If nature was Ana Mendieta’s canvas, her body was inevitably her subject. A former painter who abandoned brushes because the medium wasn’t “real enough,” Mendieta thought art should project the power and magic of ancient, primitive art. She managed to achieve this through what was then a modern genre—video art—in which her body and its residue haunt the landscapes of places like Cuba, Mexico, Iowa and Key Biscayne.
The NSU Art Museum’s “Covered in Time and History,” a survey of 21 bold and courageous films Mendieta completed in the 1970s and early 1980s, offers her bite-sized visions of all of these places and the imprint she left on them. The length of most of these videos doesn’t exceed an average YouTube clip, and most employ fixed cameras with no edits and no sound. But they run a gamut from serene to uncomfortable, calming to distressing, and sometimes both at once.
Many are so nakedly voyeuristic you want to look away. In “Blood Inside Outside,” she stands nude in front of Old Man’s Creek in Iowa, smearing what appears to be blood on just about every inch of her body, like a painter applying a primer or, more spiritually, like an adult revisiting the womb. In “Creek,” she lies corpselike in the same flowing river, her body have subsumed itself into nature’s landscape.
This conjoining of human and nature—of both being living embodiments of an ecosystem—also manifests in her staggering “Burial Pyramid,” which at first appears to be a static shot of rocks and weeds, until the rocks in the center of the mound start bobbing up and down. It turns out Mendieta buried herself under the stones in a kind of makeshift earthen coffin, and with each powerful inhale and exhale, her body reanimates a little bit more, shaking off her sepulcher.
Mendieta didn’t enforce meanings on most of her videos, allowing them to be influenced by the spectators’ own experiences and perceptions. But in a few specific cases, the rage of the videos’ provenance speaks volumes. In two of the harshest videos in the show, Mendieta reacted to the rape and murder of a fellow University of Iowa student. In “Moffitt Building Piece,” she placed blood and viscera on the sidewalk outside a local storefront and surreptitiously recorded the reactions of passersby—many of whom walk by the grisly evidence as if it’s an everyday occurrence, others offering curious glances but barely breaking their stride.
“Sweating Blood” is a lengthy close-up of Mendieta’s face in which, finally, a trickle of blood descends from the part in her hair as if from a phantom wound. The museum pairs this video with her series of six still images of her face caked with blood, presented to simulate crime scene photographs. It’s hard to stomach this portion of the show for very long, but that, of course, is the point.
But in more works than not, Mendieta’s presence is felt without her physical body. In her “Silueta” series, she created silhouettes of her body in grass, sand, dirt, even fire, and let her camera record these ephemeral sarcophagi until nature washed them away or the last embers dissipated in the wind. Analyses of Mendieta’s work have pointed to its references to Santeria and ritual practices from her native Cuba, but there’s no mention, in this exhibition, of the tragic elephant in the room. Mendieta died before her time, at age 36, when she fell from the window of the 34th floor Greenwich Village apartment she shared with husband and artist Carl Andre. Andre’s role, or lack thereof, in her death remains a subject of controversy in the art world, and her death is an eerie postscript to her famous Sileuta videos, which seem, in retrospect, like rehearsals for transfiguration—the body’s immersion into nature made permanent.
“Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta” runs through July 3 at NSU Art Museum, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Admission runs $5-$12. Call 954/525-5500 or visit nsuartmuseum.org.
