THE SERIAL SPACES OF ANA MENDIETA

SUSAN BEST

The Silueta Series is widely recognized as the most important work by the
Cuban–American artist Ana Mendieta. Arranged in roughly chronological
order, from 1973 to 1980, the images reproduced here (plates 3.1–3.12) represent a
good cross-section of the photographs, slides and films that make up the series.
In particular, this selection highlights the very variable appearance of the silueta,
or silhouette, in the landscape. For example, Untitled and Ánima (see plates 3.6
and 3.7) are clearly female figures, whereas an early image, a film still from
Flower Person (see plate 3.3), is not an identifiably female form, just as many
of the later images are not identifiably female bodies (see plates 3.8, 3.11 and
3.12). To those unfamiliar with this series, it may come as a surprise, then,
that much of the debate about the series has turned on the depiction of the
female body and its meaning. In particular, Mendieta has been criticized for
embracing a conventional alignment of the female body and nature, thereby
presenting an ahistorical, essentialist conception of woman. More recently, the
Silueta Series has been defended against these charges by emphasizing the
absence of the female body; that is, in the later images from the series, we see
only traces of the female body, rather than an image of the actual body. This
argument is hard to reconcile with the selection of images I examine in this
article – Mendieta’s body is present in several works from 1975 and the later
images are not all recognizably female. The peculiar mismatch between the
images of the series and their interpretation suggests a need for reassessment and
reinterpretation. More specifically, there is a need for an interpretation of the
series that can encompass the full range of images. Surprisingly perhaps, I think
revisiting the meaning of Mendieta’s essentialism is the most promising
approach.
In recent feminist art history essentialism has generally been regarded as
a term of abuse or an approach to avoid at all costs. In feminist philosophy,
however, the inescapability of using essentialist, or universalist notions has been
widely canvassed. If essentialism is inescapable, as many argue, then one of the
challenges for feminist theory is to distinguish between varieties of essentialism
and their efficacy for feminist ends. Mendieta’s deployment of essentialism, I
would suggest, serves such ends.
Mendieta’s essentialism can be characterized as a reliance upon an ahis-
torical idea, mother earth, to generate the Silueta Series. Thus the traditional
link between the female body and nature is supported and a received idea
about sexual difference is retained. More precisely, Mendieta subscribes to an
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 1 . FEBRUARY 2007 pp 57-82
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 T H E S E R I A L S PA C E S O F A N A M E N D I E TA

idea of feminized nature, or what I have described elsewhere as feminized

space.1 Using this particular idea, however, allows her to posit alternatives
to patriarchal culture in the name of the feminine, that include a kind of
ecological sensibility that emphasizes the reciprocity between body and land, a
resistance to colonialist conceptions of land and territory, and a complicated
intertwining of terms that are traditionally polarised, such as transcendence and
objectification, presence and absence and so forth. In other words, she uses an
essentialist notion (that women and nature are aligned), and an essentialist
position (that there is a fundamental difference between the sexes) in a highly
generative way.
This article begins with a reconsideration of the limits of the Silueta Series, a
crucial issue that partly accounts for the problems of interpretation with which I
began. Then briefly I outline the key feminist approach to essentialism and sexual
difference that I believe best suits an analysis of Mendieta’s project. In the second
half of the article I examine the alternatives to patriarchal conceptions of nature,
dwelling, space and identity generated by Mendieta’s deployment of a feminized
conception of nature or space.

W I T H O U T E N D : T H E S I L U E TA S E R I E S
Of all Mendieta’s works the Silueta Series has garnered the most critical atten-
tion. It is widely acknowledged as Mendieta’s key aesthetic achievement: Mary
Sabbatino has argued that it is the core of her practice, and Guy Brett has called it
her great contribution to art.2 Generally, it is dated from 1973 to 1980, and can be
described as including those works which resulted from Mendieta either placing
her body, or constructing a surrogate form of herself, on what she regarded as the
maternal earth. The resulting images, documented on Super-8 film, slides and
photographs, visualize the idea of a feminized earth by showing the female body
incorporated into various natural environments: rivers, the air, the land and the
liminal zones of seashore and riverbank.
Whereas there is a consensus about the importance of this series, surprisingly
little critical attention has been given to its limits, or rather as I will argue below
that they are not easily ascertained or fixed. It is as if the theoretical pull of her
work has led to less attention to basic art-historical questions, even one as
fundamental as what constitutes the objects of study, or whether that object of
study can be constituted with any sense of surety or finality.
There are a number of uncertainties about the limits of this series, some of
which further research might resolve and others which are less amenable to
resolution. They include: the starting date, which I believe is a movable feast and
will be approached differently by different scholars depending upon what they
want to emphasize; the relationship of the films to the photographs, and, in
particular, the distinction between silueta documentation and what Charles
Merewether calls the ‘action’ films, these two issues can be addressed or at least
explored with further research; the extent to which similar series should all be
assembled under the ‘silueta’ rubric; and whether the series should only
include lifetime prints (photographs printed during her lifetime), be extended to
include estate prints (prints made after her death), or whether it should
encompass all the slides – while she made over 100 silhouettes, according to Mary
Sabbatino, there are thousands of slides in Mendieta’s archive.3

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3.1 Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973. Lifetime colour photograph, 50.8 
33.7 cm. Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

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3.2 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta

Series, Mexico), 1974. 35 mm
colour slide. Photo: r the Estate
of Ana Mendieta Collection,
courtesy Galerie Lelong,
New York.

The starting date of the Silueta Series, 1973, may seem to be beyond conten-
tion; Mendieta posits this date as the beginning of the series both in an interview
with Linda Montana and in a statement about her work.4 This date is based on
Mendieta’s retrospective designation of Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) as the
beginning of this series; most critics adhere to this starting date, even though it is
not a silhouette as such but Mendieta herself who appears in this image, albeit
obscured by flowers (plate 3.1).5 Julia Herzberg’s recent research into Mendieta’s
early years introduces a level of equivocation about the status of this image as the
first silueta; she says of Image from Yagul that it ‘might be considered her first
silueta – predating the next by a year.’ (author’s emphasis).6 Herzberg notes that
the first actual outline of the body was produced the following year (1974),
documented both by slides and the film Untitled (Laberinth Blood Imprint) (plate 3.2).
The starting date for the series could thus be 1973 or 1974, depending upon
whether a silueta is defined as an actual tracing of the body’s outline. Herzberg’s
equivocal attitude to Mendieta’s dating opens the way for other interpretations of
what constitutes the core of the series. For example, the sporadic production
of these first two years – there appears to be a further hiatus between the work of
1974 and the more dense production of siluetas from mid-1975 onwards – could

