Visualising Blood by Rachel Maggart

VISUALISING BLOOD: VIOLENCE, RITUAL AND PURITY IN THE WORK OF ANA MENDIETA, REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO AND ADRIAN PIPER

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, 1973 Lifetime colour photograph 9 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches (23.5 x 18.4 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

VISUALISING BLOOD: VIOLENCE, RITUAL AND PURITY IN THE WORK OF ANA MENDIETA, REGINA JOSĂ&#x2030; GALINDO AND ADRIAN PIPER

by Rachel Ann Maggart 12930259

Presented to the Faculty of the School of Art Department of History of Art in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MA History of Art

Birkbeck College, University of London September 2014

dedicated to my father

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge my adviser Annie Coombes for her valuable direction, as well as Sarah Landry at Galerie Lelong, The Estate of Ana Mendieta and the Adrian Piper Research Archive for providing visual material and image reproduction permission. Thank you to the artists and theorists who have inspired my writing – Ana Mendieta, Regina José Galindo, Adrian Piper and Peggy Phelan – and to my family including Maajid, for their abiding love and support.

Abstract

VISUALISING BLOOD: VIOLENCE, RITUAL AND PURITY IN THE WORK OF ANA MENDIETA, REGINA JOSĂ&#x2030; GALINDO AND ADRIAN PIPER

Rachel Ann Maggart, MA History of Art 12930259 Birkbeck College, University of London, 2014

Supervisor: Annie E. Coombes

Both a problem and a solution for artists, blood has become a medium of contemporary art practice. It is a powerful tool for visualising and deconstructing how are conceived perceptions populating concepts of violence, ritual and purity. Ana Mendieta, Regina JosĂŠ Galindo and Adrian Piper employ blood as a material signpost of immaterial phenomena, dispelling myths and questioning imaginary significations of the substance. They work with blood as it conveys preconceptions attending constructs of gender and race. Selected works by Mendieta, Galindo and Piper, including respectively Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), 1973, Perra (Whore) 2005 and Cornered, 1988 explore the interplay between blood in our veins and as reconstructed in our minds. Contemporary works of art incorporating blood merit our attention because popular notions of blood bear such weight and ramifications in our world. They can help shed light on ways in which blood becomes a divisive substance. Although blood

resonates strongly in the oeuvres of the aforementioned artists, I have not seen another study connecting them under this rubric. Connotations of blood are not normally considered as they are in dialogue with blood's biological roles. Instead, the concept of blood is taken for granted even as it is filled with associations extending beyond blood's chemical composition. I wonder if blood as a concept is ever a translation of blood's physiological functions, and this concern runs through the body of the essay. To this end, I have investigated links between blood's protective and immunological capacities, and its actualisation in social spheres. I have looked at how our body is a lens for sensing amorphous events. I believe to some extent we process external stimuli in terms of our internal nature thus the composition and actions of blood on a molecular level influence its interpretation in the collective sphere. For describing this dialogue, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's models of chiasmus and texts on phenomenology have been instructive. As it is posed through the lens of a female looking at work by females, my enquiry draws heavily upon feminist theory. I apply Peggy Phelan's writings around the Invisible Female as well as Judy Grahn's Metaformic Theory, which identifies early rituals around menstruation or "metaforms" as the genesis of material culture. In examining blood as race, I extrapolate from Emile Durkheim's theories of sacred contagion and discourses of alterity as expounded on by Olu Oguibe. Visualising Blood explores the notion that human social behaviour originates on a sub-molecular level. Perception is attuned to physiological activity, even if subconsciously so. Hopefully through my writing the reader will gain insight into how are formed our preconceptions crowding blood's meaning. I have endeavoured to show through works of contemporary art what sociocultural roles blood accumulates. By visual examples, blood may be understood to be performed and embodied, as well as

operative in the body. If all goes well the substance will be dissected as a moral and political commodity, so that we can approach it more rationally â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as a self-contained element of life.

BLOODSTAINS: VIOLENCE, RITUAL AND PURITY IN THE WORK OF ANA MENDIETA, REGINA JOSĂ&#x2030; GALINDO AND ADRIAN PIPER Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Limitations .................................................................................................... 2 Methodology ................................................................................................ 4 Structure ...................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 Violence .............................................................................................. 7 Blood Heals .................................................................................................. 7 Invisible Bodies ............................................................................................ 8 Excessive Bodies ....................................................................................... 16 Bodies as Sites of Resistance ................................................................... 22 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 23 Chapter 2 Ritual ................................................................................................. 25 Psychic Wounds ........................................................................................ 26 Sacrificial Economies ................................................................................. 31 Catharsis .................................................................................................... 36 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 39 Chapter 3 Purity ................................................................................................. 40 Sacred Contagion ...................................................................................... 41 Hymeneal Blood ......................................................................................... 43 Menstrual Blood and Taboo ...................................................................... 46 Bloodlines .................................................................................................. 49 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 56 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 58 References .......................................................................................................... 61

List of Illustrations Figure 1:

Regina José Galindo ¿Quien puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?), 2005 Courtesy of the artist, Exit Art and prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan: ........................................................................................ 11

Figure 2:

Regina José Galindo Perra (Whore), 2005 Courtesy of the artist, Exit Art and prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan: ......................................................................................... 13

Figure 3:

Ana Mendieta Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1976 From the Silueta Series in Mexico, 1973–77 (Estate print 1991) Colour photograph from a suite of twelve 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 19

Figure 4:

Ana Mendieta Volcan Series, No. 2, 1979 (Estate print 1997) Suite of six colour photographs 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) each © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 30

Figure 5:

Ana Mendieta

Untitled, 1973 Lifetime colour photograph 9 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches (23.5 x 18.4 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 36 Figure 6:

Ana Mendieta Untitled (Death of a Chicken), 1972 Performance, Iowa Image from 35mm colour slide © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 46

Figure 7:

Ana Mendieta Untitled (Body Print), 1974 (Estate print 1997) Colour photograph from a suite of five 10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 49

Figure 8:

Adrian Piper Cornered, 1988 Table, 10 chairs arranged in gunboat formation, television monitor, Adrian Piper's father's two framed birth certificates, lighting Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ill, USA © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin: ................ 53

Figure 9:

Adrian Piper Catalysis IV Performance documentation: 5 silver gelatin print photographs, 16" x 16", (40.6 x 40.6 cm) Detail: Photo 4 of 5 Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna ÂŠ Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali: .................................................................................................. 54

Figure 10:

Ana Mendieta Untitled (Ape Piece), 1975 Lifetime black and white photograph 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm) ÂŠ The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York: ......................................... 55

Introduction Two well-known examples are Marc Quinn's Self, 1991, a cast of his head made from his own congealed blood, and Taryn Simon's A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, 2008-11, in which Simon spent four years recording bloodlines and their stories. I do not mean to lump these works together but only to say that blood has become a medium of contemporary art practice. This is not a trend but evidence of a barrier that has been broken down and a technique that will continue. Artists are able to manipulate and probe the substance when before they were not, in order to reveal something about the ways in which we conceptualise it. For Ana Mendieta (b. Havana, Cuba, 18 November 1948; d. New York, 8 September 1985), blood was “a powerful magic thing”.1 In an undated statement, the artist wrote: "The turning point in my art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the image to convey, and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic."2 Clearly blood was a key to unlocking what painting could not, but why? What could blood reveal, and how? Apparently it is still controversial to use blood as an artistic medium. Even Mendieta, to a certain extent, felt compelled to qualify her use of the substance, saying: "I don’t see it as a negative force".3 Handling blood if one is not a physician is equated

Ana Mendieta (exhibition catalogue). Edited by Gloria Moure. Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 1996, p. 90 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

to witchcraft, paganism, the occult; traditions that are not widely accepted. Perhaps blood externalised reminds us that we are impermanent, human beings. I am interested in conceptual artwork that reflects deeply ingrained connotations of blood and in artists who work with the substance as it engages themes of violence, ritual and purity. Focusing on Ana Mendieta, I will look additionally at Regina JosĂŠ Galindo (b. Guatemala City, 1974) and Adrian Piper (b. New York City, 20 September 1948) to illustrate for the reader different ways in which we reference blood, and what it has come to mean. Concrete examples of works, including respectively Untitled (SelfPortrait with Blood), 1973, Cornered, 1988 and Perra (Whore), 2005, will anchor psychoanalytic, feminist, and anthropological theory, and represent a range of techniques and approaches. Equal attention will be given to blood as it is implied and presented organically. How is the concept of blood utilised by female artists, and to what avail?

LIMITATIONS Although blood resonates strongly in the oeuvres of Mendieta, Galindo and Piper, I have not seen another study connecting these artists under this rubric. The P.S. 1 collective show: NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, which from October 2008 to January 2009 explored "the value of ritual in the artistic process and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art"4 fortunately did not focus on the three as minority female artists. Despite having "retired from being black" in September 20125, Adrian Piper has continued to be racially pigeonholed in shows generalising the work of 4 5

http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/205 http://www.adrianpiper.com/news_sep_2012.shtml accessed 21 September

African American artists.6 For Guatemalan Galindo and Cuban Mendieta, it has been similarly hard to escape the label of Latin American artist, which may impose on a viewer's perception of the work.7 The artists deal with blood as it exposes fantasies of race and gender governing human behaviour. However, this common denominator has not been broached in academic research. Regina JosĂŠ Galindo, although awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Young Artist at the 2005 Venice Biennale, is still relatively unknown to art historians. Despite its wide relevance, her activism can be seen as punishing and therefore not given due exposure.8 Ana Mendieta is celebrated mostly for her Silueta Series and in this light the immateriality of the work. I aim to expand on analyses of the work's materiality, including blood as a primary ingredient.9 Although much has been written on Piper's powerful performative rebuttals to racism and racial identity, to my knowledge her work has not been explored as it addresses blood's elemental, biochemical relationship to xenophobia.

