Essay by Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

By Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

one oF the most inFluential American artists of the 20th century, Ana Mendieta, created her most famous pieces in Iowa during the 1970s, within a few miles of my home on the North Side of Iowa City. From the photographs and films that have captured her performance pieces, we witness Mendieta’s body merging into nature and her sculptures, or siluetas, carved into the earth. She left a trail of blood, soil, and feathers across the campus at the University of Iowa, where she was a student of Art and Intermedia. Mendieta’s work moved between diverse public places, such as alleys and storefronts in downtown Iowa city, but she also found privacy in nature along the banks of the Iowa River and Old Man’s Creek. Mendieta placed herself everywhere and yet, apparently, nowhere. In a place that memorializes artists and writers on the names of buildings and engraved on the sidewalks downtown, Ana Mendieta’s absence glares with a sense of erasure. And yet, Mendieta calls to us in present-day Iowa to change how we relate to our environment and the systems that perpetuate violence against women. As a devotee of Mendieta’s art, I question who is made visible and invisible in public spaces and why.

image: “ANA MENDIETA, Silueta Works in Mexico” by QRartguide – George Fishman is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Each day, I walk past the Black Angel statue in Oakland Cemetery where Mendieta performed an early prototype of what would become her Silueta series. The imposing statue of the Victorian angel of death has become an Iowa City landmark through its many urban legends, which inspired Mendieta to perform an almost-ritualistic dance on the grave, over a dark imprint of her body on stone. As a recurring theme in her work, Mendieta danced a thin line between death and life. I have no access to the film of her performance “The Black Angel” (1975), so I am left to imagine her movement through a written description by art historian Jane Blocker and two existing stills. Each time I pass the statue, I ask myself, “Dónde está Ana Mendieta?”

Where is Ana Mendieta? emerged as a rally cry after her tragic death in September 1985. Outside of museums such as the Guggenheim and Tate Modern, people protested against domestic violence and the erasure of women artists in the art world. More recently in the twenty-first century, the world has caught up to Mendieta, solidifying her place as a significant artist and a cultural icon. Major museums around the world feature her art and have curated retrospectives. There has also been a proliferation of scholarly and public writing about her art. About 20 years ago, I first encountered Mendieta’s work at an exhibit in New York City. While I can barely remember the details of the exhibit (Was it at PS1? Or the Brooklyn Museum? Which pieces did I see?), I remember the images of Mendieta making her forehead sweat blood, using panes of glass to distort her body, and gluing facial hair to her face. The exhibit displayed a film of one of her most famous pieces: Untitled (Body Tracks, 1974), where Mendieta holds blood-red forearms against a white wall and sinks to the floor, leaving red traces down the wall in an unclosed V. In the film, Mendieta makes herself so small, and yet somehow communicates a sense of power. As a woman, I registered the tones of violence in the red tracks left behind by blood on Mendieta’s white sweater. But also, as a young Latina in my early twenties, I had never before seen an artist from my culture so prominently featured in a major museum. To have this image of Mendieta leaving her trace inspired a hope in me that Latinx artists, and people, have a legacy in a country in which we constantly face erasure.

I could not imagine that I would one day move to Iowa City and live where Mendieta created these and many other pieces—art that confronts the patriarchal and colonialist systems that still dominate our world. At the age of 12, Mendieta moved to Iowa as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program to relocate children from revolutionary Cuba to the United States. Mendieta and her sister ended up in a Catholic orphanage in Dubuque and then in the foster care system. Although she kept these experiences private, interviews synthesized in Julia Herzog’s dissertation on Ana Mendieta’s life and work revealed the hostile and even abusive environments the Mendieta sisters survived. Mendieta left the safety of her family in Cuba, which at the time was considered a dangerous country, to arrive in Iowa, where she experienced violence in a presumably peaceful place.

