The puzzling death of controversial artist Ana Mendieta has long overshadowed her brilliant work
Her husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre, was arrested for murder
Ana Mendieta was a rising art world star in New York City in the early 1980s when she went out the window of the 34th-floor apartment she shared with her husband. She was 36 years old. The grim, puzzling circumstances of her death cast a pall over the art scene and, sadly, went on to overshadow her brilliant, albeit abbreviated, career.
The daughter of a prominent Cuban family, Mendieta had come to the United States as a child refugee from Havana in 1961, two years after Fidel Castro came to power. Her father was a political prisoner in Cuba at the time. After two chaotic, itinerant years, Mendieta and her sister Raquelin were settled in Dubuque, Iowa by Operation Peter Pan, a Catholic charitable initiative that brought 14,000 unaccompanied minors to the United States from communist Cuba between 1960 and 1962.
Mendieta attended the University of Iowa, where she studied with the artist Hans Breder in the pioneering Intermedia Department Breder founded. The two became lovers and collaborators, with Mendieta modeling for a number of Breder’s photographs in the early 70s, and Breder documenting many of her early performances.
Mendieta was prolific from her earliest days, and she took particular pleasure in producing discomfort in viewers of her work. As her sister Raquelin said of Ana, “She was always very dramatic, even as a child — and liked to push the envelope, to give people a start, to shock them a little bit. It was who she was and she enjoyed it very much. And she laughed about it sometimes when people got freaked out.”
In her early experimental films, some of which were discovered by her siblings decades after her death, she explored the themes of violence, sex, and death. In the 1973 film “Sweating Blood,” the camera is trained close up on Mendieta. Blood very slowly begins to pour down the artist’s face, starting at the crown of her head, in what critic Ben Davis calls “a horror-movie version of Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Tests.’” Like many women artists at the time, Mendieta used her body as a site for her work. She famously glued hair to her chin in “Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants)” and transformed herself by wearing wigs and manipulating her facial features by wearing a tight nude stocking over her face in “Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations).”
Some of her work, like the 1973 photograph “Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood),” a close up in which Mendieta looks badly beaten, with blood dripping down her face and into the neckline of her white shirt, produce a feeling of unease, even distress, in the viewer. “Blood is a very powerful symbol, especially for people who feel like art making is a life and death situation,” said the late scholar Jose Esteban Munoz in the 2009 documentary BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story.
Blood and violence were central to the artist’s early work. According to her sister, she bought “steer blood by the gallon from a nearby slaughterhouse.” In response to the 1973 rape and murder of 20-year old Sarah Ottens, a fellow University of Iowa student, Mendieta made a series of pieces. In one performance called “Untitled (Rape Scene),” she was bent over a table, tied up and bloodied, surrounded by shattered crockery and other crime-scene detritus. Viewers “sat down, and started talking about it,” the artist later recalled. “I didn’t move. I stayed in position about an hour. It really jolted them.” In another piece, “Untitled (People Looking at Blood, Moffitt),” Mendieta captures on film the reactions of people passing her apartment, from which blood is trickling and where she has left a pile of animal gore. She was particularly interested in the non-response of the people who took in the scene, and was apparently angry that no one called the police.
Between 1973 and 1978, Mendieta became more invested in the themes of nature and spirituality. During this period, she made her famous “Silhueta” series, site-specific pieces in which the artist made imprints on the earth with her body and then photographed them. The ephemeral works of “earth art” (a label she eschewed), for which Mendieta is perhaps best known, left a ghostly presence in the landscape, a “performance of invisibility,” as some have referred to them.
Much of Mendieta’s work with her own body — whether exploring death or invisibility — went on to find a profound and sinister resonance following her premature and mysterious death at age 36.
On September 8, 1985, Mendieta, clad only in blue underwear, fell from the apartment she shared with her husband, the famous minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. The couple had been drunk and arguing, which friends said was typical. The doorman of the building next door to Mendieta and Andre’s Greenwich Village high-rise later testified that he heard what sounded like a woman saying “No, no, no, no” just moments before the explosive sound of her body hitting the roof of a nearby deli.
Andre had scratches on his face when police arrived. And his 911 call, later replayed in a courtroom, sounded chillingly detached. “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist,” Andre said to the dispatcher, “and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.’’
Andre was charged with murdering Mendieta. During a protracted three-year trial, Andre’s lawyer argued that Mendieta had committed “sub-intentional suicide.” But the prosecution, as well as Mendieta’s family and friends, told a different story, claiming that the artist was just hitting her stride professionally, and though frustrated by her fraught and complex marriage, feeling more productive than ever. Many also claimed she had a terrible fear of heights. In 1988, Andre was acquitted. “I know he killed my daughter,” Mendieta’s mother said as she left the courtroom.
Mendieta’s death divided the art world bitterly. In the years following, protesters have gathered at exhibitions of Andre’s work, sometimes chanting or carrying signs reading “Where is Ana Mendieta?” Many argued that the response to the artist’s death reflects the historical neglect of the work of women artists and artists of color and, more disturbingly, the erasure of violence against women in the culture at large.
Though there has been a strong resurgence of interest in her work in the past 15 years or so, the artist’s career has been unfortunately overshadowed by the suspicious and terrifying circumstances of the end of her life. As Haley Mlotek writes in the New Inquiry, it’s not hard to see why — “a fall after a lifelong fear of heights, her body left un-photographed by police after a career of photographing her own body — as well as the infuriatingly unresolved cause of death creates a compellingly dramatic and structurally tidy narrative.”
Some artists and critics have lamented the way that Mendieta has been remembered. In an interview with Artsy, Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist and curator, said, “I have not continued to participate in the canonization of Ana because I don’t think that it is about her work…When Ana was alive, she was struggling and poor. She was a marginal figure within the art world and was looked upon by many as a very difficult personality. All of the post-mortem canonization has nothing to do with how she lived or how she was treated during her life.”
For many more, however, the attention now given Mendieta’s work is not the facile elevation or “canonization” of a martyred female artist who died while young and beautiful, but the long overdue recognition of an inventive, serious artist whose productive years were cut tragically short. Though her career was brief, Mendieta produced a large and enormously varied body of work across a range of media. And she maintained a certain illegibility, steadily resisting the labels she could have used to describe her work, insisting that she was not merely an “earth artist,” a performance artist, or a feminist artist.
Though the precise nature of her death remains in question, Mendieta has posthumously become larger than life. In addition to her enduring artistic contribution, she is a symbol of the looming threat of violence all women face. As artist Betsy Damon wrote in a piece called “In Homage to Ana Mendieta,” “I cannot forget that this is what we fear every day.”
