Broad Strokes, page 14
When the police arrived, they found the room in wild disarray, fresh scratches marking Andre’s face and arms. He showed the officers a book about himself, saying, “I am a very successful artist and she wasn’t. Maybe that got to her, and in that case, maybe I did kill her.”
Two things are worth pointing out here. One, Mendieta, recently returned from working at the American Academy in Rome after winning the prestigious Rome Prize, was plenty successful. Two, both artists were big drinkers and had been drinking heavily that night.
Even Andre doesn’t seem to know exactly what happened; over the years, he’s given three very different accounts. First to the 911 operator, then to the police, then to the New Yorker. In the magazine’s 2011 interview, Andre told Calvin Tomkins that the warm night had turned suddenly cool and Mendieta had gotten up from their bed to close the window and “just lost her balance.”
Andre was arrested and briefly held. Bitter art-world factions sprang up immediately, for and against him. No question, Andre had power and wealth on his side. Artist friends paid his bail, and in 1988, he was acquitted. A celebrated pioneer of Minimalist sculpture, Andre and his brilliant career were affected not at all.
I only discovered Mendieta in 1992, the year the Guggenheim opened its new SoHo location (now defunct) not far from the gallery where my husband worked.
I’d been following media coverage of the new space for weeks, when I read this from Roberta Smith in the New York Times: “At the opening preview of the Guggenheim Museum SoHo on Thursday evening, 400 demonstrators protested the fact that this exhibition included only one woman and no minority artists, and also that it featured the work of Mr. Andre, who was found not guilty of murder in the death of his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta.”
Wait, what?
“As these objections suggest,” Smith continued, “the show is not the most diplomatic way for the Guggenheim to introduce itself to the downtown art world.”
Some protestors at the SoHo Guggenheim preview carried a large banner that read: Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta? ¿Dónde estás Ana Mendieta?
I’d been hearing about Carl Andre’s Minimalist sculptures since I began studying art history. His name and work were everywhere—museums, galleries, Manhattan apartments—along with work by contemporaries like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman.
But who was Mendieta?
I had to go looking for her.
The first things I located were all about her death, then finally, in a book on art of the 1970s on our own bookshelf, I saw my first versions of her Siluetas, ghostly outlines that were both immediate—Here I am—and timeless. Mendieta made Siluetas for seven years, creating outlines of the female form—frequently her own—from materials of the natural world. She often left the imprint of her body directly on the earth, whether stone, mud, leaves, graves, or more. The Siluetas were ephemeral in nature, but Mendieta carefully preserved them via photographs and film.
The more I discovered about Mendieta, the more amazed I was by how much she had done. The Siluetas were the beginning of a new and powerful art form she pioneered, one combining earthworks, feminism, performance, conceptual art, photography, and film. Where was Ana Mendieta? She was everywhere, if you knew what to look for.
Born in Cuba, she came to the United States in 1961 at the age of twelve with her sister Raquelin, fourteen. They had only each other, having left behind their mother and younger brother; their father, once a Revolutionary stalwart, had been jailed by Castro. Operation Pedro Pan saw fourteen thousand children airlifted from Cuba to the United States under the aegis of the Catholic Church. When she stepped off the plane in Miami, Mendieta kissed the ground.
Her romance with America was short-lived. The sisters were sent to Iowa of all places, where they often lived apart in a series of orphanages, foster homes, and reform schools. From a prominent Cuban family that proudly traced its ancestry to Spain, the girls were blindsided by the racism in Iowa. “It never entered our minds that we were colored,” Raquelin said. The isolation and abuse they experienced as teenagers made a rebel of Mendieta, one fiercely proud of her identity as a Cuban woman.
She studied art at the University of Iowa, and stayed for graduate school. It was there, in the homely dirt of the Midwest, that Mendieta founded a new art form when she was still a student.
In 1981, Mendieta wrote in an artist’s statement, “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” Mendieta sometimes filled in the Siluetas with spirals, labyrinths, or a raised bisecting line. And sometimes she made a raised portion first, like a kind of crater, then formed a Silueta down inside, almost like a small figure of herself within an earthen womb.
When Mendieta first began working in the natural world in the early 1970s, Earth Art was a powerful new idiom in American sculpture. Probably the most famous of the early earthworks was Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, where the artist created a 1,500-ft-/457-m-long coil of rock and earth spinning counterclockwise into Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Earth Art tended toward the massive and the masculine, requiring big machines and accompanying egos. Works such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field epitomize the muscular size and scope of the style. If there were an ancient prototype for the new art, it would be Stonehenge way back in the Neolithic, impressive and lasting, at least in part because it’s just so damned big. The Neolithic inspiration for Mendieta runs more to the plastered skulls of Jericho and myriad Great Goddess images found all over the world.
According to art historian Jane Blocker, Mendieta made over two hundred works utilizing the earth as a key component. “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.”
