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