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be used to argue that a ‘serial attitude’ had not yet been adopted, to use Mel
Bochner’s terms, if not his meaning.7 When the density and frequency of her
investigations of the silueta proposition become more pronounced, it could be
argued that Mendieta begins to work serially. Something like this attitude
informs Charles Merewether’s approach to the Silueta Series. Merewether makes
a qualitative argument about what should be regarded as the first major auton-
omous silueta made in 1975,8 considering that there are two decisive shifts in her
practice in this period: working directly in the landscape and removing her own
body from the works. While Merewether is careful to distinguish this particular
period of production from what follows, most critics are not as attentive to the
shifts in her practice; the characterization of this period is generalized. That
the body is absent (or mostly absent) from the Silueta Series could be called the
classical interpretation of this series, adhered to by many of her key critics.9 For
Merewether, the first major silueta is the film referred to variously as Silueta de
Yemayá or Untitled (Flower Person) (plate 3.3).
The film documentation of the Silueta Series introduces another question
about our understanding of the limits of this series. Until very recently, the films
have not been substantially included in the literature; most critics have concen-
trated on the photographs. Occasionally, the existence of the film documen-
tation is mentioned, but the films themselves are rarely mentioned by name or
analysed – Merewether is the exception here. Mendieta made over eighty films, as
Chrissie Iles recently noted, more than any other artist in the 1970s.10 Curiously,

3.3 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Flower Person), 1975. Still from Super-8 colour, silent film, 6 min.
Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

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3.4 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Genesis in Mud), 1975. Still from Super-8 colour, silent film, 4 min.
Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

on two occasions when Mendieta referred to the reception of her earth body
sculptures, she only refers to the photographs.11 How then should we regard the
films?
The recent exhibition of Mendieta’s work curated by Olga Viso, Ana Mendieta:
Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972–1985, held at the Whitney Museum in
New York in 2004, foregrounded the importance of her films. Several films were
included in the room devoted to the Silueta Series – Genesis in Mud, Flower Person
and Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) – as well as other films related
to the series in other sections of the exhibition. Genesis in Mud slowly reveals
Mendieta’s form breathing below a layer of mud. She appears in the classic pose of
this early period of the Silueta Series with arms outstretched (plate 3.4).12 Rock
Heart with Blood re-uses an ash silhouette (plate 3.5). Mendieta with spare,
untheatrical gestures pours red pigment over a heart set in the chest area of the
silhouette, and then places her naked form face-down into the cavity, uniting the
body and its double in a glove-like fit. According to Merewether, Genesis in Mud and
Rock Heart with Blood are part of a suite of four works which he classifies as
‘actions’; the other two films are Silueta Sangrienta (Bleeding Silhouette) and Alma
Silueta en Fuego (Soul Silhouette in Fire). These films, as his term ‘action’ indicates, are
not simply documenting the silhouettes; they are further works.13
If these films are included in the Silueta Series, then this constitutes the
greatest disruption to established interpretations of the limits of the series and
its meaning. The Silueta Series is not just concerned with traces of the body or the

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absence of the body, an argument that applies well to most of the photographs,
but it also includes the body itself. By positing an image of the body as the
starting point for this series (Image from Yagul, plate 3.1), Mendieta certainly shows
that she was not using the term silueta in a narrow sense. In both English and
Spanish, silueta or silhouette has the secondary meaning of perceiving an object
as an outline, usually, of course, as a dark outline against a light background. This
secondary meaning shifts the emphasis from how the image is rendered – tracing
an outline – to how it is perceived relative to its surroundings. Following this
secondary meaning, the idea of the silhouette could be taken as a kind of
direction for viewing: to attend to how the contours of the body are produced by,
and in relation to, an environment.

3.5 Ana Mendieta, Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood), 1975. Stills from Super-8 colour, silent
film, 3 min. Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

Acknowledging the persistent presence of the body in the Silueta Series also
underscores the coherence of Mendieta’s oeuvre. What might have been seen as
an aberrant reappearance of the body in The Tree of Life Series, in which
Mendieta’s body appears covered in mud in several photographs from 1976 and
1979, can now be seen as another continuity. Further to confuse matters in the
first retrospective of Mendieta’s work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York in 1987, both the Fetish Series and the Tree of Life Series were presented
as part of the Silueta Series.14 Most scholars tend to distinguish sharply between

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the different series, no doubt guided by the idea that a different title indicates a
separation, while exhibition catalogues tend to present them together, guided in
turn by the strong visual relationship between them. Olga Viso suggests a way
through this impasse of separation/inclusion. She makes a more nuanced
distinction between the Silueta Series – with which these other series are closely
associated – and what she calls the ‘Silueta Project’ which includes all of the
series, although she has also noted that a definitive answer to the question of the
limits of the Silueta Series is difficult to give.15
With these accumulated uncertainties about the Silueta Series, there remains
the peculiar situation of analysing an object or objects whose exact limits cannot
be specified. This boundlessness or indeterminacy could be regarded as simply
another face of Mendieta’s elusive, fugitive art. Indeed, Mendieta herself referred
to the Siluetas in 1977 as ‘a long series that will never end’.16 Guy Brett interprets
this statement as showing the influence of minimalist seriality and this may
indeed be the case; the interminable quality of minimalist work much lamented
by Michael Fried – there is no end because there is nothing there to exhaust – is,
however, at odds with the infinite variations of the Silueta Series.17 The desire for
boundlessness suggests not interminability but a desire for infinite extension and
variability, like the appearances of nature. That the very parameters of the series
also have this diffused and variable quality is not then very surprising, although
deeply troubling for interpretations which attempt closure.
In what follows, I work between the classical understanding of Mendieta’s
Silueta Series as emphasizing the absence of the body and the new understanding
of the series as including the body, foregrounded by Olga Viso and by Charles
Merewether. It might be argued that the persistence of her body adds weight to
the charge of essentialism. In my view, however, this does not substantially shift
the terms of the debate. What the film works do complicate is the depiction of
nature and time.

THEORIZING FEMININITY
It may seem somewhat perverse to consider Mendieta’s relation to essentialism,
given that so many of her recent critics have attempted to disentangle her work
from precisely this reading.18 In particular, there has been a concerted effort to
read her work through notions of performativity, thereby aligning her work with
a kind of postmodern sensibility and the destabilization, deconstruction or
subversion of identity.
Mendieta’s silueta works are able to sustain this reading because they
emphasize repeated actions, a key issue in Judith Butler’s idea of gender as
performance, and they repeat one of the abiding narratives which has determined
an understanding of femininity: the link between the body of woman and nature.
For Judith Butler, agency resides in the capacity to alter such narratives by
unfaithful repetition.19 Following the classical interpretation of the Silueta
Series, we could say that the repetition also varies the narrative by making the
female body at once present in outline and yet absent in actuality. Certainly,
unlike the work of many body artists, in most of her earth bodyworks Mendieta
does not use her body itself as a material.20 In these works, the action – the
repeated imprinting of Mendieta’s silhouette on the earth – is doubly displaced