6 Piper

pulled out of the 2013 show "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art" at NYU's Grey Art Gallery, accessed 21 September: http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/piper-pulls-out-of-blackperformance-art-show/ 7 See for examples "Through their Eyes: Reflections on Violence in the Work of Guatemalan Performance and Installation Artists" by Aida Toledo, Anabella Acevedo and Elaine Bolton in n.paradoxa: the only international feminist art journal; 2008, Vol. 21, pp. 56-66 and "Ana Mendieta as a Cultural Connector to Cuba" by Laura Roulet in American Art, Summer 2012, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp. 21-27 8 Exceptions include a Third Text journal article by Claire Carolin, "After the Digital We Rematerialise: Distance and Violence in the Work of Regina Jose Galindo", offers detailed contextualisation for the work, "tracing the ways in which the internet and related digital technologies that have been key to the production and dissemination of Galindo's work have affected its critical reception." Vol. 25, Issue 2, March, 2011, Abstract. Similarly "The Representation of the Female Body in the Multimedia Works of Regina JosĂŠ Galindo" by Jane Lavery and Sarah Bowskill in Bulletin of Latin American Research, compares Galindo's representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. Jan 2012, Vol. 31 Issue 1, pp. 51-64 9 Notable exceptions are Jo Beth Wharton's "The Blood Symbolism within Ana Mendieta's Untitled" and Melissa E. Feldman's "Blood Relations: Jose Bedia, Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, and Ana Mendieta" in Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art. Edited by Debra Koppman and Dawn Perlmutter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999

METHODOLOGY This project formed from a desire to articulate blood as metaphysical. How do we ascribe to material immaterial phenomena? How are intangible concepts elaborated by tangible means? Mine is a study in the visualisation of blood. How did it come to accumulate and how are aesthetically reflected its diverse identifications – vengeance, catharsis, shame? Because the author and the artists are women, we will explore especially how blood is a female issue. How have these women artists re-appropriated blood to display what it means in the female context? What has the fetishisation of Woman got to do blood and how is blood taboo? Blood has been mythologised since ancient Greece, when according to the system of humours it was believed to yield traits of courage, hope and love, producing an optimistic and empowered personality. It has been the only of the four humours thought to express the other three: yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. In 1921 the Swedish physician Fåhræus observed how blood clotted. After being left undisturbed for about an hour it formed four layers: at the bottom a dark clot (the "black bile"); above that a layer of red blood cells (the "blood"); above this a whitish layer of white blood cells (the "phlegm"); and above that a translucent yellow serum (the "yellow bile"). Reading about humourism and Fåhræus's experiment prompted me to consider conceptions of blood as they are in dialogue with its molecular structure and biochemical activity. It seems helpful to have a rudimentary idea of the mechanics of the vascular system when looking at how blood is perceived. How do blood's organic composition and roles translate to an aesthetic realm? I argue that the action or functions of the vascular system – carrying oxygen from the lungs to the tissues,

protecting the body against foreign invaders (e.g. bacteria and viruses) and forming clots so as to prevent haemorrhage during injury – relate to sociocultural conceptions and ways of visualising blood. My goal is to refine my theory through examples of artworks, incorporating blood as an index of incorporeal attributes.

STRUCTURE The body text of the essay is arranged in three thematic chapters – entitled consecutively Violence, Ritual and Purity – in which are resonances of blood on a micro level. This structure represents my own attempt to connect form and content and demonstrate how preconceptions around blood might be affected. In the first chapter of the essay – Violence – I write about the psychology of femicide – policing of female sexuality and subtle incursions into female autonomy. I talk about discourses of alterity transposed to women, in other words, the convergence of Other and Woman in a male-oriented paradigm. The Female relegated to negative space, as a result of a skewed regime of visibility, has been probed by psychoanalytic and feminist theorists. I posit that how violence done to the female body is connected to violence done to the female image. I refer to the writings of Peggy Phelan, who in her text, Unmarked: Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), applies Lacanian ideas of indescribable sexual difference and Slavoj Žižek's "Impossible Real" to visual representation of gender. Phelan's theories of the "unmarked" female sex I relate to Galindo's performance work addressing endemic disappearances of female bodies in her native Guatemala and in Mexico, as well as Mendieta's Silueta Series.

The second chapter â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ritual â&#x20AC;&#x201C; takes up blood induced in religious rites. Mendieta's syncretistic practice points to blood as a divisive and unifying substance which seals gaps between disparate belief systems while obliquely calling to mind violent conflict brought on by religious crusades. Blood is elaborated as a currency of war, redemption and salvation. Here I will refer to biographical details and primary source material including interviews, letters and preparatory sketches by the artist. Annotations of Herman Nitsch of his post-World War II Viennese aktionist experiments inciting catharsis by animal blood letting supplement my analysis. For making sense of Mendieta's anthropomorphic landscapes there is in the background Merleau-Ponty's concept of chiasmus in which nature and man are entwined. I also draw on my own experience of Catholic rites for this chapter. From Ritual I move to Purity, wherein I discuss blood as a moral construct. How has blood as an indicator of virtue or sin been leveraged to suit colonialist and racist agendas? How have hymeneal and menstrual blood influenced conceptions of blood as a stigmatised substance? Here I pull from post-queer and post-colonial ideas including Judy Grahn's Metaformic Theory, which identifies early rituals around menstruation or metaforms as the genesis for material culture. Theories of sacred contagion as elaborated by Mary Douglas in her Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 1966) throw light on how blood has become a feared and stigmatised substance.

Chapter 1: Violence If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene I)

Who will speak for the unseen? Regina JosĂŠ Galindo and Ana Mendieta contemplate this question, dealing through their art with violence done to Woman, conventionally the Other sex. The artists grapple with explicit and discreet forms of violence to women. They question the paradigm on which this fully realised misogyny is predicated. Looking at their work, we can tease apart what factors are at play. Through a lens of psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodern theory, we begin to grasp how female representation on a broad scale is affected by incommunicable sexual difference and resulting dichotomies, economies of substitution, even the global capitalist system.

BLOOD HEALS... How does blood itself respond to violence? Blood and blood loss are not the same, although both have come to evoke violent bloodshed. On a microscopic level, clotting (or coagulation) occurs. Platelets and proteins such as fibrin present in blood plasma facilitate a process by which blood changes from a liquid to a gel, to achieve haemostasis (or cessation of blood loss from a damaged vessel). The reconstituted blood forms a temporary plug (the clot or thrombus) where the lining or endothelium of the blood vessel has been worn away or compromised, to prevent vulnerable red blood cells from escaping and hasten repair of the faulty vessel. Blood is actively involved in the healing process. How do Galindo and Mendieta enact this function of blood?

...INVISIBLE BODIES Regina José Galindo stands before Guatemala's Corte de Constitucionalidad (Constitutional Court), holding a bowl of human blood. Her diaphanous black skirt blowing behind her, she sets it down, dips her feet into it. Then she walks from the national symbol of justice to the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura (National Palace), pausing periodically to apply another coat to her soles, her footprints leaving a trail of fresh blood in her wake. At the entrance of the Presidential headquarters, there is a row of uniformed guards. Galindo sets down the bowl in front of them and walks away. This demonstration, called ¿Quién peude borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?) [Fig. 1], was documented in a 37-minute video. With ¿Quién peude borrar las huellas?, Galindo protested the freedom granted to José Ríos Montt – a former army general who twenty years prior led a massacre of Mayan Guatemalan civilians – to run for President in 2003. Following the "October Revolution" of 1944 led by Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, putting forward a new constitution under which would be practiced democratic values, was a bloody civil war. In a "pacification" initiative between 1982 and 1983, Montt commanded the execution of tens of thousands of Ixil Indian civilians for sympathising with the guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP – Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres), a communist organisation opposing the dictatorship.10 In 1999 Montt was found guilty of genocide by the UN-backed Historical Clarification Committee, a Guatemalan human rights commission to facilitate a process of truth and reconciliation following the war. Born in Guatemala City in 1974, Galindo was only a child during Montt's reign. She recounts: 10

Ironically, the country now holds itself up on tourist websites as a beacon of extant Mayan civilisation.

When it was announced that Efraín Ríos Montt had managed to win acceptance as a presidential candidate, I was in my room, and I suffered an attack of panic and depression. I cried out, I kicked and stomped my feet, I cursed the system that rules us. How was it possible that a character as dark as this would have such power with which to bend everything to his will? I decided then and there that I would take to the streets with my shout and amplify it. I had to do it.11 A tribute to the Mayan civilians whose hundreds of villages were destroyed in Montt's genocide, ¿Quién peude borrar las huellas? was also an injunction of "the system that rules" present-day Guatemala, in which an architect of mass murder is able to reinvent himself as he pleases, and run a Presidential campaign. The work was a poetic channelling of Galindo's rage, and a demand for accountability. It was meant to be a wakeup call to a complicit Guatemalan people. ¿Quién peude borrar las huellas? implicates a climate of apathy. Watching video footage of the piece, a lack of public concern is evident. People seem curious but unaffected. At one juncture, Galindo encounters a crowded marketplace where passers-by drift by her. When she reaches the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura, the guards are still, not one of them moving to clean up the mess on the pavement.12 Her footprints of human blood are not at all a provocation, which is the artist's point: decades of corruption and violence have numbed the Guatemalan people, so that they are no longer sensitive to what is going on around them. Galindo implores, where is the living and breathing "new" Guatemala? Her bloodstains bring up to the surface the

Goldman, Francisco interview with Regina José Galindo, BOMB Magazine online: http:// bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780 accessed 26 September 2014 12 The scene reminds me of an early work by Ana Mendieta – People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, 1973 – in which Mendieta dumped outside her Iowa apartment what appears to be viscera. A series of slides and a super-8 film document the reactions of pedestrians, none of whom cared to stop. Finally a storekeeper named Moffitt cleaned up the mess.

ugliness that has been repressed. People walk around in darkness, and Guatemala's violent history is covered up in a charade. In 2000, Galindo was invited to produce a work on what it means to live in Guatemala. She injected herself with 10ml of the prescription tranquiliser Valium, which rendered her unconscious.13 This reprisal of endemic numbness in a zombie world is present in her bloody footprints â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a tell-tale sign of those walking dead among her, who nevertheless remain in the flesh. The work rebukes Montt for his supreme arrogance, asserting that even if anaesthetisation on a national scale is the consequence of generations of violence endured by a population, their apathy does not blot out the fact that she is alive, undeniably occupying space. The red ridges of her soles and their marks on the concrete are proof of her existence, like fingerprints indexing her irrevocable DNA. Montt may be able to con a country (twice), but he cannot erase his wrongdoing or the lives that he has claimed.

Stallabrass, Julian. "Performing Torture", preface to Regina JosĂŠ Galindo, ConfesiĂłn, Palma de Mallorca, p. 7

Fig. 1 Regina JosĂŠ Galindo, ÂżQuien puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?), 2005

Within the realm of the visible, that is both the realm of the signifier and the image, women are seen always as Other; thus, The Woman cannot be seen. Yet, like a ubiquitous ghost, she continues to haunt the images we believe, the ones we remember seeing and loving.14 These words of Peggy Phelan, from her Unmarked: Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), resonate in images of Galindo wafting from the Corte de Constitucionalidad to the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura, exploiting the blind spot in public vision that allows for victims to vanish and perpetrators to go without retribution. Can blood illuminate the invisible Woman? How do artists mark the unmarked Female?

