아나 멘디에타(Ana Mendieta): 대지와 신체의 접점(1972-1985)

Abstract

This paper was originally presented at the symposium entitled “Art in Ecology,Nature and Environment” that the Association of Western Art History organized. Throughout my paper, I have attempted to look at Ana Mendieta’s provocative Silueta series as well as other body and performance oriented works, mainly created between 1972 and 1985, in order to explore the gendered and politicized nature of Mendieta’s “drawing in nature.” After her marriage to Carl Andre and her subsequent tragic death in 1985 (it is unclear whether she was murdered by her husband or committed suicide), Mendieta has never been as recognized as Andre. However, recent retrospective exhibitions, scholarly publications, and doctoral dissertations have placed Mendieta in the context of the politics of gender and race. This Cuban-born artist was exiled to Iowa at the age of 13, leaving behind her parents in Cuba. She studied interdisciplinary art studies under the guidance of Hans Breder, professor at the Intermedia program at the University of Iowa, where Mendieta participated in the lectures conducted by contemporary artists such as Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and others. This paper first questions where we can locate Ana Mendieta’s place in our current discussions of contemporary art in relation to performance and photography. Then, in the first chapter, I scrutinize three pre-existing scholarly perspectives on Mendieta’s life. First, this perspective explores the way in which the feminist artist encountered avant-grade art. Second, it leads to discussions on her first performance initiated by the incident of rape. By analyzing the alienated trajectory of her life from Cuba to Iowa and New York in American cities, we can assume that Mendieta’s travel to Mexico acted as a “surrogate” for Cuba. Thus this was her inscribed “silueta”on the land and a metaphor for her nostalgia in the absence of her motherland. This argument is closely related to the gender politics of the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary feminist debates about Essentialism and Constructivism. In particular,Mendieta’s employment of her own body in line with pre-historic “mother-earth”goddesses has placed her work in the context of essential feminism. Third,Mendieta’s work is at the crossroads of an “in-between” liminal space between Cuba and America. The second chapter analyzes Mendieta’s feminist vision, and then discusses how her work embodied it. I also look at the way her works move beyond essential feminism by adhering to her body and performance in seilueta pieces. In this vision,I argue that her use of performance and camera are of significance in creating the alter-ego or “double” of herself. This chapter also deals with other contemporary feminists such as Carolee Schneeman and Mary Edelson, who created, respectively,Evaporation Piece-Noon of 1974 and Grapceva Neolithic Cave Series: See for Yourself of 1977. The third chapter is my own thorough study on the observation of her body drawn in nature and on land. Although Mendieta has recently garnered scholarly attentions especially in her contribution to performance, I find that little scholars studied the operation of photography in her work. Thus, the last chapter examines the indexical operation of photography in Mendieta’s oeuvre, as a mark of the absence of her mother country. The traces of her body in nature also evoke the presence and absence of her identity, creating in-between space as a double or multiplicity of herself. The interaction of photography and performance is therefore inscribed in her body of work as a form of land art and drawing in nature. It was Mendieta’s “earth-body work” or “earth-body sculpture” as she called