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from her body: a model of her body is used either to build up or gouge an image
into the earth and the results are seen only through film or photographic
mediation. Mostly, we see then, traces of traces of the body.
When the withdrawal of the body is emphasized, the siluetas can be argued
not only to sidestep the overdetermined meanings of the female body in art, but
also to follow Judith Butler’s idea of focusing on the ‘deed’ rather than the
‘doer’.21 The emphasis on the deed is the linchpin of Butler’s idea of gender as
performance; as she puts it, ‘there need not be a ‘‘doer behind the deed’’, the
‘‘doer’’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.’22 As a theoretical
concept, performativity’s greatest purchase is perhaps in queer theory, where it
functions to emphasize sexual practices rather than embodiment. Within that
context, the political efficacy of emphasizing action makes perfect sense; it
highlights the contribution of sexual practices to ideas about identity. However,
when this idea is utilized in art history it often loses this political edge and
functions predominantly as a way of avoiding the so-called risk of essentialism.
For example, in Jane Blocker’s highly nuanced discussion of Mendieta, she
acknowledges the reappraisal of essentialism by Diana Fuss and others, but
nonetheless aims to avoid essentialism by embracing the central tenet of
performativity, namely, the shift away from the doer as the origin of the act. She
argues, ‘no one true identity precedes the act’ and that ‘no one identity remains
stable in and through performance.’ Even the possibility of agency depends upon
action, she states: ‘Mendieta negotiated among identity possibilities that them-
selves emerge with the act of performance.’23
A similar strategy is adopted by Amelia Jones. She makes an ingenious
transposition of Butler’s argument to art history; she moves the opposition of
doer and deed into the more art-historical terms of intention and production.
The subject, she says, is ‘never fully coherent in his or her intentionality’.24
Uncoupling this link between intention and production, she argues, destabilizes
gender as the ground or origin point of production. In Mendieta’s reiteration of
norms such as woman and nature, she argues, citing Butler, ‘sex is both produced
and destabilized.’25
Clearly essentialism is avoided by both of these theoretical constructions, but
so, too, is any kind of specificity for feminine identity. Feminine identity can be as
unstable, indeterminate and unfixed as any other. But what if Mendieta’s goal is
precisely to fix the subject, to claim a place for feminine agency and identity
before, during and after the act? Her work could then be positioned in relation to
what Elizabeth Grosz calls feminism of difference, which rather than valorizing
indeterminacy, has attempted to valorize femininity and to construct or explore
female specificity.26 Feminism of difference with its utopian goal of revising or
transvaluing the historically given attributes of femininity, shares similar aims
and theoretical sources to Butler’s model of performativity, where it departs
from her stated aims is in retaining sexual difference as a crucial ontological
distinction.27
Feminism of difference is most closely associated with the work of Luce Irigaray
and her key commentators in the 1980s and early 1990s: Elizabeth Grosz, Naomi
Schor and Margaret Whitford. This approach can be considered essentialist in so
far as it is committed to the idea of sexual difference as a meaningful distinction,
and is similarly committed to the utopian goal of thinking about women and

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femininity in what Elizabeth Grosz has called ‘autonomous, self-defined terms’.28

For these feminists, indeterminacy is the problem, not the solution, for the iden-
tity of woman.29 In other words, alongside the debate about essentialism versus
social constructionism, there is another crucial divide within feminist approaches
using poststructuralism: one pole favours Kristeva’s idea of the disruption of all
identity and the other follows Irigaray’s utopian project of reconstructing female
identity. Irigaray’s project is a complicated one and it is perhaps worth briefly
unpacking her ideas about female identity and her relationship to essentialism,
before considering how the approach inspired by her work illuminates the work of
Mendieta as well as other feminist artists of this period.
First, it should be emphasized that the autonomous self-defined terms
required to reconstruct female identity cannot be sought in some hitherto
unknown attributes of woman. In other words, such terms are not presumed to be
newly minted, as Irigaray poetically puts it: ‘It’s not that we have a territory of our
own; but their fatherland, family, home, discourse, imprison us in enclosed
spaces where we cannot keep on moving, living, as ourselves.’30 Irigaray
acknowledges that there is no alternative account of femininity but she none-
theless consistently expresses the utopian desire to think what has not been
thought – woman’s specificity.31 As the quotation above indicates, paradoxically
Irigaray sees woman’s specificity as already existing – hence there is a notion of
‘living as ourselves’ in opposition to patriarchal accounts – as well as being a
future project to realize, as she puts it: ‘One day we’ll manage to say ourselves.’32
Naomi Schor concludes from this that ‘the feminine can only emerge from within
or beneath – to extend Irigaray’s archaeological metaphor – femininity, within
which it lies buried.’33
Irigaray’s commitment to femininity is precisely what aligns her work with
essentialism, and, in turn, it is Irigaray’s essentialism that has generated most
criticism and debate. For example, Toril Moi argues, ‘her superb critique of
patriarchal thought is partly undercut by her attempt to name the feminine. If . . .
all efforts towards a definition of ‘‘woman’’ are destined to be essentialist, it looks
as if feminist theory might thrive better if it abandoned the minefield of femi-
ninity and femaleness for a while.’34 Innumerable efforts have been made to
defend Irigaray against the charge of essentialism, suggesting a very interesting
parallel with the efforts to defend Mendieta.
Elizabeth Grosz, however, points out how difficult it is to refuse the category
of woman. Grosz argues that Moi represents a typical response to feminism of
difference and asks:

. . . if women cannot be characterised in any general way, if all there is to femininity is socially
produced, then how can feminism be taken seriously? What justifies the assumption that
women are oppressed as a sex? If we are not justified in taking woman as a category, then what
political grounding does feminism have?35

Grosz’s own work focuses on the body as the basis of subjectivity precisely because
it brings the question of sexual difference most insistently to the fore.36 Here the
strategy Naomi Schor attributes to Irigaray, namely productive mimesis, is well
demonstrated.37 Productive mimesis transforms the dichotomous terms that

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have aligned woman with all those things meant to fortify, complement or
support the role and position of man: nature as against culture, space rather than
time, reproduction rather than production, body instead of mind. In Volatile Bodies
Grosz uses the focus on the body, a term traditionally aligned with femininity, to
transform our conceptions of subjectivity and embodiment. Mendieta’s work can
be understood to perform a similar function for the alignment of woman and
nature. In other words, both demonstrate how to retain a commitment to sexual
difference and sexual specificity while also transforming the historical meaning
of these distinctions. In this way, their work demonstrates how feminism of
difference serves both a critical function and a constructive purpose.
As model of feminist theory, feminism of difference, with its commitment to
female specificity, also makes sense of the utopian pursuit of feminine difference
evident in much feminist art of the 1970s. Now that feminist art of the 1970s is
being reviewed as an historical moment – in exhibitions and publications38 – it is
timely to reconsider the complexity of essentialist positions. Feminism of differ-
ence, I would argue, allows us to see what was productive about essentialism and
utopianism.

F E M I N I Z E D N AT U R E
‘Ana did not rampage the earth to control or dominate or to create grandiose
monuments of power and authority.’39 Nancy Spero’s description of Mendieta’s
practice brings out what could be called an eco-feminist orientation. In this
ecological orientation, Mendieta’s work is distinct from most earthwork prac-
tices. While Robert Smithson also referred to the world as mother earth, Suzaan
Boettger has very convincingly argued that he, and the other key figures in the
land art movement (Heizer, Oppenheim, Morris, De Maria, Kaltenbach) were not
motivated by an ecological ideal. She argues that their practices embodied a deep
ambivalence about nature which she acerbically characterizes as ‘going to nature,
but relating to it as dirt’.40 Indeed, Smithson strongly objected to the idea that
one should not interfere with mother earth, contending that what underpinned
this idea was an inappropriate projection of the incest taboo onto nature, what he
called, equally acerbically, an ‘ecological Oedipus complex’.41
Mendieta, on the other hand, linked an ecological sensibility with an anti-
colonial stance. In two of her lectures, Mendieta links the domination of nature to
the project of colonization: ‘To establish his empire over nature it has been
necessary for man to dominate other men and to treat part of humanity as
objects. This has had a detrimental effect on both man and nature.’42 In prehis-
toric beliefs about nature the artist seeks an alternative to the appropriative
masculinist relation to land, space and earth. Of her Silueta Series she says: ‘The
work recalls prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts
made the earth a living creature. In essence my works are the reactivation of
primeval beliefs at work in the human psyche.’43 She resuscitates a link between
the female body and space, and its correlate a belief in a maternal world, a belief
that Freud would argue is both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, that is, it lies in
both the prehistory of races and individuals.
This link between the female body and nature conventionally goes in two
directions: the idea of women as closer to nature, which might be the more