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 6

Video documentation of Perra (Whore), 2004 [Fig. 2] opens on a stolid Galindo, sitting in a foldup aluminium chair in a grey room. She wears a simple black dress, which is peeled up, exposing her left thigh. Galindo takes a silver blade to taut flesh above her knee and inscribes a line about two inches in height, patiently waits. Droplets of blood come to the surface. She continues to work, engraving, summoning courage for the next mark. We see her sigh after making a decipherable series of letters: "P", "E" and "R", before inscribing a second "R". Thick droplets of blood ooze from the "P" and "E". Over about five minutes Galindo spells out the word PERRA, a stigma on her thigh. Then it is finished, and she stares solemnly at her work. Her leg quivers. Galindo gets up from the chair, calmly straightens her dress and walks out of the room. “Bitch, death to whores, I hate whores. This is what they write on the bodies of the women they murder”, Galindo says. “They kill them, they strip them and then they slash their bodies with a knife, writing all kinds of insults on them”.15 In Guatemala City and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, women routinely vanish only to be found later, their corpses vandalised and cast in a ditch. Perra is a word commonly found knifed into the bodies. From January 1 to June 9 in 2005, 279 women in Guatemala were recorded as "missing". Declaring their suffering will not have been in vain, Galindo used blood drawn from her own body to reincarnate those of the faceless women whose murders had been systematically wiped clean from the slate of Guatemalan history. At the Venice Biennial of 2005, she crawled inside a grey cube and flagellated herself 279

Biec, Odile and Toussaint, Evelyne. "Regina José Galindo", Le Parvis Scène Nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées : le centre d'art

times. The "sound installation" 279 Golpes (279 Blows) featured a component which amplified the crack of a whip abrading her bare skin.16 Hiding her body in the cube, Galindo stepped into the role of a "missing" Guatemalan woman, although the sound of the lashes pronounced loudly her "absence". This technique laid bare the euphemism and pointed out a literal disregard for female life.

Fig. 2 Regina JosĂŠ Galindo, Perra (Whore), 2005

The failure to represent sexual difference within visual representation gives way to a certain effect of the positive/negative, the seen and the unseen, which frames the visual perception of the Woman, and leads to her conversion into, more often than not, a fetish â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a phallic substitute. This fetishisation of the image

Apel, Dora. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, p. 115

is the risk of representational visibility for women. It secures the gap between the real and the representational and marks her as Other.17 Citing Lacan and Slavoj Žižek's "Real Impossible"18, Phelan holds that incommunicable sexual difference aids in creating imaginary binaries and divisions of space. Phelan notes that the disconnect between Male and Female points of view underlies a displaced configuration of Woman in Man's peripheral vision. Woman, whose experience cannot be known by Man, is fetishized as an appendage of Him in a maleoriented spectrum of visibility. Another consequence of His misconception of the Female is the relegation of Her to Other or negative space (outside of that which is occupied by Male). Because Female is not Male she remains unremarkable and thus "unmarked". Both there and not there, She is simply "missing". The Female as a phallic substitute may be facilitated by a postmodern society. If in fact, pursuant to Baudrillard, we are living in an infinite hall of mirrors (or substitutions), where signs of signs and signs of signs of signs lead only to more signs and one is doomed to an endlessly multiplying "precession of simulacra"19, Woman is exponentially ripped – what Hito Steyerl might call a low-grade image.20 Downgraded in

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 6 In what he calls "the paradox of the Sublime" (pursuant to Kant and Lacan), Žižek approaches this "Real Impossible": "the gap separating phenomenal, empirical objects of experience from the Thing-in-itself is insurmountable – that is, no empirical object, no representation [Vorstellung] of it can adequately present [darstellen] the Thing (the suprasensible Idea); but the Sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility, this permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing." (The Sublime Object of Ideology New York: Verso, 1989, p. 203) 19 Baudrillard writes: "Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum." "The Procession of Simulacra", in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 20 See Steyerl's "In Defence of the Poor Image", in which the author identifies "the poor image" as "the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. [Poor images] testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images – their acceleration and 18

the spectrum of visibility, Her image is fewer pixels-per-inch than His and thus a blurrier or "lower quality" reproduction. The abstraction of Female from female form may accelerate a process of objectification, if not dehumanisation. Now, recalling Galindo's restrained tirade against "the system that rules" Guatemala â&#x20AC;&#x201C; her rage that would question not how Montt could commit mass murder but rather how he was able to do so with zero repercussions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we conceive of multiple levels on which the piece works. In Phelan's view, just as "the focus on skin as the visible marker of race is itself a form of feminising those races which are not white" [italics mine],21 female bodies are Other territory to be occupied by men. In the context of Guatemala, if Other is seen as superfluous, to the extent that Other is denied life, Woman finds herself also in a tenuous position. Through her work Galindo endeavours to mark the missing, unmarked Female so that She cannot so seamlessly slip into oblivion and so that future violence against Her will be met with repulsion. Phelan writes, "Increased visibility equals increased power".22 The capitalist system is in collusion with this equation. In a free market economy, if revenues are driven by consumer spending, it is only natural that companies will vie for billboard space and pervasive exposure, to gain influence and sway consumer attitudes toward their product. Visibility affects profitability, and profitability is power. Then in deeply inlaid codes of hetero-normativity capitalism has a vested interest. Divisions of masculine and feminine space, dichotomies of seen and unseen perpetuate its end of

circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism." http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defenseof-the-poor-image/ 21 Ibid., p. 10 22 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 7

leveraging profitability. There is a remote connection between ideological capitalism and female disposability, if invisibility does not sell.

...EXCESSIVE BODIES A motionless body lies flush with the borders of a stone slab, in a desiccated baptismal font. The figure is wrapped in a white sheet splattered with blood, which collects in pools between its legs and drips down the sides of the raised platform. Except for a bit of flesh poking through the posterior edges, the figure is completely wrapped, lending an added element of macabre to the Gothic scene. On the figure's diaphragm balances a cow's heart, the size of a woman's womb. It is said that in this tableau vivant is the story of the founding of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), "where the heart of a defeated enemy is buried and out of that spot, a city grows".23 Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1976 [Fig. 3] – sometimes called Mutilated Body on Landscape – was one of six works Mendieta made using her body, a white sheet and blood, in the stone courtyard of a sixteenth-century Dominican church complex in the village of Cuilapán outside Oaxaca, Mexico. These works were part of Mendieta's Silueta (Silhouette) Series, over one hundred of which were executed by the artist in Iowa and Mexico between 1973 and 1980.24 A collection of performative "earthbody" pieces, the Siluetas show the artist's body or a foam board template placed or traced in the landscape, to leave an outline or remnant of corporal presence. Conceived

Extracted from the website, "Women in Performance Fall 2011" https://sites.google.com/site/womeninperformancefall2011/ana-mendieta 24 According to Mary Sabbatino, there are thousands of Silueta slides in the artist's archive. See "Ana Mendieta: Identity and the "Siluetas" Series", p. 135 of Ana Mendieta (ed. Gloria Moure), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition

as sculptural interventions in nature, they incorporated a variety of natural materials – earth, wood, grass, flowers, leaves, moss, algae, mushrooms, pebbles, fire, ice and stone – to mediate between form and surrounding landscape. Mendieta's tutor and lover at the time, Hans Breder (b. 1935), usually accompanied and documented her actions with a camera or hand-held video recorder, so that a photographic or filmic document is all that remains of the ephemeral work. In both English and Spanish, the word "silhouette" (or sílueta) is attributed a dual meaning – either an object's dark outline or the viewer's perception of that object as an outline (usually a dark outline against a light background).25 Silhouettes describe only the periphery of an object, without capturing its essence. The viewer's participation in defining the Silueta speaks to the second meaning of the term, and that involuntary action of the optical faculty to create an afterimage – an image of an image of an object burned onto the retina, which reappears as a shadow of the first image. Mendieta's vestigial Siluetas play with this iterative quality of visual perception, especially as it concerns the female body. Via her Siluetas, Mendieta created reflections and illusions of herself as one-dimensional Female. Another untitled Silueta from the Oaxaca Series shows a white sheet draped inside a rocky alcove in the wall of the church. On the sheet is a bloody imprint of a human figure. An arrangement of splintery dried yucca stalks is tucked into the lower part of the stone cleft, which because of its setting recalls the Crown of Thorns which was woven around Jesus's forehead during His walk to Golgotha. The work evokes the

Best, Susan. “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta”, Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians, 30:1, February, 2007, p. 63

myth of Saint Veronica as chronicled in the Bible. Moved by pity for Jesus who was carrying his cross, Veronica offered Him her veil, which He took and used to wipe sweat from His brow. Jesus returned the veil to Veronica, miraculously imprinted with an image of His face.26 The Veil of Veronica is a relic which tells the bloody tale of the Crucifixion. What is interesting to me about both of the Oaxaca Siluetas is the androgyny of the human figure, which seems to be confirmed as Female only by certain subtle visual clues. In the second figure one witnesses a dislocated right arm, which seems to have been printed as the sheet was folded in places. On account of this detail and because of its backdrop of Mexico, the piece is reminiscent of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Official Catholic accounts testify to an apparition of the Virgin revealed to Juan Diego on the 9th of December 1531. Asked for a sign to prove her identity, the Virgin instructed Diego to gather a bunch of Castilian roses from the top of Tepeyac Hill outside of Mexico City. Diego obeyed and brought back to her the flowers which she arranged in his peasant cloak or tilma to show the Spanish Archbishop Fray Juan de Zumรกrraga. On the 12th of December Diego opened his cloak before the Archbishop, who witnessed the fabric impressed with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.27 Mendieta, having been raised in the tradition of Spanish Catholicism, is likely to have been aware of this myth, which may have provided inspiration for the primitively rendered arm. Might it be representative of Juan Diego's just-opened tilma in revelation

Wikipedia entry for "Veil of Veronica": http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Veil_of_Veronica 27 English translation of the account in Nahuatl: http://web.archive.org/web/20071022042328/www.interlupe.com.mx/nican-e.html

of his apparition? This contextualisation compounds the effect of the disappearing and reappearing Female image in the Silueta.

Fig. 3 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1976

Looking at Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), the bloodstained sheets in the Silueta possess an eerie, clinical quality. The white feels too stark and red too synthetic; there is too marked a contrast between colours. There is something unsettling about the way blood is so emphatically poured, as if for a low-budget horror film. Can we be sure that the sheet is not a bloodied medical smock? In Mendieta's Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), I see a visualisation of fanatical measures to censure female sexuality.

The work critiques the symbol of the venerated virgin. Ultimately, it reimagines sex as violence. Mendieta's "mutilated" body could allude to the cutting of the small, sensitive and erectile part of the female genitals called the clitoris, in a practice known as female genital mutilation (FGM), concentrated in Africa and the Middle East. The four ways in which FGM is implemented are defined by The World Health Organization as follows: Clitoridectomy: partial or total removal of the clitoris and, in very rare cases, only the prepuce (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoris). Excision: partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora. Infibulation: narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the inner, or outer, labia, with or without removal of the clitoris. Other: all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.28 It is estimated that 125 million girls and women alive today in 29 countries

have

experienced FGM.29 FGM has roots in Ancient Egypt, when "young girls who were captured and brought up in slavery were genitally mutilated in order to prevent pregnancies, ensuring their re-sale value". Controversial findings of traces of FGM on mummified remains have indicated that infibulation was undertaken by aristocracy.30 If there is any merit to this evidence, it could be a first instantiation of the fallacy that female chastity can be written on her body. Many reasons are cited for the continuation of FGM (tradition, cleanliness, aesthetics, among them), although it is hard to justify in the face of known risks, 28

UNICEF. "Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: a statistical overview and exploration of the dynamics of change", 2013 via World Health Organization website: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/ accessed 27 July 2014 29 Ibid. 30 Black Women's Health and Family Support website: http://www.bwhafs.com/fgm.php?fgm_id=1

including "severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, infertility as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of new-born deaths".31 Complicating these factors is the administering of the surgical procedure by untrained cutters, who deem the reasons above to be more important than physical wellbeing anyway. FGM is prevalent in patriarchal societies in which men feel women are property over which they can exercise control. In such circumstances, men feel entitled to behave like "masters over women's bodies", trampling on female space.32 An obsession encircles female virginity, because this accompanies a woman who is kept private and thus easier to manipulate. A zealous ideology of spatial divisions and Female invisibility leads to gruesome prescriptions for female sexuality. As Female is ready to venture out into public space, she is cut. A fundamental problem of FGM is its infusion with extremely conservative values, upheld by religions such as Islam and Coptic Christianity. This is not to say that followers of either of the two religions comprehensively subscribe to FGM. It just complicates stamping out the practice. The argument to brutalise female bodies for the sake of morality is ensnared in the idea that one can forcibly remove sexual desire. This is in fact a thinly veiled misogyny, which neither religion would support. On the fringes however, there is a toxic emulsion of extreme values and insecurities. Proponents of FGM play the trump card of religion, and initiatives to stop the practice are impeded by misguided efforts to maintain cultural sensitivity.