Then, while Mendieta was attending the University of Iowa, a nursing student, Sarah Ann Ottens, was brutally murdered and possibly sexually assaulted in her dorm room. Mendieta was deeply affected by Ottens’s murder, and she created a series of artworks that were a “personal reaction” to violence

images: courtesy of author.

against women, such as Untitled (Rape Scene, 1973), Untitled (Bloody Mattresses, 1974), Untitled (Suitcase Piece, 1973), and Dead on Street in Clinton, Iowa, to name a few. In many of these pieces, she disturbed onlookers with her use of blood and materials in public areas, like alleys and parks, that would suggest a scene of assault. In Moffitt Building Piece (1973), a blood-like substance seeps from an office door in downtown Iowa City. Mendieta filmed local people passing, documenting their causal response, or lack thereof, to evidence of violence. By confronting these issues in public, she made visible the daily fears that live in our heads as women, even in a place like Iowa City. And as I write this, a wave of sexual assaults continues to happen at the University of Iowa and other universities across the country, sparking protests. As survivors come forward and speak out on our campus, I imagine how alone Mendieta must have felt in the 1970s, as a one-woman crusade for people to pay attention—to look more closely.

And when we look closer at the landscape, we confront an environment forever changed by colonialist values. Mendieta’s art moves between her future, which is our present moment, and pre-Columbian modes of being, a past which she researched extensively for her art. I interpret her as a “deep time” artist, meaning her work has no temporal barriers, even though she lived a short life. Mendieta time-traveled in Iowa, at places such as Old Man’s Creek, a former Indian hunting preserve south of Iowa City. There she created contact pieces in nature: Tree of Life / Árbol de La Vida (1978), a piece where her body caked in mud disappears into a tree; Creek (1974), where she submerges her body in water; and Blood Inside Outside (1975), where she stands on a riverbank smearing herself in blood. She measured time in blood, suggesting the genealogy between her sanguineous life force and the dead blood of unrecorded past violences. And when she made contact with the earth, her still body disappeared into it, extending her presence back through Iowa’s history of colonialism and environmental degradation.

In this way, Mendieta’s art differs from her contemporaries, often white male artists such as Charles Ray who “planked” their bodies into corpse-like poses in the 1970s and 80s. For these men, their rigid bodies testified to the core strength of their legacy and the power of their relevance after death. In response to her contemporaries, Mendieta’s art disintegrates into time, blending into a landscape subject to environmental destruction both natural and unnatural. Her body is not so much rigid as limp, half covered in grass, stone, or mud, in a dynamic relationship with the earth. In her pieces Creek (1974) and Ocean Bird Washup (1975), she floats in water, transforming her body into driftwood or debris. Intentionally, her art in Iowa City was ephemeral, not meant to last. Mendieta inscribes her own brown body within a genealogy of colonized subjects, anticipating being forgotten in Iowa. And yet, as Joseph Roach says in his book Cities of the Dead, there are ways of being “forgotten but not gone.” Mendieta’s use of technology offers evidence of her power to remember and be remembered. I describe Mendieta’s recording process as what Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli describes as an “inventory of echoes”: “sounds that were present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost” (141). Mendieta used film to create an archive of visual echos, where her body and her siluetas remind us of all that remains unrecorded, and in this way, is not lost. Now, after years of arduous labor by her family, her films have been digitized for posterity, allowing Mendieta’s messages to live on for subsequent generations.

In twenty-first century Iowa City, scholars and artists keep her memory alive through conferences and performances, while waiting for a more material presence to take root. The scholar in me searches for tangible evidence and desires open access to Mendieta’s oeuvre. However—as Mendieta once wrote on a barn wall in Iowa (in blood)—there is a devil inside me, which knows that I must access the intangible by touching the material. So, I return to the Black Angel in Oakland Cemetery for a ritual to understand her art through my body. I enlist the help of my neighbor, Dorian Dean, an artist, and she films me as I mix tempera with egg, and dirt with water. We record improvised motions that recall Mendieta’s performances: I lie flat on the long gravestone; I spread blood and wet dirt over my skin; and I raise my arms in a reversal of the body track. As I embody Mendieta’s Black Angel performance, I leave my own trace, channeled through Mendieta, who remembered others forgotten, but not gone. In this way, we move through time, enacting visibility through our bodies as we remember.

elizabeth rodriguez Fielder is Assistant Professor of English and Latina/o/x Studies at The University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City.