1-Year Plan
Post 4: 10/8/04
Ana Mendieta:
Restaging Depth
Ana
Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972–1985, exhibition
catalogue ed. Olga Viso (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germ.: Hatje Cantz, 2004); Whitney
Museum, New York, 1 July–19 September 2004
Poetry
becomes the site of a critical construction of that which precedes it, and
there is no sense that this process could not continue. The act of criticism,
then, could be a continual restaging in new historical circumstances, not a
reinvestment of orders that had been there all along (like "America"
or "literature" [not to mention "woman" or "art"]).
[Post 3]
Ana
Mendieta's retrospective at the Whitney—ending the same day as the final
events of the Zukofsky conference at Columbia—usefully offers another road to
the construction of the "author" than the one usually taken in
literary contexts. Mendieta died at age 36 in 1985, in mid career or at least at
the very beginning of it, having produced a definitive body of work in multiple
media (sculpture, site-specific installation and performance, drawing,
photography and film) that more than warranted its museum-scale reconstruction.
Her work has been in the process of critical negotiation, in fact, from her
reception among fellow artists and peer critics, to a restaging at the New
Museum in 1987 after her death and a substantial series of posthumous gallery
shows, and finally to the recovery by younger scholars of considerable unknown
work. As period frames for her work changed, by virtue of ideological drift, new
horizons became possible—and that is precisely what one saw at the Whitney.
Her retrospective's success was its restaging, underscoring the poetics of her
work's construction toward unknown contexts.
Unlike
that of other earthwork and body artists, Mendieta's work has been both embraced
and rejected in relation to its ideological (rather than strictly aesthetic)
contents. Ana (whom I knew briefly at the University of Iowa and encountered on
one her working trips to Mexico) developed the vocabulary of her work out of the
formal strategies available to her through the multimedia program at Iowa and
the work of her mentor, Hans Breder, in a working dialogue that clearly led to
the interpretation of her work as dialogic on other scales. The program itself
was a substantial "offsite" laboratory for interdisciplinary art in
the early 1970s, one of many sites for what has since been termed (in a 2000
exhibition at the Queen Museum) "global
conceptualism." For a period, Iowa was the scene of a global aesthetic
practice, and as such it offered all kinds of interpretive frames for Mendieta's
personal experience of displacement (exiled from Cuba and family in the early
1960s). By the time her work encountered its initial reception in mid-1970s
feminism, Mendieta had substantially pushed the available strategies of
minimalism and earthworks into new territory, and her adoption of an explicitly
feminist context of exhibition, at the same time as her marriage to Carl Andre,
developed from already articulate negotiations of history and method. Feminism,
otherwise put, was available to Mendieta at the moment she was available to
it—a historical conjunction that was too simply interpreted in her early,
posthumous recognition. Admittedly, there is abundant ground for this
interpretation in her work: the intersection of "goddess" icons,
female body imagery, and nature is mapped onto her marginalized,
diasporic identity, providing an interpretation that is still readable,
negatively, in mainstream hedging of her accomplishment. In that reception,
something is being taken away by Mendieta's feminism, rather than made by it.
If
horizons of interpretation must remain open to new meanings—a virtual
requirement for living works of art—what is one to do with such period
inscriptions in Mendieta's practice? Looking at her Anima series of Silhuetas,
in which her body outline is fabricated in native materials and torched with
ritual fireworks against the twilit Oaxaca skyline, may to some convey a
symbolic iconography of ersatz depth, a pseudo-ritualism the Burning Man
performs on a yearly basis in the Nevada desert. However evocative Burning
Man may be as an experience, it is too easily interpretive, on the one hand,
and occult, on the other—leading to the central problematic of
depth-hermeneutic art, mystification. The spectator is in thrall—just
so, the modern subject is pinioned by the pseudo-explanatory content available
in the array of symbolic systems offered for precisely that purpose, from media
hype to consumerist religiosity. Adorno's writings on crypto-fascist orators or
astrology charts in the Los Angeles Times in the early postwar period
precisely delineates the problem: the jargon of authenticity redeployed as
occult populism. Goddess iconography, in that sense, simply sets the symbolic
stage for mystification at other levels: a too-available religiosity substitutes
for confrontation with direct experience; though offered as an image of
transformation, nothing of any substance can result. Ideological bondage is
reinscribed: this was the problem with the turn to myth and the deep image in
the poetry of the 1960s—the "honeyhead" of neoplatonic bliss the
unaware can trip into, now redeployed in its feminist version. "Dancing on
the Grave of a Son-of-a-Bitch" (Diane Wakoski) points "She it is Queen
Under The Hill" (Robert Duncan) to the graveyard of ideology. The
poetics of deep image is a mystification—if taken as merely confirming the
properties of genre, of feminist art or postmodern poetry, or if not seen as a
specific conjunction but made into a generalized practice. Amy Lowell leads
the way.
