OANA URCAN ON IDENTITY

In America , in the 70’s , there had been intense experimentation in the arts. Many artist were angered by the ‘racism, sexism and elitism of gallery and museum exhibitions’. (1) In this decade, there was much unrest at many levels; the struggle of the women’s liberation front, civil rights, racial equality, the Stonewall riots....The 70’s also mark the richest production of feminist art and theory. Women artists - largely inspired by 60’s artists who used their bodies as image and medium such as Ives Klein and Bruce Naumann - begun to examine issues of identity and subjectivity through the female body.

I have chosen the artist Ana Mendieta in trying to consider issues of identity - much of her work being concerned with feminism, gender and exile.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America in 1961 by her parents, when the revolution broke out. She went to the Iowa University where she gained an M.A. in Fine Arts. Through her work, Mendieta ‘ adapted and synthesized the artistic trends of the decade - conceptualism, body art, performance, installation and earth art - to animate the territorial boundaries between artist and audience, male and female, body and spirit.’ (2)

In ‘Glass on body’, a performance at Iowa University, she pressed her body onto glass, thus contorting it and changing it in a grotesque manner until it became unrecognizable. Through this work she turned body art ’ toward such feminist issues as the normative construction of beauty and the female body as the monstrous other’. (3)

For her M.A. project she asked a male friend to shave off his beard, and stuck it on her face, conceptually turning herself into a man. This work is similar to many of her contemporaries - Eleanor Antin, Anette Messager , who were doing similar ‘drag’ performances. It is also reminiscent of Vito Acconci ‘s work, who ‘became’ a woman in his ‘Conversion’ series. ‘While many male artists experimented with the unfamiliar experience of making themselves the object of the viewer’s gaze, female artists worked to expose the violence and control that can lie beyond the gaze, which for them (us) is neither novel nor escapable’. (4)

Although feminist in the content of her work, she distanced herself from the ‘essentialist’ theory, of what she called ‘white feminism’.’ In the 70’s, women artists reclaiming the Goddess were looking for a unity beyond the pluralism of culturally specific symbols.....At the time, feminists did not realize that this retrieval of a Worldwide Goddess civilization was largely being done by white, middle-class women for the sake of what some have called an ‘essentialist’ theory until it was pointed out to them.’(5)

Mendieta’s interest in the earth as goddess came directly from Cuban cultural tradition-and in her work , she brings together colour, ethnicity, gender, nation and earth.

‘In essence- she explains- my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human.’(6)

It is interesting to note that throughout her life she is the ‘exiled’, belonging to both Cuba and U.S.A-she belongs to none. She writes: ’I make sculptures in the landscape because I have no motherland, I feel a need to join with the earth, to return to her womb’.(7)

Through her performances, her narratives and earth sculptures, she understood exile as ‘not just a loss of country, but as the lifelong process of coming to terms with the estrangement that is the soul of identity’(8)

She somewhat echoes the Freudian concept of heimlich/unheimlich ; the familiar/the uncanny. In his work ‘The uncanny’, Freud writes: ’I have roots that are most heimlich. I am grown in the deep earth’....’With it, he teaches us that home is a concept related both to feelings of belonging and to repressed memories of alienation’(9)

Ana Mendieta’s work attracted harsh criticism, often being marginalized. Donald Kuspit being very harsh indeed. He fails to understand the political and feminist critique in Mendieta’s work His criticism tends to be very gender specific. He writes; ‘Mendieta preferred to have narcissistic intercourse with Mother Earth than sexual intercourse with man.......She was not as liberated or enlightened feminist as she might have thought she was.’(10)

Ana Mendieta’s work is indeed post-modern - dealing with the complex issues of identity, gender, sexuality, race,class and politics.

By engaging the contradictions of identificatory practice relative to the female, the primitive, earth and nation, Mendieta occupies the discursive position of exile, and she uses this position to produce a sense of the uncanny. She uses, in other words, exile performatively to question the limits and fixity of identity.’ (11)

This is an extract from a reading she gave at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1982, three years before her untimely death at the age of 43 :

‘ It is only with a real and long awakening that a person becomes present to himself, and it is only with this presence that a person begins to live like a human being.

To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world .I know that it is the presence of myself, this self knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art.’ (12)

Bibliography:

1. Where is Ana Mendieta by Jane Blocker p.5

2. Ibid p.10

3. Ibid p.11

4. Ibid p.15

5. Ibid p.19

6. Ibid p.61

7. Ibid p.77

8. Ibid p.74

9. Ibid p.71

10. Ibid p.14

11. Ibid p.73

12 Art in theory 1900-2000 , Ideas of the post-modern p.1065