Ibid. Geovana Lemus, quoted in Biec, Odile and Toussaint, Evelyne. "Regina José Galindo", Le Parvis Scène Nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées : le centre d'art 32

BODIES AS SITES OF RESISTANCE In Belia’s car, I began to feel a warm liquid between my legs, flowing more and more with every passing second. We drove back to her house and I put on a sort of diaper, but nothing could stop the flow. Then we went to my gynaecologist’s clinic—my doctor there had been seeing me for years, and had asked to examine me after the operation—and from there to the hospital. Everything happened so fast. They dressed me in a gown, laid me on a bed, stuck an anaesthetic in my arm, and as I was fading into sleep I could hear the nurses talking among themselves, feeling sorry for me as they had for the many other girls who had been admitted to the hospital bleeding from a botched medical procedure, be it an abortion or a hymenoplasty.33 In 2004, Regina José Galindo underwent hymenoplasty, a surgery to reconstruct the delicate female membrane which partially covers the vagina. Since a woman's hymen is normally broken during her first intercourse, this operation is performed to recreate hymeneal bleeding in order to validate her nuptial proceedings. Hymenoplasty or hymenorrhaphy can work in one of three ways. A tear in the hymen may be sewn back together; a synthetic gelatinous capsule may replace an organic membrane with blood supply; or a flap of vaginal lining may be snipped to create a new hymen.34 After noticing a newspaper classified purporting to "restore virginity", Galindo went to the advertised clinic and consulted the physician, who agreed to operate and let her film the procedure. A still of the resulting Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty), 2004 (presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale) shows a tight close-up of Galindo's parted legs, bloodied genitalia. Her labia are pulled apart by the male doctor's hands. Medical

Goldman, Francisco interview with Regina José Galindo, BOMB Magazine online: http:// bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780 accessed 26 September 2014 34 Wikipedia entry for "Hymenorrhaphy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenorrhaphy

scissors and other sterile equipment are strewn around the operating table. Synthetic fibres suture closed her vaginal tissue. Originally

conceived

for

group

show

entitled

Cinismo

(Cynicism),

Himenoplastia was an sardonic query into the price of virginity. Clearly, Galindo is critical of the paedophiliac mind set underpinning a procedure which, for all its cruelty, is couched in such terms as "innocence" and "purity". She is also interested in virginity as it is bought, sold and marketed. As FGM was used in Ancient Egypt, hymenoplasty is an optimisation of female sexuality. Female virginity is a product for which both men and women will pay. For example, a girl in a prostitution ring who has had hymen "repair" surgery fetches a higher profit, and her client is reassured that her virginity (although fraudulent) will guard him against STDs. In certain cultures faking virginity is the only way to earn eligibility for marriage. The price for not submitting to such pressure is the reputation of a sexual deviant.

CONCLUSION Shirley Ardener has written about acts of "female militancy" as deployed by women of the Bakweri, Balong and Kom tribes of West Cameroon. In the case of the Kom, a practice called anlu is issued as a disciplinary technique for particular offences, including "the beating or insulting of a parent; the beating of a pregnant woman; incest; the seizing of a person's sex organs during a fight; the impregnating of a nursing mother within two years of the birth of a child; and the abuse of an old woman".35 The root of the word anlu, -lu, means "to drive away" and as such, anlu involves a collective

Ardener, Shirley. "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy", Perceiving Women. London, 1975

shrieking and beating on the lips with the four fingers by the Kom women, who convene at the sound of the first shriek to alert the whole community of the offence that has been committed. The offender is then brought to justice: to histrionic dancing and chanting telling of his transgressions, to raise in the hearts of its audience a full throttle reaction against him. The complete ritual of censure continues into the next morning, escalating in the hurtling of a "garden-egg type of fruit which is supposed to cause "drying up" in any person who is hit with it", as well as exhibiting of "vulgar parts of the body".36 Regina JosĂŠ Galindo and Ana Mendieta employ a similar strategy of the Kom women, by wielding female sexuality to push up against "an ideology which erases the power of the unmarked, unspoken and unseen".37 In both cases, blood is a clot which stems flow of all forms of violence toward women.

Account of Kom Francis Nkwain in Ardener, Shirley. "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy", in Ardener, Shirley. Perceiving Women, London, 1975. p. 36 37 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 7

Chapter 2: Ritual Blood, our gushing forth, our growth, our life is blood ... thick, fat animating, our life; it reddens, moistens, drenches, fills all the flesh with mud, it gives it growth, it surges to the surface, it covers people with earth ... it strengthens people, it fortifies people greatly. – Bernardino de Sahagún (b. Sahagún, Kingdom of Leon, Spain, c. 1500; d. Mexico, 23 Oct., 1590), n.d.

This chapter examines the inseparability between body and earth / earth and body, which informs visual perception. Blood as a by-product of ritualistic sacrifice – a deterrent of inauspicious circumstances and insurer of prosperity – will be our focus. Through early performative and Silueta works by Ana Mendieta, we shall see how art performs ritual, as well as how explicit and implicit representations of blood animate themes of anthropocentricity, interconnectivity and catharsis. Blood as a signifier of sacrificial offering remarks on the human tendency to ascribe immaterial to material phenomena. What is ritual, if not a reckoning of man with his environment? An antidote to forces beyond his control – the possibility of randomness – ritual is basically a manipulation of his surroundings to affect a desirable outcome. Fear that the cosmos will deliver pain upon our doorstep is the underlying cause of ritual, but as ritual embraces the idea of a universal network where calamity does not belong, this fear is displaced. In the words of Mary Douglas, ritual is an effort to create "unity in experience",38 which originates in our hardwiring to relate form and function. A resourceful formula for making sense of reality when it presents itself as chaos – for feeling one's way through her ecosystem – ritual could not work without a perception of 38

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, first published 1966, p. 2

being integrated into an overarching system. Ritual is the belief in symbiosis, antibiosis and communication. In its fusing of interior and exterior, it is related to proprioception and phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty said, "There is no limit or boundary between the body and the world since the world is flesh".39 One can interpret this in two ways. First, the world is flesh because it consumes and nourishes bodies; decomposition of organic matter fertilises soil, and soil gives sustenance to plant and animal life. Second, our interdependence with our environment works in tandem with our perception; from our ecosystem we conceive of how to situate ourselves in space. Vertebral tissues subsist on oxygen and nutrients such as glucose, amino acids and fatty acids transported from the lungs by haemoglobin, a protein present in red blood cells. If the human body depends on blood for sustenance, and the body is a microcosm of the world, then blood is essential to the world. Its signification in ritual mirrors its biological function. Induced or offered in sacrifice, blood is an offering to the gods. Through Mendieta's work, we will look at how blood expresses the position of human being in her ecosystem. Blood as food for humans, as food for higher powers is intrinsic to physiology and ontology.

PSYCHIC WOUNDS I first came across the work of Ana Mendieta through a suite of six reproduced photographs of Volcan Series, No. 2 [Fig. 4], arranged in two columns by three rows. In the first of these images, a mound of earth appears to be a convex burial mound, where

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 130-1

a powdery white substance (probably a mixture of gunpowder and baking sugar Mendieta used) has accumulated in the shape of a mummified human corpse. Over the course of the images, the gunpowder is set ablaze and flames and smoke issue from posterior to the anterior of the figurative mould. We witness a phoenix rising from a funeral pyre – perhaps that liminal state thought to incubate the soul on its way to the afterlife. As in Catholic imagery of the Ascension (according to the New Testament, Jesus was buried in a tomb before rising from the dead three days later), body disposes of earthly ties, and all that is left is a dark chasm. Volcan Series, No. 2 is a late Silueta, although its dating of 1979 seems to contradict what Olga Viso writes in her Ana Mendieta: Earth Body. The monograph references a trip Mendieta took with Breder to Mexico in 1980. While on this trip the couple visited San Felipe, a town on the bay of San Felipe in the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez) in the Mexican state of Baja California, where Mendieta filmed "gunpowder "volcano" works burning".40 As is characteristic of Mendieta's later Siluetas, the artist's body is hinted at but not shown.41 An academic tendency has been to try to verbally quantify Mendieta's phantasmal presence. In scholarship and exhibitions, one finds a near paradoxical straining to articulate such transient Síluetas, which capture only a trace of a figure –

Viso, Olga M. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, published by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Hatje Cantz in conjunction with the traveling retrospective, 2004, p. 231 41 In “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta”, Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians, 30:1, February, 2007 Susan Best identifies "two decisive shifts" in 1975: Mendieta working directly from the landscape and removing her own body from the works. p. 61

what Abigail Solomon-Godeau calls, "a lacuna, an evacuated presence".42 In spite of these esoteric analyses, it is important to note how Mendieta conceived of herself in executing the Siluetas: "like a dog, pissing on the ground".43 At the same time that they were transcendental acts of communion with the earth, they were site-specific, territorial markings. In order to understand Volcan Series, No. 2 and its relevance to this enquiry details of the artist's biography are helpful. Mendieta was born in Havana on 18 November 1948, to a wealthy, politically prominent family. In 1959-60 her father, Ignacio, was made an assistant in the Cuban Ministry of State, but privately he conspired against the revolution. After relations between their activist father and Castro turned sour, Ana and her sister Raquelín became engaged in counterrevolutionary activity, distributing anti-Castro literature. On 11 September 1961, Mendieta and Raquelin were exiled from Cuba under "Operación Pedro Pan", a rescue mission organised to protect children whose families opposed Fidel Castro. Raquelín recounted: "We left Cuba and our family in a KLM plane ... Ana was two months short of thirteen, I had just turned fifteen the month before."44 The girls spent three weeks in Camp Kendall in Miami before being sent to St. Mary's Home (a group home for disturbed and neglected children) in Dubuque, Iowa. They were estranged from their mother, Raquel, and brother, Ignacio, until 1966. Until April 1979 they were separated from their father, 42