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problematic link; and the gendering of nature as feminine. It is this latter

connection that Mendieta consistently and explicitly emphasizes. Neolithic
beliefs in the elements as deities are endorsed by Mendieta as powerful and
important. She argues ‘I don’t know why people have gotten away from these
ideas. It seems as if these cultures are provided with an inner knowledge, a
closeness to natural resources.’44 Many commentators have linked Mendieta’s
interest in prehistoric cultures to her interest in the beliefs of Afro-Cuban
Santerı́a and the indigenous cultures of Cuba. But although she performs a kind
of syncretic assimilation of many different ideas of the earth mother, her
iconography is largely derived from Mexican, European and Middle Eastern
sources.45
Her most legible imagery recalls the pose of the goddess with outstretched
arms familiar from statues of the Minoan snake goddess amongst many other
ancient sculptures and reliefs, and which we also find in the work of her
contemporaries Mary Beth Edelson and Carolee Schneemann (plates 3.6 and
3.7).46 Mendieta had a longstanding interest in the art of ancient cultures, which
suggests her familiarity with such imagery.47 Alternative Mexican and Latin

3.6 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta

Series, Mexico), 1976. 35 mm
colour slide. Photo: r the Estate
of Ana Mendieta Collection,
courtesy Galerie Lelong,
New York.

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American sources have also been cited. Charles Merewether suggests that the pose
is redolent of a popular Latin American Catholic image of the soul in purgatory.48
Olga Viso notes that such images were readily available in markets and shops in
Oaxaca in the years Mendieta visited the region. She also cites another possible
Mexican source, reproducing a photograph of Mendieta taken in 1976 with a pair
of candles made in Teotitlán del Valle which represent earth and nature spirits in
an identical pose.49 Mendieta herself states that ‘when I first started working this
way, I felt a very strong Catholic connection, but as I continued to work, I felt
closer to the Neolithic.’50

3.7 Ana Mendieta, Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks), 1976. 35 mm colour slide.
Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

The goddess pose is both striking and unnatural, the exact meaning of the
arm gesture unclear. Often referred to as invocatory, it is uncertain in Mendieta’s
case to whom such a gesture is addressed, whether to the elements, herself, the
camera, or to us. In the Catholic tradition, Merewether notes, the set of associated
meanings are self-sacrifice, submission and a quest for redemption.51 This reli-
gious meaning would be tempered for contemporary audiences by the appro-
priation of the Neolithic gesture by artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, in whose
works it suggests jubilation, or a celebration of feminine power, energy and
divinity. Mendieta’s images seem to partake of aspects of all of these meanings,
while also retaining something of the opacity of the gesture, its refusal or
inability to be rendered directly into speech.
While gestures are usually considered as always intending to communicate, it
is the muteness of gesture relative to speech that Giorgio Agamben posits as

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crucial to current understanding of gesture. His intriguing idea that gesture is

both a kind of gag intended to hinder speech and a compensation for an inability
to speak is underpinned by the idea that a natural repertory of gestures is no
longer available to us.52 Whether one agrees that Western society has lost its
gestures – Agamben’s dating is from the end of the nineteenth century – it is
certainly true that the gesture Mendieta uses is denaturalized. It comes from a
depictive vocabulary, not the body’s movements in everyday life; thus its meaning
cannot be discerned with reference to our own bodies. It is precisely because it
escapes this kind of mimetic corporeal decipherment that its meaning remains
opaque or enigmatic, despite the innumerable iconographical sources that can be
found for it. The meaning of the gesture is muted, almost deliberately so, as
though it has a private meaning that is not available to us.
This aspect of the gesture is particularly pronounced in the film Rock Heart
with Blood, which records a private ritual witnessed only by the camera
(see plate 3.5). After covering the rock heart with red pigment, Mendieta merges
her naked body with the silhouette, lying face down inside the form. In this act,
she reveals what could not be clearly seen until this point, that the pose of this
silhouette is not quite the same as the goddess pose in Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes
(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks) of 1976 and many other works (see plate 3.7). The upper
arms are not outstretched here; they are bent closer to the body. The gesture is
similar to the goddess pose, but with the arms closer to the body the emphasis
falls on the actual contact with the earth, rather than the more abstracted or non-
specific sense of invocation conveyed by the fully extended upper arms. Once this
subtle shift in posture is noticed, it becomes clear that a number of other
silhouettes also use this modified goddess pose.
The film underscores another aspect of the silhouettes that is not often
noticed – the recto verso possibilities of the siluetas: the goddess pose could be
read as facing the earth or the sky. Perhaps most importantly, the pose presents
intimate contact with the earth, not quite an embrace or a caress, but certainly in
the domain of some kind of close, private communion. Because Mendieta’s
movements and gestures are simple, almost restrained or deadpan, and certainly
not expansively expressive, and yet the final action of touching the earth is
extraordinarily evocative, we are left with the sense of witnessing something
deeply moving but without a clear sense of its affective meaning.
This kind of splitting of gesture from expressive meaning is, of course, a
characteristic of much dance and performance art of this period; the inex-
pressivity of the gesture makes it a literal, concrete movement which, when also
shorn of associational meaning, serves to secure it in real space and time. In
Mendieta’s film this inexpressive strategy serves a slightly different purpose: by
de-emphasizing the body’s expressiveness but emphasizing the expressivity of the
action, feeling is subtly diffused across the whole scene rather than being
concentrated in the figure of the artist. In other words, one has to deduce the
feeling from the whole scene rather than having it conveyed solely by expression
and the gesture. In this way the importance of the earth comes forward as the
affective meaning of the figure’s actions recede or are withheld.
There are at least three other key poses used by Mendieta for the silhouettes.
The goddess pose does not appear in the late 1970s, as Viso notes, when Mendieta
favoured ‘non-gender-specific figural references’, such as the mummy-like

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3.8 Ana Mendieta, Untitled

(Silueta Series, Iowa), 1977. 35 mm
colour slide. Photo: r the Estate
of Ana Mendieta Collection,
courtesy Galerie Lelong,
New York.

form (plates 3.8 and 3.11).53 Mendieta referred to some of these works from
1977 as her ‘Tut-inspired work’.54 She had visited the Treasures of Tutankhamun
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.55 Her other two poses,
one with arms by the side, and the more contained mummy-like form with
truncated arms that Mendieta also frequently uses, have a less clear provenance;
the latter may be modelled on Neolithic statuettes with folded arms or the
Sardianian Great Mother figure discussed by Lucy Lippard (plates 3.9, 3.10
and 3.12).56
All the poses, irrespective of their degree of legibility when used to construct
an outline of the body, suggest a play between a generalized depiction of the body
and a representation of Mendieta in particular. As outlines without individua-
lized features, made directly on and with the elements, the immediate associa-
tion is with ancient forms of depiction of the body (rock carvings and earthworks
etc.) and the idea of cultural expression embedded or nested in nature. Mendieta
puts the case for this relationship to nature in stronger terms: ‘art must have
begun as nature itself, in a dialectical relationship between humans and the
natural world from which we cannot be separated.’57