If
the Anima images of burning figures or the sepulchral Silhuetas
might be included in this series, how can we read their poetics of the
image in ways that are not merely reductive? How can we look at Mendieta's work
differently, and rethink the symbolist portents of its iconography? This is
precisely what the recent exhibition suggests that do, granted an already
existing intuition that her strategies of cultural dialogue and
multidisciplinary methods are not limited to the fixity of image. The problem,
to begin with, may be with a poetics in which genre is equated with intended
effect. It is the reinforcement of depth hermeneutics with an image-based
poetics—as if intention and interpretion only align in the self-evidence of
the author's psychological set or visionary state—that is the problem with the
"image" per se. Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is a
caught moment that, it is true, fulfills all the criteria of Baudelaire's
modernism as transitory and eternal. If this is so, a continuous production of
image material, as deep as can be tolerated, might bring both author and reader
into an eternal moment from which we might descend into history, if only to
restore the initial condition of emergency that made us opt for such an inoculation
against it in the first place. Mendieta's negotiations with her materials and
history are anything but such fixity of method, even as they deliberately
construct a series of transformations around their central iconographic core
(for which the Silhueta image provides the exemplary case). Here, it is
the continuous production of image between media that opens a space for
their resonance, rather than fixity, in the future, and for the articulation of
displacement and negativity in the provisional stabilization of her materials.
Depth is nothing more than a memento mori in Mendieta, and this was not,
it turned out, only literary. It was historical—in a series beginning with the
displacement of exile and ending in—
Ana
Mendieta's work is informed, before any claims to depth, by a generous and
productive irony that makes the sequence of its occasions a form of
noncoincidence, rather than hypertrophic reinforcement. In other words, her work
accedes to further horizons precisely because it opens up a faultline between
its inscription within a stabilizing form of interpretation (such as genre or
feminism or poetry). This faultline is identified, from the outset of her work,
with historical and gendered experience—of exile from any conceivable place of
origin, and of the feminine as precisely a material condition of displacement.
There is no "return" in Mendieta's work, it is an open sequence, and
this has consequences for its later interpretation. The seeming ease with which
the Whitney curators created such a loosely configured, evocative
re-presentation of the process and progress of Ana's work is, in itself, a
direct response to its hermeneutical cunning. Mendieta's work is an exemplary
case in which staged displacements are an index to history—the one she was in
the process of making, the one the Whitney exhibition reconstructs. Seen as a
work in progress, displaced from its initial series, Mendieta's intentions are
readable not in the fixity of an iconography, but in the affective
qualities of her images in their discontinuous instances. Material, indexical,
and figural at the same time, her discontinuity counters depth in a continual
restaging.
[Images
from the Smithsonian Museum and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Text copyright © Barrett Watten
2004. Not to be reprinted
without permission, except in
short excerpts in electronic media.]
Ana
Mendieta's retrospective at the Whitney—ending the same day as the final
events of the Zukofsky conference at Columbia—usefully offers another road to
the construction of the "author" than the one usually taken in
literary contexts. Mendieta died at age 36 in 1985, in mid career or at least at
the very beginning of it, having produced a definitive body of work in multiple
media (sculpture, site-specific installation and performance, drawing,
photography and film) that more than warranted its museum-scale reconstruction.
Her work has been in the process of critical negotiation, in fact, from her
reception among fellow artists and peer critics, to a restaging at the New
Museum in 1987 after her death and a substantial series of posthumous gallery
shows, and finally to the recovery by younger scholars of considerable unknown
work. As period frames for her work changed, by virtue of ideological drift, new
horizons became possible—and that is precisely what one saw at the Whitney.
Her retrospective's success was its restaging, underscoring the poetics of her
work's construction toward unknown contexts.