Butler, Cornelia. "The Woman Who Never Was: Self-Representation, Photography and First-Wave Feminist Art" in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (exhibition catalogue). Edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2007, p. 344 43 Montano, Linda interview with Ana Mendieta. Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/fame, Ritual/death. Edited by Linda Montano. University of California Press, January 2001, p. 73 44 Mendieta, Raquelin. "Childhood Memories: Religion, Politics, Art", p. 228, Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition, 1996

who was imprisoned for his cooperation with the American Central Intelligence Agency prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Of her displacement Mendieta said: "Having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb."45 She processed her dislocation viscerally, using the metaphor of birth to describe her psychological trauma. In Affect Imagery Consciousness Silvan Tomkins describes a phenomenon of claustral enclosure, which arises from distant memories of being in the womb and can bring about one of two opposing sensations: an ecstasy induced by "the sense of a supporting enveloping environment such as one might experience in solitude communing with nature, or a proportionate anxiety which we have come to know as claustrophobia".46 Embodying Merleau-Ponty's chiastic intertwining and Tomkin's claustral enclosure, Mendieta's "earth-body" sculptures alleviated her profound homesickness for Cuba. "My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them I ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world" [italics mine].47 As in rituals of SanterĂa where gunpowder is used to lure spirits to the ceremonial site, Mendieta communes in Volcan Series, No. 2 with her ancestry. By its use of gunpowder and because of the organic shape of the cavity in the ground, the work alludes to the primary rite of passage of the foetus through the birth canal, with the "volcano" a symbol of Mendieta's ejection from her motherland. Volcan Series, No. 2 may reference

Mendieta, Ana. "A Selection of Statements and Notes" in Sulfur 22, Spring 1988, p. 72 Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness: Vol. 1 The Positive Affects. New York, 1962, p. 419 47 Mendieta, Ana. Personal Writings, p. 216, Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition, 1996 46

West Central African Kongo rites of passage, in which an ideogram is cut into an initiate's skin and filled with gunpowder, representing life as transition: we are made from dust, and to dust we will return.48 Most of all, it is a wound in what she imagines to be her flesh: the world.

Fig. 4 Ana Mendieta, Volcan Series, No. 2, 1979

Genesis 3:19, New International Version

SACRIFICIAL ECONOMIES Through her syncretistic practice, Mendieta was a reflection of her native Cuba: a melting pot of religious traditions. Cuba's predominant religions, Spanish Catholicism and its derivative, Santería, are a legacy of interwoven belief systems dating from the Spanish Inquisition, when camouflaged observances of native rituals formed new faith traditions. Santería was born from a fusion of Spanish Catholicism and West African religions, when Yorùbán slaves imported to Cuba during XVI to XIX centuries were forced by the Spanish traders to abandon their ancient practices. Divested of the freedom to practice their beliefs Yorùbáns adopted aspects of Catholicism. Octavio Paz speaks of the common "sacrificial economy"49 of Catholicism (a monotheistic religion upholding the Sacred Trinity or one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and polytheistic Pre-Columbian systems, which may have enabled the reformulation of Catholic rituals and iconography in Santería. In the Bible, references to "the blood of the Lamb" – sheep slaughter as a metaphor for the crucifixion – iterate Jesus's suffering on the cross for humanity's sake. Likewise in Santería (based on a system of Orishas (roughly translated to demi-Gods), each of whom "has been tasked with maintaining this Earth, watching over the affairs of humanity, and has dominion over a portion of nature"), offerings of such animals as

Merewether, Charles. "From Inscription to Dissolution: an Essay on Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta" in Moure, Gloria (editor). Ana Mendieta (exhibition catalogue), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1996, p. 83

roosters, turtles and goats are made by santeros to appease the Orishas and thereby ensure a fruitful harvest.50 In Cuba religion is bound up with class, so it is not surprising that Mendieta was raised in a Catholic household. As her older sister Raquelín described their strictly observing grandfather: Our grandfather Dr. José Francisco Oti y de la Fé, but Papapa to us, was very spiritual and devoted to Catholicism. He was the backbone of our religious beliefs. Our grandmother was the teacher or the one who instituted the beliefs. In 1950, the Holy Year, they made a pilgrimage to Rome, Fátima and Lourdes amongst other places. At Lourdes he had a spiritual experience which transformed his life. He did not speak to us about it, being a humble and quiet man, our mother told us of it as teens. After the experience, he dedicated his life to the Virgin, he became more religious and, in retrospect, he connected spiritual with physical discipline. He awoke around 5:00 AM each morning to do his meditations and to attend mass. Papapa, did not eat red meat and fried foods, neither did he smoke and drink (most unusual for a man in Cuba)...51 Following convention, her family slightly shunned Santería, describing it as "something more connected with popular culture than with religion". At once "too serious to be discussed" and "like magic", it was viewed by the girls' grandmother with a certain suspicion.52 All things considered, the family displayed an unusual level of devotion to Catholicism. Although a majority of Cubans profess to be Catholic, only a small minority of this number are active practitioners of the faith.53

Wharton, Jo Beth. "The Blood Symbolism within Ana Mendieta's Untitled", p. 2 http://www.csuchico.edu/contrapposto/Volume_1_files/Papers/WhartonBloodSymbolism.pdf accessed 24 July 2014 51 Mendieta, Raquelín. "Childhood Memories: Religion, Politics, Art" in Moure, Gloria (editor). Ana Mendieta (exhibition catalogue), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1996, p. 226-7 52 Ibid, p. 227 53 As of 2009 it was reported that although sixty-five per cent of the Cuban population professed to be Catholic, only five per cent of that sixty-five attended mass regularly. "International Religious Freedom Report 2009: Cuba". US State Department, October 2009

Despite her family's aversion to Santería, Mendieta harboured an interest in the religion from an early age. "Through the media and the maids' conversations" to which she listened surreptitiously, she learned about the less accepted religion. Raquelín writes that for the sisters "there was no separation between Catholicism and Santería",54 and stories from Mendieta's childhood are evidence of this unbiased attitude. In an interview with Linda Montano the artist recalled, "We had a little chapel in our house, and I used to play priest all the time. I would tie a half-slip around my neck, ring bells, and act out all of the ceremonies in Latin because I had memorised it in church." According to her sister, "[Ana] also loved playing with fire and matches in secret, since she knew this was not allowed and could get her into trouble. My sister always pushed the boundaries of what was permitted."55 By "pretending she was spreading incense", Mendieta was playing santero56 as well as priest. For Mendieta, blood was a familiar symbol which transferred seamlessly to her practice and became a mode of reconciling her own traumatic experience as a Cubanborn American émigré. Mendieta was aware of the imbalanced set of circumstances and sacrifice laden in her genealogy – her ancestors who suffered ritual "taming" and killing at the hands of Spanish imperialists. Underneath her family's conviction lied a bloody history of Mesoamerican cultural warfare instigated by the Spanish Inquisition, whose Catholic conquest waged a centuries-long battle including force feeding their

Mendieta, Raquelín. "Childhood Memories: Religion, Politics, Art" in Moure, Gloria (editor). Ana Mendieta (exhibition catalogue), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1996, p. 228 55 Ibid, p. 226 56 Translated literally to "saint-maker", santero refers to "a man who has undergone the Initiation known as "Kariocha" in the Santería religion, also known as "making the Saint" (Spanish: Hacer Santo) where his tutelary deity is crowned over his head. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santero accessed 24 July 2014

doctrine to natives of the colonies. By incorporating blood in works she could illuminate this inherent friction of Santería. The ritual process for Mendieta ... was a stripping down of ego to manifest a transpersonal moment that is self-empowering through its voluntary self-loss. Mendieta recreated rituals that intentionally involved a level of sacrifice in order to fuse body, nature and art.57 In Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) [Fig. 5] we see a young Mendieta, dark eyes and hair, her head and shoulders tightly cropped in a dimly lit space, peers out at the viewer. Her eyes are half open, lips parted from the strain of the angle at which her neck is arched. Coating her skin appears to be a thin layer of blood. It covers her forehead and runs down the sides of her face, over the bridge of her nose and into her nostrils, the crevices of her lips and chin. She wears a white undershirt, the edge of which is stained with the red liquid. Her hair is loose and matted. Created in 1973, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) was part of a series of six additional photographs which were printed posthumously in 1997 in an edition of ten. (For each of these the position of Mendieta's head, as well as the camera angle, changes.)58 At the time she executed Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), Mendieta was enrolled in the University of Iowa's Intermedia course led by Breder. After completing a painting MA at the University (1969–72), she re-enrolled in autumn of 1972 for a second MA under Breder's supervision. In quick succession she made other works featuring

Ultan, Deborah K. "From the Personal to the Transpersonal: Self Reclamation Through Ritual-inPerformance" in Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2001, Vol. 20 Issue 2, p. 30 58 Ana Mendieta: Body Tracks (exhibition catalogue). Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2002. Edited by Peter Fisher. Text by Patrick Dondelinger and Laura Routlet, pp. 54–6 in Manchester, Elizabeth. "Ana Mendieta: Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), 1973", October 2009 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-self-portrait-with-blood-t13354/text-summary

blood, including the silent Super-8 film Sweating Blood (1973), Blood Writing (March 1974) and Blood Signs. In Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), Mendieta appears accepting of the blood threatening to obstruct her vision. Hers is not a pained expression. She seems at peace with whatever it is that has caused her injury. This visage is echoed in Sweating Blood, a still of which shows the artist, her eyes faithfully downcast in a sign of humility, as blood pools in a part on her scalp and trickles down her brow. Both recall the visage of the Catholic martyr, who has sacrificed herself knowing that "by dying she is born to eternal life".59

Attributed to Saint Francis of Assissi, 13th century

Fig. 5 Ana Mendieta, Untitled, 1973

CATHARSIS In 1973 Mendieta partook a ritualistic action involving a white rooster. Video documentation of Untitled (Death of a Chicken) [Fig. 6] shows a large white rooster draped over a chopping block, Breder hovering over it with an axe. He strikes, and the animal is beheaded in one blow. The decapitated bird is handed to Mendieta. She holds its flailing body upside down, cringing. Its wings flap wildly, spasmodically, as the creature clings to life. For a full two minutes more, its muscles continue to twitch.

In her essay "Blood Relations", Melissa Feldman connects this piece to "the initiation rites of the Abakuรก society during which the initiate must parade with the head of a freshly sacrificed white rooster in his mouth, while blood drips down his body".60 By its ingredients of life passage, dripping blood and fowl, her parallel cements the component of ritual between Volcan Series, No. 2, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) and Untitled (Death of a Chicken). Untitled (Death of a Chicken) may owe a debt to Chicken Action by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, as Breder exposed Mendieta to work of the experimental aktion (action) painters to which he was party. The Aktionists experimented with viscera and animal carcasses to free pent-up energies in the darker corners of the human subconscious. In the 1960s, Nitsch (b. 1938) orchestrated "mystery theatres" in which a cast acted out scenes of killing and sacrifice. Nitsch reappropriated tropes of sacrifice and proposed death as a mode of catharsis. The performances often involved the live slaying of cows or sheep and manipulation of the animal carcasses. Nitsch is famous for orchestrating what he has called "blood orgies" and theatrical works such as 31st Action (Mary's Conception), 1969, heavily laden with sacrilegious and shamanistic imagery. In a documentation of one six-day aktion that took place from 3 - 8 September 1998 at Prinzendorf an der Zaya in the province of Lower Austria, a man snaps a cow's neck and peels away layers of skin allowing people to grope its exposed entrails. The slain animal is juxtaposed next to actors strung on crosses and robed in white, Nitsch spilling copious amounts of blood on their garments.