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3.9 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1979. 35 mm colour slide. Photo: r the Estate of
Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

These departicularized or generalized images, nonetheless also represent

Mendieta herself; it is her own body that provides the template for the silhou-
ettes, in the minimal form of her height or the more exact form of an outline of
her actual body. The muted form of this self-representation means that it is at
once her in particular, and potentially every person that is reconnected to the
earth. This play between the legible iconography of prehistoric beliefs and her
own particular quest to reconnect with the earth is also evident in how she
describes the works. She describes the Silueta Series alternatively as a dialogue
between ‘the landscape and the female body’ and as ‘an ongoing dialogue
between me and nature’.58 The work then functions to assert her place in the
world, an issue that had particular force for her as an exile from Cuba, and to
suggest an ethic of dwelling more generally, that is a kind of co-existence with
nature.
Claiming space is always difficult to disentangle from possession, appropria-
tion and exclusion. It is precisely this problem that Emmanuel Levinas
acknowledges in the epigram from Pascal that opens Otherwise than Being, which
reads: ‘‘‘That is my place in the sun’’. That is how the usurpation of the whole
world began.’59 Mendieta addresses this problem by asserting a feminine claim
on space in opposition to usurpation. She notes that ‘men artists working with
nature have imposed themselves on it. Definitely my work has that feminine
sensibility.’60 Against the idea of dominating nature she posits the siluetas as ‘a
search to find my place, my context in nature’.61 The siluetas only temporarily
claim territory. Mendieta very colourfully describes her practice of marking the

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earth as ‘like a dog, pissing on the ground’.62 This territorial action of claiming
the earth is counterbalanced by what she describes as a kind of submission to the
earth: ‘a voluntary submersion and total identification with nature’.63 Similarly
she describes her actions as at once transcending the self – becoming one with the
earth, through this identification – and as a way of making manifest an
objectification of her existence.64 In short, the siluetas show her form as both
continuous with nature and differentiated from it, claiming and claimed by
nature.
In one of her most succinct formulations of this double action, she described
the siluetas as ‘visualizing the body as an extension of nature and nature as an
extension of the body’.65 One could summarize her approach then as a non-
appropriative relation to nature and space: a kind of ‘reciprocal insertion’ of one
thing in another, to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phrase.66 Merleau-Ponty
develops an account of the interimplication of terms, such as body and world,
which he calls the intertwining or the chiasmus. His work can be understood as
questioning the sovereignty of man over the world precisely through this
emphasis on reciprocity and interrelation.

3.10 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta

Series, Iowa), 1978. Lifetime colour
print, 25.4  20.3 cm. Photo: r
the Estate of Ana Mendieta
Collection, courtesy Galerie
Lelong, New York.

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In her analysis of Mendieta’s work, Amelia Jones has also pursued this link to
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of intertwined or reversible relations. She argues that the
Siluetas turn ‘the earth itself into flesh and vice versa’, and that this instantiates
Merleau-Ponty’s observation that: ‘There is no limit or boundary between the
body and the world since the world is flesh.’67 These descriptions, which suggests
the merger or dissolution of body and world, actually shift Merleau-Ponty’s
argument quite substantially. His project emphasizes both individuation and
continuity of the body and the world. Jones’s account of the intertwining of body
and world captures only one part of Merleau-Ponty’s project, namely continuity,
and misses the equal stress on individuation. The intimacy between subject and
world remains for Merleau-Ponty only ‘as close as between the sea and the
strand’.68 This suggests a fluid relation of ebb and flow, coming forth and
retreating back. In this way differentiation is never finished. But by maintaining a
line, albeit a fluid one, the subject is given a sense of embodiment as well as a
sense of becoming. It is precisely this separation or individuation alongside
continuity with nature that Mendieta’s work performs. A feminine attitude to the
living land thus allows nature to be embodied and female embodiment to have a
place.
This mutuality of figure and ground is difficult to achieve, given our
tendency to focus on the human figure. The desire to emphasize nature as much
as the body might account for the very tight framing of the Silueta Series.
Rarely do we see an expanse of landscape which could be interpreted as the
roomy habitat for the body, or the backdrop for the figure’s actions. Rather
the picture plane is tipped upwards, allowing nature to appear on the same plane
as the body: horizontal earth versus vertical body is rarely in evidence. Nature in
this tight framing then ceases to be a landscape and becomes figured more as
matter, force, growth, decay (mud, ice, fire, waves, water or growing things). In
other words, nature is not glamorized through photography or presented as an
enticing scene we might want to enter. Mendieta uses the deskilled mode of
photographic documentation prevalent at the time to cut across the pastoral
ideal of nature made into a picture. Claiming territory is not then sovereignty
over the earth, but an inclusion of the body in the natural cycles of birth, growth
and decay.

T E M P O R A L I T Y, S E R I A L I T Y
The use of photography also enables the two desired states described by Mendieta
– namely objectification and transcendence of her existence – to be given a
further temporal elaboration. Photographs, as Roland Barthes notes, embody the
‘illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly’.69 In Mendieta’s photographs
the presence and disappearance of the moment recorded is powerfully linked to
the presence and the inevitable disintegration of the figures. This predicable
disintegration adds another temporal dimension to the photographs: not just the
present and the past, but also the future. Unlike most photographs, where the
future is not certain or known, Mendieta’s insistently impermanent construc-
tions make us think of the inevitable future of these images, the time after the
images, or to bring these two moments together the future anterior. In other
words, we can say with absolute certainty when looking at the siluetas: this one

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will have melted, that one will have been washed away, that one will have been
eroded. In short, we know, as Mendieta puts it, that the sites are eventually
reclaimed by the earth.70
Many critics have emphasized this disappearance of the figure, at the
expense of the appearance of the figures.71 And certainly disappearance with
its intimations of mortality is an overwhelming idea that is very powerfully
evoked by the siluetas. But the photographs balance appearance with disap-
pearance. It is here that the power of the serial method Mendieta employs is
particularly evident. Repetition works to assert the present and the appearance
of the figure alongside disappearance. The sheer quantity of repeated actions –
the artist made over 100 siluetas – insists upon the presence of the body in
nature, underscoring the constancy as well as the variability of the depiction of
the body. In short, the photographs permanently hold onto that series of
moments when Mendieta was there, as well pointing us forward to the work of
time and nature.
The temporality of her film documentation is somewhat different. Henry
Sayre argues that film is a less satisfactory form of performance documentation
than photography because of a less complex relation to time. Drawing on Roland
Barthes’s distinction between film and photography, he claims that film gives us a
sense of ‘being there, of actually experiencing the scene’, thereby losing the tension
between here and formerly, presence and absence.72 While it is certainly true
that film cannot strongly evoke this simultaneity of different temporal orders,
film has its own temporal complexity which turns on the tension between
unidirectional and cyclical time. In films, such as Mendieta’s, which emphasize
change or process, the passage of time is clearly registered, there is no need to
imagine the natural processes of disintegration or efflorescence (birth in the case
of Genesis in Mud), the irreversible processes are shown. This is particularly marked
in her films involving fire where we witness a kind of magical ignition (we do not
see Mendieta light the fire), full blaze and the fire’s eventual extinction. Similarly,
in Flower Person, the floral body floating along the river on a slightly submerged
raft begins its journey as a coherent form and then gradually begins to break up
and lose shape.
Alongside this irreversible sense of time, however, there is also a more
cyclical conception. A film can be watched again, events retraced, the movements
re-enacted, the process reviewed. The sense of things ‘being there’ before the
viewer can thus be magically repeated. In other words, if projection summons
these things into existence and dispatches them again into non-existence when
the film finishes, there is nonetheless always a possibility of resurrecting them,
making them present again. The theme of resurrection that Lippard argues is
central to Mendieta’s oeuvre is thus inherent in the reproducibility of film
itself.73
If the paradox of photography is the simultaneous sense of ‘here and
formerly’, then the paradox of film might be more spatial: here/gone.74 In other
words, the sense of ‘being there’ is always haunted by the transience of film, its
elusive, immaterial, existence only in the time of projection, just as the finitude
of film – its fixed record of a particular fleeting moment in time – is undercut by
its reproducibility: the strange unanchored timelessness of this infinitely repea-
table record. Presence is thus accompanied by a kind of incipient absence and vice

