead of the abstract language of modern American art, she depicts actual divine figures, a personal mythology as weirdly coherent as William Blake’s. Peppered among the photographs, films, and objects are drawings, including lovely sketches on leaves, in which Mendieta develops this surrealistic imagery. She brings her graphic imagination directly into nature, making her imprint in a muddy wasteland, or a figure composed of white flowers in a coffin-like grassy rectangle, or another deep imprint of herself in mud filled with red pigment like blood.
A Feminist Cosmology Carved in Earth
This artist is irresistible. She does not just make startling interventions but presents a worked-out theory of the cosmos. She strives to reconnect art and nature around a feminist mythology of ancient goddesses, half forgotten, whom she literally digs out of the soil or reveals hidden in trees by fire sacrifice. This is art rooted in organic matter—in leaves and ashes—with an unfettered ability to produce unforgettable images. It is also art for now.
Mendieta died in 1985 aged 36, in highly controversial circumstances. This exhibition makes nothing of that, and nor will this review, except to say her art has infinitely more life than the bricks her husband Carl Andre sold to the Tate years before he was accused, then acquitted, of her murder. A Mendieta who never fell from her apartment would be absolutely at the forefront of art in this century. But then again, she would have been equally at home in the Stone Age. It is now claimed by some archaeologists that the stencilled images of hands found in Palaeolithic caves are female. Years ahead of this thesis, Mendieta made a mould of her hand and turned it into a branding iron that she used to burn her handprint into the earth—and into history.
Ana Mendieta is at Tate Modern, London, from 15 July to 17 January.