Feldman, Melissa E. "Blood Relations: Jose Bedia, Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, and Ana Mendieta" in Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art. Edited by Debra Koppman and Dawn Perlmutter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, p. 112

Although Nitsch's technique is more provocative than Mendieta's, a mutual objective was exposing the hypocritical underbelly of sacred institutions. Both considered repressed animal instincts to be a greater evil than actions taken to liberate such instincts. Although the subject matter of his "actions" is disturbing, the work should not be dismissed, because it grapples with processes of trauma and memory. By reinserting the body back into the traumatic situation the mind works through an "unthinkable" reality. Remembering may be re-membering in this case. When Europe was still reeling from the consequences of the Second World War, Nitsch's actions were cathartic re-productions of human loss, serving to repeat by the only means possible the atrocities of war and thereby come to terms with a living nightmare. It seems that Nitsch, who was Austrian, was retracing himself the steps of war criminals. In this way his "blood orgies" sought to humanise the "casualties" of war. Nitsch's theatres of horror may have been influential to a series of works Mendieta created in 1972, re-enacting scenes of the rape and murder of a nursing student at the University of Iowa, Sarah Ann Otten. Mendieta staged clandestine and public, relational installations, including one in which her classmates were invited to her apartment. There a dramatically lit Mendieta could be found, undressed from the waist down and leaning over a table, blood covering her backside and dripping down her legs. One notes the haphazard state of her surroundings, dishes broken on the floor as if by a violent disturbance. In a photographic document of a private performance from this series that took place in a wooded area, we see an anonymous body strewn

casually on the ground, bloodied legs splayed out. The work reproduces how might look the first sighting of a crime scene.

CONCLUSION Blood is the mortar of sacrifice, a cornerstone of religion. It is a life force of human beings and deities, who are nourished by it in sacrificial offerings. In the language of sacrifice, bloodshed translates to redemption. It appeals to the divine through eradication or slaughter, entailing death as a means of releasing a surplus vital energy for the possibility of community. Looking at blood as it manifests in Mendieta's syncretic practice, one bears witness to a history of interweaving visual lexicons born from colonialist agendas. Mendieta commented, "By making my image in nature I can deal with the two cultures. My [earth-body] sculptures are not the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature and conceptualizing religion and culture."61 Technically defined as "surrendering a possession as an offering to God or to a divine or supernatural figure", sacrifice can be seen as a human enactment of blood's role of oxygenation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a deferential gift offered up to something greater. Sacrificial rites express through blood the symbiotic relationship between man and his environment. They situate man centrally in an ecosystem while repelling the perception that he hangs in a delicate balance.

Mendieta quoted in Rauch, Heidi, and Suro, Federico. "Ana Mendieta's Primal Scream" in AmĂŠricas 44, no. 5, 1992. pp. 44-48

Chapter 3: Purity Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Percy Bysshe Shelley, n.d.

The co-option of purity as a social construct has rendered the identification of blood as a moral commodity. How has purity come to mean piety, chastity and female virtue, and how has blood come to be seen as pure or impure with reference to these connotations? What is purported by racial (im)purity, and how is blood invoked in bids for racial supremacy? Blood's immunological function relates strongly to the concept of purity, even as purity inhabits constructs of sex and race. White blood cells (WBCs) or leukocytes and lymphocytes (including B cells and T cells) ensure "freedom from adulteration or contamination"62 by managing the body's response to foreign materials. By producing antibodies that latch on to the antigens, WBCs identify and neutralise pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and carcinogens in the bloodstream. They remove waste products such as carbon dioxide, urea and lactic acid. This action of separating out malignant from benign has apparently made blood susceptible to religious campaigns. Both the term "sacred" from the Latin sacer and the Hebrew root k-d-sh meaning "Holy" derive from the concept of separation.63 Perhaps

Definition of "purity" from New Oxford American Dictionary. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, first published 1966 63

blood's prophylactic function, without which would ensue pH imbalance, infection and disease, has inspired purification rites in the social sphere. Again, blood on a micro-level gels with blood on a meta-level. Advocates of blood as it signifies purity, in its imagined conceptions as mentioned above, imitate the activity of immune defence performed by the white blood cells and antibodies. Instead of separating out carriers of disease, poisons or toxins, however, they exclude innocuous components at will. Ritual as it maintains order may be applicable to the prophylactic functions of the vascular system. Blood might be imagined to carry out purification rites, as it stops contaminants from wreaking havoc on the body. It is the definition of contaminants that has become debatable, and the mind has deceived itself in thinking it can mimic physiological intuition in isolating and disenabling antagonists. Deliberate purification rites have serious implications.

SACRED CONTAGION At the same time during every Catholic Mass, after the Offertory of the gifts (a chalice of wine and unleavened wafers) the celebrant (a Priest or Bishop, e.g.) washes his hands. He asks for forgiveness. "Lord, wash away my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin",64 signalling the altar server to drip holy water over his fingers. Over the server's forearm is draped a linen cloth (or "purificator") which the celebrant takes to dry his hands. By a mimetic action, he is absolved of his sin and free to carry out the holiest of all Catholic sacraments, the Eucharist.

Psalm 50:2, New International Version; Psalm 51:2 in the Hebrew

This purification ritual readies the celebrant to orchestrate transubstantiation, at the crux of the Eucharistic sacrament. The celebrant performs a miracle through God, endowing him with the ability to transform unleavened wafers and wine into the body and blood of Christ (as Jesus turned water into wine and multiplied loaves of bread and fish at a wedding in Cana at Galilee65). A chalice filled with Christ's blood is distributed among the congregation, each of whom make the Sign of the Cross and ingest a drop of the tannin-tasting fluid. The rim of the glass is wiped by a Eucharistic minister. Even if consecrated substance contaminates the body it is presumed to purify the soul, for it simply is God. "Dirt is disorder", said Mary Douglas in her Purity and Danger.66 We cast a suspicious eye on pollutants as they can wreak havoc on orderly systems, physiological or otherwise. It is the lawlessness of dirt that frightens us. Because dirt colludes with bacteria, disease and death, we try to keep it at bay. But what happens when dirt â&#x20AC;&#x201C; assuming it is interchangeable with "adulteration or contamination" â&#x20AC;&#x201C; becomes an analogue for "immorality"? Now we have a complicated equation, where immorality is thought to be as dangerous as disease (morality a variable term yielding different interpretations from one creed to the next). If immorality is dirt, should it not be treatable by similar antibacterial and antiviral agents? As dirt propagates so too can sin. One should be able to exert control over immorality like she does dirt and infectious disease. But how does one neutralise immorality? Following in the footsteps of Emile Durkheim, Douglas asserts that 65

John 2:1-11, New International Version Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, first published 1966, p. 2 66

practices of "developed" and primitive religions harbour a common aversion to uncleanliness. The idea that one should be able to cleanse herself of sin is a tantalising one, especially if morality translates to immortality, a recurring promise of religion. To achieve purity it seems all she must do is practice good spiritual hygiene. Purification rites – essentially creative attempts at controlling dirt and disorder – are fuelled by what Durkheim called "sacred contagion", or the belief that spiritual properties of an inanimate object or person may be transferred to another object or human being. This invasion of biochemical into the psychosocial realm is related to Erving Goffman's theories of social stigma67 – a negative collective response against a perceived flaw in an individual – in that both come from a shared anthropocentric viewpoint which projects fear of physical deformity or mutation. Like social stigma, sacred contagion relies on an imagination of the body politic as one discrete organism, susceptible to illness.

HYMENEAL BLOOD Blood from between a woman's legs is a receptacle of propaganda to control female sexuality. It has been thought that if she bleeds on her wedding night, she is pure, while if she menstruates she is impure. These are problematic assumptions, of course. Is involuntarily bleeding something of which to be proud or ashamed? In ancient Muslim and Jewish matrimonial rites, a virtuous bride is verified by her spilt hymeneal blood. A third party is appointed to retrieve from her nuptial chamber a sheet which is held up for the community as evidence of her consummated marriage. In 67

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968

this case, a stained sheet equals a spotless conscience, for it proves she is chaste. If a bloody sheet is not produced from the bridal chamber, circumstances surrounding her deflowering may be called into question. Inversely, a prepubescent girl who does not yet ovulate is thought to be as pure as her undergarments are white, for she has not yet been "adulterated" by menstrual blood. Red on white – recalling virginal blood on clean sheets – is a classic chromatic juxtaposition of (im)purity. Mendieta re-appropriated this palette, playing with the mythical constructions of "white as snow" or "scarlet sin" (personified by Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, e.g.). Looking at her Untitled (Death of a Chicken) anew, one notices a ritualistic performance inflected with notions of purity. Mendieta said, "I was taking the white cock of Voodoo, a male symbol, and making me the object of it."68 Inversely to Nitsch and the Viennese Aktionists, as well as the machismo American Abstract Expressionist painters who patented their own brand of action painting, Mendieta's position was passive. The sputtering cock spews blood on Mendieta's flesh, which becomes a splatter canvas à la Jackson Pollock. Was she emphasising her feminine passivity? There is a tension between Mendieta and the chicken that would signify a sexual encounter. Aside from its inescapable overtones of the phallus, Untitled (Death of a Chicken) becomes a performance of vaginal penetration. We encounter a cast of characters performing the loss of virginity. The haemorrhaging white cock is the bloodstained sheet on which hymeneal blood is spilt, and Mendieta is the virgin, whose

Joan Marter and Ana Mendieta in Conversation (edited excerpt) 1 February 1985 p. 229, Hayward Gallery catalogue

innocence is "offered up" or sacrificed in exchange for "the continuation of the species" as championed by marriage.69 First intercourse is de-romanticised and re-imagined as violence. Documentation of another piece incorporating white feathers and a female "object" underlines the subtext of Untitled (Death of a Chicken). This time, Mendieta is active and another student is passive. In Feathers on Woman, produced in 1972, Mendieta affixed to the body of a female classmate white feathers until all that remained exposed were the classmate's eyes, lips and pubic area. A still image from the performance shows the woman cum ostrich seated, her legs spread eagled. These two observations more directly connect Untitled (Death of a Chicken) to Mendieta's rape series created in 1972.