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3.11 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series Iowa), 1978. 35 mm colour slide.
Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong,
New York.

versa. It is precisely because Mendieta’s films emphasize time passing through

irreversible natural processes that a sense of loss is strongly evoked alongside
presence. Repetition does not resolve loss but it does bring forth the cyclical sense
of time, that these natural processes occur over and over again. The eternity of
nature is evoked as well as the immediacy of experience, to cite Mendieta’s own
thoughts on the matter.75
In the photographs this tension between irreversible time and the repeated
cycles of nature is not as easily conveyed. One might say that the most powerful
sense of animate nature belongs to the future of the image when the body is
reclaimed. The full strength of animate nature, then, is not so much pictured as
anticipated. So while the body is seen as an extension of nature, nature as an
extension of the body is more imagined than figured. The reversible relation
between the body and nature posited by Mendieta is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it,
‘always imminent but not realised in fact’.76 In other words, reversibility is
always incomplete; as Sue Cataldi explains, the two relations do not become one
another.77 If the reversible relations truly became one, there would be the
undifferentiated condition described by Amelia Jones – where the body and the
flesh of the world are indistinguishable. In Merleau-Ponty’s and Mendieta’s work,
however, the divergence between the two relations is emphasized as well as the
intertwining and interdependence of the two terms. In other words, the earth as a
female figure and the female figure as part of nature do not coincide or
become reduced to a single proposition. The earth as animate makes the spectator
regard it as powerful or as an unstoppable set of processes, while the solitary
figure as part of nature calls up vulnerability and mortality, being subject to the
processes of nature, as well as a kind of determined resilience. If the films
highlight the eternal circle of nature – birth, growth and death – then in contrast
the photographs emphasize the brevity of life. Viewing the films in conjunction

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3.12 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series Iowa), 1980. Lifetime colour
photograph, 50.96  33.18 cm. Photo: r the Estate of Ana Mendieta
Collection, Galerie Lelong, New York.

with the photographs allows these two sides of animate life to be dovetailed
together.
One could say, then, following Mira Schor, that Mendieta’s assertion of the
bond between her body and that of mother earth is an enviably simple idea, but
that its actual instantiation is quite complex. Her resulting images do not, as
Schor asserts, display a ‘problematic lack of ambivalence’.78 While it is certainly
true that some of Mendieta’s statements do at times appear unambivalent and

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romantic, the images themselves undercut this romanticism. Her reference to the
shelter of the womb as a model of dwelling is a case in point. She describes her
works as ‘a return to the maternal source’. She says: ‘Through the making of
earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by
nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb.’79 One might
think of this ‘oneness with the earth’ as a mystical experience in a romantic vein
– an evocation of oceanic bliss. Yet oceanic bliss is not the predominant feeling
evoked by these images, even if it may have been Mendieta’s experience when
making them. When larger amounts of landscape are visible the locations are
deserted, and often desolate, suggesting a challenge, if not a threat, to human
dwelling and existence (plates 3.11 and 3.12). Similarly, the traces of the solitary
figure in these images evoke a strong sense of isolation, aloneness, even lone-
liness, alongside the assertion of a temporary place in nature.
Furthermore, the idea of being encompassed by the earth can just as easily
mean being swallowed up by it, as being supported by it. This ambivalence about
enclosure makes its way into Mendieta’s images. The tight framing of the figures,
coupled with the persistent tilt of the picture plane, makes the siluetas just a
little disorienting and claustrophobic. These negative and positive meanings of
being encompassed or enclosed are well explained by the American psychologist
Silvan Tomkins. The positive meaning Tomkins has called claustral joy; it conveys
the sense of a supportive enveloping environment such as one might experience
in solitude communing with nature, or the claustral interpenetration of the
mutual embrace where each person is inside the other. Equally, being encom-
passed can mean the unpleasant sense of restriction, suffocation and confine-
ment that comes from claustrophobia. Tomkins notes how the memory or fantasy
of the intra-uterine state underpins these contrasting senses of enclosure.80
Mendieta’s images combine, then, a kind of ritualized communion with nature –
a celebration of its power and diversity in which the body participates – and
paradoxically, alongside the sense of transience, also a faint sense of immobility,
and restriction.
This ambivalent sense of enclosure – constricted and threatening as well as
supportive – is perhaps why Mendieta’s images are frequently described as chil-
ling, powerful, moving or uncanny. Indeed this ambivalent sense of enclosure
adds yet another duality to the complex weave of oppositions that characterizes
Mendieta’s work: transience and permanence, life and death, agency and deter-
mination. In the simple act of reclaiming a feminine link to space the siluetas
manage, then, to call up an extraordinarily complex range of feelings and ideas
about our relationship to nature, our place in it, the power of the elements, and
the resilience and vulnerability of embodiment. If, as Naomi Schor argues, much
can be gained by reinventing the essentialist terms in which women have been
characterized, then Mendieta’s siluetas are clear evidence of this proposition.
Schor argues woman’s specificity is to be achieved through a strategy she assigns
to Irigaray: namely, transvaluation of essentialist terms through productive
mimesis. Mendieta achieves this goal for the link between nature and femininity.
According to Schor, transvaluation suggests, ‘rather than a repudiation of the
discourse of misogyny, an effort to hold onto the baby while draining out the
bathwater’.81 Mendieta’s Silueta Series follows this formulation. Mendieta’s
capacity to generate images that hold in tension such contradictory states

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demonstrates that the essentialist link between the female body and nature is not
to be repudiated.
Notes
Special thanks to Olga Viso and Charles Merewether for their very helpful
responses to my queries about Mendieta’s work.
1 Mendieta’s abiding concern with the idea of
mother earth is just one example of a feminized
conception of space. I have discussed a range of
feminized conceptions of space in ‘Sexualizing
Space’, Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of
Feminism, eds Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth
Probyn, London, 1995, 181–94.
2 Mary Sabbatino, ‘Ana Mendieta Silueta Works:
Sources and Influences’, Ana Mendieta 1948–1985,
exhib. cat., Helsinki: Helsinki City Art Museum,
1996, 47; Guy Brett, ‘One Energy’, Ana Mendieta:
Earth Body, Sculpture and Performances 1972–1985,
exhib. cat., Washington, 2004, 186.
3 Sabbatino, ‘Ana Mendieta Silueta Works’, 47.
4 Ana Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements and
Notes’, Sulfur, 22, Spring 1988, 70; Ana Mendieta
Interview, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties,
compiled by Linda M. Montana, Berkeley, 2000,
395.
5 Julia Herzberg notes the retrospective descrip-
tion of this work as the first silueta. See Herz-
berg, ‘Ana Mendieta: The Formative Years’, Art
Nexus, 1:47, 2003, 59, n. 11.
6 Julia Herzberg, ‘Ana Mendieta’s Iowa Years 1970–
1980’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 166. Herzberg
notes elsewhere that there was another silhou-
ette constructed at Yagul in 1974, Untitled (body
contour on grass in red tempera), where Mendieta
less successfully traced her outline in a shallow
grave because of the uneven surface. The work is
documented by 35 mm slides. Herzberg
concludes that Laberinth Blood Imprint is among
the first of Mendieta’s silhouettes, although she
also acknowledges that Sherry Buckberrough
told her that Mendieta regarded Laberinth Blood
Imprint as the ‘first piece that used the silhouette
image instead of her body’. Julia A. Herzberg,
‘Ana Mendieta, The Iowa Years: A Critical Study,
1969 through 1977’, PhD, The City University of
New York, 1998, 222–3.
7 Mel Bochner, ‘The Serial Attitude’, Artforum,
December 1967, 28–33. Bochner’s description of
this attitude stresses a kind of impersonal,
almost quasi-scientific, method where ‘order
takes precedent over execution’ and a ‘prede-
termined process’ is followed until it exhausts.
This impersonal attitude to seriality is stressed
by Sol Le Witt, who states: ‘The serial artist does
not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007
object but functions merely as a clerk catalo-
guing the results of the premise.’ Sol Le Witt,
‘Serial Project No.1 (ABCD)’, 1966, in Minimalism,
ed. James Meyer, London, 2000, 226. Mendieta’s
seriality could not be described as dispassionate
in this fashion; interestingly, she refers to the
urge repeatedly to reconnect with the environ-
ment as an ‘obsessive act’. Mendieta, ‘A Selection
of Statements’, 71.
8 See Charles Merewether, ‘Ana Mendieta’, Grand
Street, 67, Winter, 1999, 49; Charles Merewether,
‘From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on
Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta’, Ana
Mendieta, ed. Gloria Moure, exhib. cat., Barcelona,
1996, 109.
9 See, for example, John Perreault, ‘Mendieta’s Body
of Work’, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, exhib. cat.,
New York: The New Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1987, 13; Sabbatino, ‘Ana Mendieta Silueta
Works’, 47; Mary Jane Jacob, The Silueta Series, 1973–
1980, exhib. cat., New York: Galerie Lelong, 1991,
17; Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual
Culture, London and New York, 2000, 127–8.
10 Chrissie Iles, ‘Subtle Bodies: The Invisible Films
of Ana Mendieta’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 205. A
selection of Mendieta’s films was shown in 1996
at the Helsinki exhibition, Ana Mendieta 1948–
1985. See the catalogue for a list of eighty-one
film titles, 71–2. Excerpts from the films are also
included in the film about Mendieta Fuego de
Tierra (1987) dir. Kate Horsfield, Nereyda Garcia-
Ferraz, Branda Miller.
11 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 70; Mendieta,
‘Personal Writings’, Ana Mendieta, ed. Moure, 186.
12 Herzberg classifies this work as one of the Burial
Pieces, tracing its genealogy back to Image from
Yagul. See ‘Ana Mendieta’s Iowa Years’, 167.
13 Merewether, ‘From Inscription to Dissolution’,
114–15.
14 In the list of works at the back of the catalogue
an asterisk indicates Silueta works, see Ana
Mendieta: A Retrospective, 64.
15 Email correspondence with the author, 12
October 2004.
16 Mendieta quoted in Guy Brett, ‘One Energy’, 184.
17 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 1967, in Art
and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, 1998,
166.
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18 Olga Viso characterizes this recent trend away
from essentialist readings of Mendieta’s work as
a development after 1996. The art historians she
associates with the shift are Jane Blocker, Miwon
Kwon, Gerardo Mosquera, Anne Raine and Irit
Rogoff. See Viso, ‘Introduction’, Ana Mendieta:
Earth Body, 30.
19 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, New York, 1990, 144–5.
20 Examples of artists who do use their body as
material include Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman,
Dennis Oppenheim, Hannah Wilke, Carolee
Schneemann, Gine Pane, Chris Burden, Marina
Abramovic and Valie Export.
21 Butler, Gender Trouble, 25, 142.
22 Butler, Gender Trouble, 142.
23 Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity,
Performativity and Exile, Durham, 1999, 25.
24 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject,
Minneapolis, 1998, 50.
25 Jones, Body Art, 50.
26 This terminology, ‘feminists of difference’ and
‘feminism of difference’, is attributed to Eliza-
beth Grosz by Naomi Schor in ‘Previous Engage-
ments: The Receptions of Irigaray’, in Carolyn
Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, eds,
Engaging with Irigaray, New York, 1994, 6. My own
first exposure to these terms was in an under-
graduate philosophy course taught by Grosz in
1987; Grosz, however, thinks these terms were
common at the time. Email correspondence with
the author, 22 September 2004.
27 I have argued elsewhere that there is a tendency
to view sexual difference negatively. The parti-
cular case I examine is Iris Marion Young’s
examination of female spatiality and motility,
‘Throwing Like a Girl’. See ‘Driving like a Boy:
Sexual Difference, Embodiment, and Space’,
Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and
Spatial Inquiry, eds Ruth Barcan and Ian
Buchanan, Perth, 1999, 93–101.
28 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A Note on Essentialism and
Difference’, Feminist Knowledge: Critique and
Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew, London, 1990, 341.
Grosz and Schor, along with Diana Fuss, have
demonstrated the importance of thinking about
essentialism in more complex ways. See Diana
Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Dif-
ference, New York, 1989; Naomi Schor, ‘This Essen-
tialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips With
Irigaray’, Differences, 1:2, Summer 1989, 38–58.
29 Irigaray’s project could be understood as an
engagement with the indeterminate identity of
woman; this historically received position is
precisely what she aims to overcome. This
issue was debated most rigorously in the
feminist literature on Derrida and Irigaray.
See, for example, Margaret Whitford, Luce
Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London, 1991,
123–40.
80
30 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.
Catherine Porter, Ithaca, 1985, 212.
31 The desire to bring into being a new construction
of woman is the utopian orientation of
Irigaray’s work noted by Margaret Whitford.
Whitford cites Marcelle Marini’s formulation
of the value of utopian ideas to clarify how
this traditionally futuristic or ideal term
(utopia means, literally, ‘no place’) can also
pertain to the present. Marini states that:
‘the value of a utopia is not to programme
the future but to help to change the present.’
Marini, quoted in Whitford, Philosophy in the
Feminine, 20. A utopia such as Irigaray’s high-
lights the current lack of specificity of woman.
One begins to notice that woman is not consid-
ered in her own terms, and suddenly it becomes
glaringly obvious that woman is constantly