Kuspit, Donald, "Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body", p. 35 of Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition

Fig. 6 Untitled (Death of a Chicken), 1972

MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND TABOO In contrast to hymeneal blood, menstrual blood has been quarantined and avoided. For the ancient Nahuan people of Central Mexico (who Mendieta studied in detail), as well as certain indigenous African and Asian cultures, menstrual blood has been thought to have strange effects, especially when exposed to organic material â&#x20AC;&#x201C; crops, human skin and tissue, etc. Such a distrusted fluid has menstrual blood been in these milieus that women have been forced to remove themselves from the sight of others, also to avoid trapping others in their gaze. "Even the eyes of menstruating women were thought to have special powers for she could not look at others for fear of sickening them, and

they were particularly banned from touching or cooking the food for any other being."70 Judy Grahn provides an account of the ostracism with which menstruating women in primitive societies have encountered. She describes a ritual in Southeast Asia, in which the menstruating woman was sheathed in a hammock and locked away in a dark hut for the duration of her period. The woman was sequestered and prohibited from speaking during this time of her communing with the ominous substance. "One of the injunctions most strongly laid upon her was not to look about her. She kept her head bowed and was forbidden to see the world and the sun. Some tribes covered her with a blanket."71 Witness Untitled (Body Print), 1974 [Fig. 7], from a series Mendieta performed in Iowa. A precursor to her Siluetas, this work appears to be either a living statue or lifeless body in a morgue. It was done by the artist coating her ventral skin in blood, before a sheet was laid on top of her. Red bleeds through white, and she is motionless despite the dynamic canvas laid on top of her, a prop that blood defines. The minimalist convergence of flesh, blood and fabric signifies both the broken hymen and the menstrual period, making blood an ambiguous "pollution symbol"72, signifying neither purity nor impurity. The French sociologist Roger Caillois (1913-1978) observed, "the very health of a human body requires the regular evacuation of its "impurities", urine and excrement,

Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 5, in Wharton, Jo Beth. "The Blood Symbolism within Ana Mendieta's Untitled", p. 14, accessed 24 July 2014: http://www.csuchico.edu/contrapposto/Volume_1_files/Papers/WhartonBloodSymbolism.pdf 71 Ibid. 72 Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, first published 1966, p. 5

as well as, for women, menstrual blood".73 But is menstrual blood actually an "impurity"? Caillois may be partly responsible for a conflation which would further complicate perceptions of rituals around menstruation or "metaforms". In menstruation blood is a vehicle for disposing of nutrient-rich uterine lining â&#x20AC;&#x201C; unneeded while a woman is not pregnant â&#x20AC;&#x201C; so only to the extent that the effluence is contaminated by the shed uterine lining is menstrual blood "impure". I think it is inaccurate to assert that menstrual blood, in its maintenance of the female reproductive system, is impure. In any case the menstruating woman would be more (not less) pure, by virtue of the fact she has via the menstrual fluid flushed out "impurities" from her system. Grahn's "Metaformic Theory", which identifies menstruation as "the primary ritual that would have started us on our human trail",74 clarifies the peripheralization of menstruating women as a ritual done in deference to her blood's elemental power. A faithful reading of the etymology of the word "taboo", deriving from the Polynesian tapua meaning "sacred" and "menstruation",75 casts an alternate light on metaformic rituals. Blood has in this case been thought to be numinous; both fear- and aweinducing. Since ancient metaforms are filtered through a distorted lens, the delegated menstrual "space" should not be misrepresented as a prison. We must keep in mind the modern corruption of the word "taboo" (smacking of the fear-laden society in which 73

For me a more appropriate characterisation of menstruation is that of Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who viewed it as a space of the maternal body, "a place of passage, a threshold where nature meets culture." Quoted on p. 100-1 of Merewether, Charles. "From Inscription to Dissolution: an Essay on Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta" in Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition. Paz, incidentally, was a strong source of inspiration for Mendieta, who frequently quoted and paraphrased him in notes of her own. 74 "Judy Grahn Discusses the Transpersonal Element of Women's Spirituality", Sofia University, YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C3EOvxnBc 75 Ibid.

it has been anglicised). It is my belief that metaformic rituals, with respect to menstrual blood as a "taboo" or "sacred" substance, are deeply cognisant of the purifying function of the substance â&#x20AC;&#x201C; cleansing the female reproductive system of extraneous material thus maintaining equilibrium in the body â&#x20AC;&#x201C; so that their actions imitate blood's action of separating out.

Fig. 6 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Body Print), 1974

BLOODLINES Of course blood is a transmitter of disease at the same time it is a prophylactic apparatus. In colonial situations this potential has been exploited to propagate the

fantasy of a "tainted" bloodline, promote a fear of Other and prevent miscegenation. It is in the interest of the dominating power to maintain distinctions of race. In a distortion of sacred contagion, skin colour becomes an indicator of toxicity, and notions of purity are hijacked by imperialist agendas. The euphemism of racial cleansing is born. Adrian Piper deals with race as it has become a container for such misconceptions of blood. Piper's video installation Cornered, 1988, in its aim "to focus our attention on the defences we use to rationalise away the uniqueness of the Other", tackles such homogenising aspects of racism, which proffer the point of view that bloodlines can infect bloodlines, to the detriment of one race over another.76 Piper steps into the role of Other, to expose the absurdity of a system which takes a topdown approach to its perceiving of genetic encoding. Epidermal pigmentation points to DNA and white blood cells. We cannot infuse blood with manmade values, and accept this as empirical fact. From a television monitor the calm and composed Piper, dressed in a pale blue blouse and pearls, reveals flatly: "I'm black". She sits on a chair in a corner which can be seen in the image on page 53 [Fig. 8]. The corner shown in the video is lined up with the corner of the room where the installation is shown. Piper is styled in the fashion of a media reporter. This compounds the effect of her message which may come across to her viewer as news â&#x20AC;&#x201C; its truth of racial profiling so profoundly repressed in her audience, up to the point of her revelation. She proceeds to test the viewer in her complicity with

Piper in Berger, Maurice. "The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper" in Afterimage 18, October 1990. p. 8 76

this "social" premise, challenging the arbitrary sets of criteria used to determine one's race in the United States. Piper declares: Now, this country's entrenched conventions classify a person as black if they have any black ancestry. So most purportedly white Americans are, in fact, black ... Think what this means for your own racial classification. If you've been identifying yourself as white, then the chances are really quite good that you're in fact black. Then she asks, "What are you going to do about it?" Cornered is more progressive than provocative, for it imagines in its subtle accusations a society in which class and race do not commingle, where race is not a stand-in for class. With each rebuke of the socially engineered phenomenon, Piper erodes the tenuous dividers populating racist ideologies. These ridiculous albeit stubborn lines are echoed in her plainspoken delivery. Her setting mirrors the learned but uninformed social behaviour she interrogates. As it was displayed in New Museum's Broadway window 12 May â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 12 July 1990, Cornered also included Piper's father's birth certificate(s), overturned table and ten chairs. The chairs are arranged in rows. Piper recreated a lecture room, where she unloaded a barrage of facts one can assume her "white" spectator has never before encountered. Her father's birth certificate functions as another wafer-thin articulation of race. In its eager legitimisation of her heritage there is also an element of mortification â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Piper exposed, laid bare; the documents mounted on the walls contain conflicting information, which leads us to more plot twists and turns. This is a sarcastic deprecation of the shoddy grounds on which fate can be determined. Should not her identity extend beyond a piece of paper? Even in complying with standards of racial categorisation, Piper cannot be classified. Of Cornered Phelan writes:

In unhooking racial identity from the realm of the visible and making it a matter of "choice", Piper exposes the enormous consequences of racial difference while exposing the utter insignificance of the ground which legislates these differences â&#x20AC;&#x201C; gene arrangement, the odd biology of blood (italics mine). Again we confront the issue of blood as a contaminant, but this time it is turned on its head (like the table). Actually, Piper says, race is not a biological fact, and because one is black does not mean that she is tainted by her blood, which is invariably "mixed" no matter what phenotypic characteristics she possesses. In the words of Phelan, "Since race is thought to be "carried" by blood and the history of slavery for African-American women is also the history of rape, the belief that one is "purely" white or black is difficult to sustain."77 The deceit of race is toppled by its own arsenal of presumptions.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. pp. 7-8

Fig. 8 Adrian Piper, Cornered

In her Catalysis IV (part of her Catalysis Series, of dozens of performances executed in public spaces in New York City between 1970 and 1971), Piper placed a large bath towel in her mouth and roamed the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public transportation system [Fig. 9]. In another installation of the Series, she altered her smell with vinegar, eggs, milk and cod-liver oil, to accentuate notions of Other.78 The Catalysis works queried invisible constructs of race, by confronting viewers with obvious difference and their private xenophobia. As did Mendieta in her Untitled (Death of a Chicken), Piper became the object thereby situating the making and viewing experiences "in the same time and

Baum, Kelly. "Shapely Shapelessness: Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Glass on Body Imprintsâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Face), 1972." Princeton University Art Museum, p. 88

space continuum".79 She worked to catalyse in her "viewers" a recognition of their lack of empathy for others, stemming from social conditioning to difference.

Fig. 9 Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV

The Catalysis works may have been an inspiration for Mendieta's Untitled (Ape Piece), June 1975, for which the artist donned a gorilla costume and confined herself to a wooden pen on the grounds of the 1975 All Iowa Fair [Fig. 10]. Photographs of Untitled (Ape Piece), show the artist subjecting herself to a public spectacle. Two black and white prints document Mendieta alone in the pen. Two more show her surrounded by onlookers, and a fifth shows her being led away on a short rope.80 By parodying a

Piper, Adrian. "Concretised Ideas I've Been Working Around", 1971 in Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 42 80 Baum, Kelly. "Shapely Shapelessness: Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Face), 1972". Princeton University Art Museum, p. 88

quasi-ethnographic fantasy, Mendieta "denatures" normative racism and highlights its stupid presumptions.81

Fig. 10 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Ape Piece), 1975

Ancient empires used violence to expand their territories in order to gain economic power. The colonisation of the Americas, in which the natural inhabitants were submitted to a violent system of human exploitation ... is evidence of this type of colonisation ... In the XX century, however, it incorporated a new type of colonisation ... Colonisation and neo-colonisation will be disguised by modern techniques ... In the past as well as in our own century, in order to facilitate the expropriation of the natural richness of a 81

Mendieta's Untitled (Ape Piece) bears a striking resemblance to Coco Fusco's (b. 1960) and Guillermo G贸mez-Pe帽a's (born 1955), Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid. In March 1992, the two artists locked themselves in a cage which travelled to Irvine, CA, London, Madrid, Minneapolis, MI and Washington, D.C. Wearing Converse sneakers, plastic beads and a wrestler's mask, they presented themselves as inhabitants of an island in the gulf of Mexico that was missed by Christopher Columbus. Led to the bathroom periodically, they spoke in a made-up language and engaged in "numerous stereotypical activities associated with Latinos, such as sewing voodoo dolls, lifting weights, watching television, dancing to rap music if offered a small donation and agreeing to have their pictures taken with visitors." Half of the visitors to the exhibition believed that the two were real captives, like shipwrecked "natives" washed ashore on a foreign time and place. Viso, Olga. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985. Hatje Cantz Publishers in collaboration with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2004, p. 133

territory and/or use the people as labour, the process which has been and still is very much implemented is DECULTURATION, its purpose being to uproot the culture of the people to be exploited. In fact to destroy the culture is a prerequisite for conquered territory.82 This passage from Mendieta's notes for her 1981 series Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) articulates the "methodology of disenfranchisement" that her work actively resisted.83 During the 1970s, the United States hosted a confluence of anticolonial, Third World, Native American and feminist movements, all of which fought against cultural homogenisation by re-appropriating and validating Other viewpoints. Phelan summarises the mutually beneficial synthesis of these groups, saying, "The focus on skin as the visible marker of race is itself a form of feminising those races which are not white. Reading the body as the sign of identity is the way men regulate the bodies of women." The whitewashing of culture is a tactic of colonial empires, to disenfranchise a people from identity and create a single pervasive network of associations. It is one way of sweeping soft power.