formed to complement man. The utopian possi-
bility of woman’s specificity also changes present
reality because it is constituted as a telos, the
ground of which is already deemed to be present
in reality. In Irigaray’s work woman’s specificity
is grounded in her body. This is at once a repe-
tition of patriarchal conceptions of woman and
paradoxically something that has yet to be
thought.
32 Irigaray, This Sex, 216.
33 Naomi Schor, ‘This Essentialism Which Is Not
One’, 48.
34 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary
Theory, London and New York, 1985, 148.
35 Grosz, ‘A Note on Essentialism and Difference’,
341.
36 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal
Feminism, Sydney, 1994, vii.
37 Naomi Schor, ‘This Essentialism Which Is Not
One’, 47.
38 Gloria at Whitewalls Gallery in New York (2002),
Personal and Political at the Guild Hall Museum of
East Hampton, New York (2002), as well as the
upcoming show at the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art (Wack! Art and the Feminist
Revolution, scheduled for 2007).
39 Nancy Spero, ‘Tracing Mendieta’, Artforum, April
1992, 77.
40 Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and Landscape of
the Sixties, Berkeley, 2002, 225.
41 Robert Smithson, ‘Frederick Olmsted and the
Dialectical Landscape’, 1973, in Robert Smithson:
The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley,
1996, 163.
42 Mendieta, ‘Art and Politics’, and ‘The Struggle for
Culture Today is the Struggle for Life’, ‘Personal
Writings’, 167, 171.
43 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 71.
44 Mendieta, ‘Personal Writings’, 182.
45 Olga Viso argues that the influence of Santerı́a
has been overstated. Viso, ‘The Memory of
History’, 67.
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 T H E S E R I A L S PA C E S O F A N A M E N D I E TA
46 Olga Viso notes that it is unlikely that
Mendieta knew about these parallel practices
until February 1975. Olga Viso, ‘The Memory
of History’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, 247,
n. 152. Mendieta’s silhouettes from 1974 do
not use the classic goddess pose: the arms
are upraised but not bent. If Flower Person, made
in the summer of 1975, is the first silueta
to use this exact pose, then its adoption may
be partly influenced by Mendieta’s exposure
to the work of Mary Beth Edelson. For a discus-
sion of the complexities of goddess imagery,
see Gloria Feman Orenstein, ‘Recovering
Her Story: Feminist Artists Reclaim the Great
Goddess’, The Power of Feminist Art: The American
Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, New York,
1994, 174–89. See also Mary Beth Edelson,
‘Male Grazing: An Open Letter to Thomas
McEvilley’ 1989, in Feminist – Art – Theory: An
Anthology 1968–2000, ed. Hilary Robinson, Oxford,
2001, 592–7.
47 Viso, ‘The Memory of History’, 45.
48 Merewether, ‘Ana Mendieta’, 50.
49 Viso, ‘The Memory of History’, 61.
50 Interview with Mendieta, Performance Artists
Talking, 396.
51 Merewether, ‘Ana Mendieta’, 50.
52 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, trans.
Verena Tomasik, That Bodies Speaks Has Been Known
for a Long Time, exhib. cat., Vienna: Generali
Foundation, 2004, 111.
53 Viso, ‘The Memory of History’, 74.
54 Viso, ‘The Memory of History’, 245, n. 86.
55 Viso, ‘The Memory of History’, 58. Viso notes that
Mendieta’s slide archive also indicates her
interest in Mexican mummies.
56 Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art
of Prehistory, New York, 1983, 40.
57 Mendieta, ‘Personal Writings’, 186.
58 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 70, 71.
59 Pascal quoted in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso
Lingis, Dordecht, 1991, epigraph.
60 Mendieta, quoted in Blocker, Where is Ana, 18.
61 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 70. In her
interview with Montana she reiterates this point:
‘I started doing imprints to place myself and my
body in the world. That way I can do something,
step away from it, and see myself there after-
ward.’ Performance Artists Talking, 395.
62 Interview with Mendieta, Performance Artists
Talking, 396.
63 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 70.
64 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 71.
65 Mendieta ‘A Selection of Statements’, 71.
66 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invi-
sible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, 1968, 138.
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67 Jones, Body Art, 41. Merleau-Ponty does indeed
pose the question: ‘Where are we to put the
limit between the body and the world, since the
world is flesh?’ Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and
the Invisible, 138. However, his answer to the
question of limits is not to deny them, as Jones’s
analysis tends to suggest. I have discussed this
aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s work and its impor-
tance for feminist scholarship in ‘Space for
Woman: Towards Thinking in Three Dimen-
sions’, in New Literatures Review, 34, Winter 1997,
57–72.
68 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–1.
In this opening section of Merleau-Ponty’s
description of the intertwining, he is a pains to
point out that the division between our vision
and the visible world, or subject and world, does
not disappear.
69 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Image/
Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York, 1977,
44. I am using Thierry de Duve’s more succinct
translation of ‘the here-now and the there-then’. See
Thierry de Duve, ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot:
The Photograph as Paradox’, October, 5, Summer
1978, 117.
70 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 70.
71 See Miwon Kwon, ‘Bloody Valentines: After-
images by Ana Mendieta’, Inside the Visible: An
Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, in, of, and from
the feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher, exhib.
cat., Cambridge, MA, 1996, 168. Kwon argues:
‘Mendieta’s use of her/the body almost always
approached erasure or negation: her ‘‘body’’
consistently disappeared.’ Jane Blocker makes
exactly the same point and curiously also uses
exactly the same words, Where is Ana, 33–4. See
also Anne Raine, ‘Embodied Geographies:
Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana
Mendieta’, Generations and Geographies in the Visual
Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock,
London, 1996, 244. Raine draws out the psycho-
analytic implications of merger or dissolution
into the earth, arguing that the repetition of this
act is like a Fort-Da game and hence under the
sway of the death drive. Her provocative account
captures the psychological implications of
merger, the oneness with the earth desired by
Mendieta, but downplays her desire for an
objectification of her existence.
72 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The
American Avant-Garde since 1970, Chicago, 1989,
244.
73 Lippard, Overlay, 49. With all films there is always
this possibility of repetition, but with short
artists’ films, particularly when they are viewed
in a continuous looped format in a gallery
(which was the case in the Whitney Museum
installation of Mendieta’s films), it is not only
possible, but often required. Because viewers
rarely enter the exhibition space at the begin-
ning of the film, they may stay until they at least
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reach the point at which they arrived; indeed,
film viewings in galleries tend to encourage this
circular mode of viewing.
74 Mary Ann Doane argues that the paradox of film
is the production of continuous movement with
discontinuous images. See Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency
and the Archive, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 172. She
also notes the contrast between film as perfor-
mance and film as record (24), which I am
building on here.
75 Mendieta, ‘Personal Writings’, 184.
82
76 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147.
77 Sue Cataldi, Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of
Sensitive Space; Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Philo-
sophy of Embodiment, Albany, 1993, 72.
78 Mira Schor, ‘Mendieta was two months shy . . .’,
Sulfur, 22, Spring 1988, 101.
79 Mendieta, ‘A Selection of Statements’, 71.
80 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: Vol 1
The Positive Affects, New York, 1962, 419.
81 Naomi Schor, ‘This Essentialism Which Is Not
One’, 47.
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