CONCLUSION Purification rituals often have at their core an objective to prevent toxic materials from disrupting the natural order of things. They endeavour to guard against contaminants so that life can go on uninterrupted, unencumbered. But the meaning of purity has become clouded by moral connotations, and blood as an intuitive purification agent entangled with issues of sex and race.

Mendietaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notes for her 1981 series Esculturas Rupestres, published in Ana Mendieta, A Book of Works. Clearwater, Bonnie, ed. Miami Beach, FL: Grassfield Press, 1993. p. 25. 83 Baum, Kelly. "Shapely Shapelessness: Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Face), 1972." Princeton University Art Museum.

Female blood has been inconsistently characterised as both pure and impure, depending on its contextual framing, and called upon to regulate sexual abstinence or promiscuity. Blood as it concerns race has been misused to pigeonhole and classify skin colours, in order to leverage soft power. The role of waste management or detoxification as undertaken by blood has detrimentally reappeared in moralising and geopolitical crusades.

Conclusion

The impetus for this project was a desire to plot how blood is visualised in the contemporary art context. Its use and significance in works of contemporary art may point to underlying preconceptions and sources of conflict around blood. It was my objective to broaden out views of blood as a taboo concept, by providing analyses of blood as it is performed in works by contemporary female artists. Our perceptions of blood are not normally considered as they are dialogue with its biological roles. As a result, blood as it is flooded with associations related to our external environment and how we react to it is taken for granted. Over the course of this essay, I have endeavoured to uncouple blood from its myriad connotations. I have been concerned with dislodging rigid dichotomies attached to the substance: ecstasy and agony; purity and impurity; morality and immorality. In order to do this, we have examined the origins of these connotations, in interlocking areas of violence, ritual and purity. In this dissertation I have elaborated how human behaviour starts on a submolecular level. Perception is attuned to physiological activity, even if subconsciously so. Hopefully through my writing the reader will have gained insight into how are formed these preconceptions crowding the meaning of blood. I have tried to illustrate through visual examples what sociocultural roles blood accumulates. In doing so, blood may be understood to be performed and embodied, as well as held by the body. The substance will be emptied of moral value, taboo, constructs of sex and race. It will be viewed rationally, as a self-contained element of life. The artists whose work we have explored hone a self-reflexive approach to their environment, employing blood as a reflector of how we mimic chemical reactions in

social behaviour. For Ana Mendieta, Regina José Galindo and Adrian Piper blood is indeed “a powerful magic thing”,84 which has a deep capacity for meaning. It can be destructive depending on how it is configured, but it cannot act alone to destroy. Blood is an indicator of genetic predisposition, but it maintains equilibrium via processes of coagulation, oxygenation, nutrient distribution and prophylaxis. Fundamentally, it creates and heals. In the same way that skin is a mask, blood is a polygraph, revealing our true nature. As porous, sensitive bundles of nerve endings, we are prone to disproportionate responses to innocuous stimuli. Sometimes we react in fear when no danger is present. Mendieta, Galindo and Piper enact blood as it betrays our sameness, not dissimilarity.

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Ana Mendieta (exhibition catalogue). Edited by Gloria Moure. Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 1996, p. 90

References Selected Primary Sources Goldman, Francisco interview with Regina JosĂŠ Galindo, BOMB Magazine online, accessed 26 September 2014: <http:// bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780> Marter, Joan interview with Ana Mendieta (edited excerpt), 1 February 1985, p. 229, Hayward Gallery catalogue Mendieta, Ana. "A Selection of Statements and Notes" in Sulfur 22, Spring 1988 Mendieta, Ana. Personal Writings, p. 167, Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition, 1996 Montano, Linda interview with Ana Mendieta. Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/fame, Ritual/death. Edited by Linda Montano. University of California Press, January 2001 Piper, Adrian. "Concretised Ideas I've Been Working Around", 1971 in Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996 Selected Monographs on Ana Mendieta 2008

Viso, Olga M. Unseen Mendieta, published by Prestel, Munich, 2008

2004

Viso, Olga M. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, published by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Hatje Cantz in conjunction with the traveling retrospective, 2004

1999

Blocker, Jane. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile, published by Duke University Press, 1999

1996

Ana Mendieta, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compestela, published in conjunction with the traveling retrospective exhibition, with essays by: Kuspit, Donald. "Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body", p. 35 Mendieta, Ana. Personal Writings, p. 167 Mendieta, Raquelin. "Childhood Memories: Religion, Politics, Art", p.223 Merewether, Charles. "From Inscription to Dissolution: an Essay on Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta", p. 83 Moure, Gloria. "Ana Mendieta", p.13 Sabbatino, Mary. "Ana Mendieta: Identity and the "Siluetas" Series", p. 135

1992

Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works, published by Grassfield Press Inc., Miami, Florida, with text by Bonnie Clearwater Ana Mendieta: The "Silueta" Series, 1973-1980, published by Galerie Lelong, New York, with text by Mary Jane Jacob

1987

Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, published by The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987 with essays by: Barreras del Rio, Petra. "Ana Mendieta: A Historical Overview" Perreault, John. "Earth and Fire: Mendieta's Body" Tucker, Marcia. Preface and Acknowledgements

Selected Secondary Sources Acevedo, Anabella; Bolton, Elaine; and Toledo, Aida. "Through their Eyes: Reflections on Violence in the Work of Guatemalan Performance and Installation Artists" in n.paradoxa: the only international feminist art journal, 2008, Vol. 21, pp. 56-66 Apel, Dora. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012 Ardener, Shirley. "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy", Perceiving Women. London, 1975 Baudrillard, Jean. "The Procession of Simulacra", in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 Baum, Kelly. "Shapely Shapelessness: Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints--Face), 1972", Princeton University Art Museum Berger, Maurice. "The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper" Afterimage 18, October 1990 Best, Susan. “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta”, Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians, 30:1, February, 2007 Biec, Odile and Toussaint, Evelyne. "Regina José Galindo", Le Parvis Scène Nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées : le centre d'art www.parvis.net/intranet/Upload/Liens/CentredArt/centredart_265.doc accessed 20 August 2014 Bowskill, Sarah and Lavery, Jane. "The Representation of the Female Body in the Multimedia Works of Regina José Galindo" in the Bulletin of Latin American Research Butler, Cornelia. WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution. Edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2007 Carolin, Claire. "After the Digital We Rematerialise: Distance and Violence in the Work of Regina Jose Galindo". Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 2, March, 2011, pp. 211-223

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, first published 1966 Feldman, Melissa E. "Blood Relations: Jose Bedia, Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, and Ana Mendieta" in Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art. Edited by Debra Koppman and Dawn Perlmutter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999 Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993 Heartney, Eleanor. “Rediscovering Ana Mendieta”, Art in America, November 2004, pp. 138-143 Herzberg, Julia P. “Ana Mendieta: The Formative Years”, ArtNexus, No. 47, Volume 1, 2003, pp. 54-59 Lippard, Lucy R. "Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper", The Drama Review 16, no. 1, March 1972 Lippard, Lucy R. “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women's Body Art”, Art in America (New York), May-June 1976, pp. 73-81 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, 1963 O'Dell, Kathy. "Time Clocks and Paradox: On Labour and Temporality in Performance Art" in Tempus Fugit: Time Flies. Edited by Jan Schall. Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2000 Oguibe, Olu. "In 'The Heart of Darkness" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Market Place. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 320-327 Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge, 1997 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993 Rauch, Heidi, and Suro, Federico. "Ana Mendieta's Primal Scream" in Américas 44, no. 5, 1992 Roulet, Laura. "Ana Mendieta as a Cultural Connector to Cuba" in American Art, Summer 2012, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp. 21-27 Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. USA and Canada: Routledge, 1997 Stallabrass, Julian. "Performing Torture", preface to Regina José Galindo, Confesión, Palma de Mallorca Steyerl, Hito. "In Defence of the Poor Image", The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg Press, September 2012

Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness: Vol. 1 The Positive Affects. New York, 1962 Ultan, Deborah K. "From the Personal to the Transpersonal: Self Reclamation Through Ritual-in-Performance" in Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2001, Vol. 20 Issue 2 Wharton, Jo Beth. "The Blood Symbolism within Ana Mendieta's Untitled", electronic version accessed 24 July 2014: <http://www.csuchico.edu/contrapposto/Volume_1_files/Papers/WhartonBlood Symbolism.pdf> Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989 Ana Mendieta: Body Tracks (exhibition catalogue). Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2002. Edited by Peter Fisher. Text by Patrick Dondelinger and Laura Routlet Ana Mendieta: Traces (exhibition catalogue) Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 2013. Published by Hayward Publishing, 2014. Foreword by Ralph Rugoff. Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Adrian Heathfield, Stephanie Rosenthal Butler, Cornelia. "The Woman Who Never Was: Self-Representation, Photography and First-Wave Feminist Art" in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (exhibition catalogue). Edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2007 Selected Electronic Media Sources Cembalest, Robin. "Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance-Art Show" 25 October 2013 ARTNEWS online, accessed 21 September: <http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/piper-pulls-out-of-black-performanceart-show/> English translation of the account in Nahuatl, accessed 27 July 2014: <http://web.archive.org/web/20071022042328/www.interlupe.com.mx/nicane.html> "Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: a statistical overview and exploration of the dynamics of change", female genital mutilation fact sheet N° 241, UNICEF 2013 via World Health Organisation, accessed 27 July 2014: <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/> "Humorism", Wikipedia page, accessed 21 September 2014: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism> "Hymenorrhaphy", Wikipedia page, accessed 21 September 2014: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenorrhaphy>

"Judy Grahn Discusses the Transpersonal Element of Women's Spirituality", Sofia University, YouTube video, accessed 27 July 2014: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C3EOvxnBc> Micchelli, Thomas. "Regina JosĂŠ Galindo", 5 November 2009, Brooklyn Rail, accessed 7 August 2014: <http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/11/artseen/regina-josegalindo> "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith" exhibition microsite, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Museum of Modern Art, accessed 21 September 2014: <http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/205> "News: September 2012", Adrian Piper website, accessed 21 September 2014: <http://www.adrianpiper.com/news_sep_2012.shtml> "Veil of Veronica", Wikipedia page, accessed 21 September 2014: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Veil_of_Veronica> "Women in Performance Fall 2011", accessed 21 September 2014: <https://sites.google.com/site/womeninperformancefall2011/ana-mendieta>