Nowhere is earth as womb more vivid than in her Volcano series. The Volcanoes are both vaginal and womblike, implying sex, creation, fertility, and—through what she did with them—transformation.
Alongside earth, Mendieta often used blood and gunpowder, essential elements in the rituals of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion that fascinated her. Mendieta earnestly believed in the mysterious potential of art. As a student, she’d rejected painting because of what it could not do: “I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the images to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.” It may sound a little New Age nutty, but Mendieta undercuts any bullshit with her intensity. She was fierce.
Ana Mendieta. Volcano Series no. 2. 1979.
Ana Mendieta. Volcano Series no. 2. 1979.
Ana Mendieta. Untitled. 1985.
Like an artist-shaman, in Volcano Series no. 2 from 1979, shown here, she molded the earth to her purposes, filled the goddess-shaped hole with gunpowder, and set it on fire. The transformation of gunpowder—light-filled, spewing, active, and alive—to dead ash was a kind of transubstantiation of matter. One she, as the artist, had performed in and on the earth.
Magic.
In 1983, Mendieta took up residence at the American Academy in Rome. The city was a revelation. It offered a new context for her Latin heritage. According to author Robert Katz, Rome was “a midplace in the geography of her soul between Cuba and America, neither motherland nor fatherland, a kind of sisterland where she felt strong and free.”
With use of a dedicated studio, Mendieta began working indoors for the first time. Her final pieces were also her first meant to be exhibited in a gallery just as she’d made them, objects in themselves, with a palpable sense of permanence. Totemic and upright, they’re made from large, often curving slabs of the trunks of fallen trees. A contemporary letter from her dealer mentions a “shield project,” of which these are likely part.
Which, it turns out, is heartbreaking.
An Italian collaborator of Mendieta’s told the artist’s niece (Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, a filmmaker) that the original piece of curved wood once had a handle in the back, implying its protective purpose. Onto the trunks’ surfaces, Mendieta burned shadowy shapes with gunpowder. These mysterious symbols recall the magical power superimposed on shields of the past. Constantine, for example, affixing the Chi Rho—symbol of Christ—on the shields of his men at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, not far from Mendieta’s own studio in Rome, from which he had emerged victorious more than 1,500 years before.
But as Raquel Mendieta ruefully notes of her aunt’s last artworks, “These shields did not protect Ana.”
Thirty years after the death of Ana Mendieta, the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York, featured a retrospective of Carl Andre’s work. Protestors cried “Tears for Ana Mendieta” inside the exhibition and wrote “Ana” in fake blood in the snow outside. At Dia headquarters in Manhattan, others dripped chicken blood across a banner on the sidewalk reading, “I Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive.”
Her absence is felt as a great weight.
Many long for what might have been.
But look how much there is.
Though most of her art was meant to be “ephemeral” in one way, Mendieta relentlessly documented her work at every stage. More than a hundred films alone (many recently discovered) are part of her wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes performance pieces on rape, on the slaughter of animals, on transformation and rebirth, self-portraits with her nude body manipulated and distorted as it’s pressed against sheets of glass, self-portraits with masculine facial hair, and so much more.
In recent years, Canadian artist Elise Rasmussen began visiting many of the sites of Mendieta’s works in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba. Though she was told again and again that there was nothing left, she found plenty. This, it seems, was Mendieta’s hope.
In a piece in the New Inquiry, Haley Mlotek quotes Cuban-American curator Olga Viso on Mendieta’s interest in the “residue” of her works: “She liked to think that someone hiking in the area might discover one of her weathered Siluetas and believe that they had stumbled upon a prehistoric gravesite, carving, or painting.”
That makes sense. In her Silueta Muerta and many others, Mendieta claimed herself as part of the earth, part of time itself. As protean and prolific as any artist of her generation, she created powerful art still alive in the world.
Where is Ana Mendieta?
All around us.
CHAPTER 14:
KARA WALKER
Often I’ll be surprised at even what I could think, self-righteous goody-two-shoes that I am.
—KARA WALKER
Mommy makes mean art.
—HER DAUGHTER
SO, I MISSED ONE of the great events in twenty-first-century American art. Like skipping Woodstock, or passing up the Six Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl. An essential cultural moment, squandered. And there’s no getting it back. It’s gone now. Forever.
And that sucks.
In early May 2014, artist Kara Walker unveiled a genuine colossus in Brooklyn, a 75.5-ft-/2,301-cm-long, 35.5-ft-/1,082-cm-high gritty and glistening white mammy sphinx. In photographs, her ample whiteness fills the dark-but-soaring industrial space she inhabits. She crouches, impassive face framed by a stereotypical knotted head rag, nipples forward, bum high. She is beautiful and terrible, haunting and sickening and humorous. And, she’s made of sugar.
The show’s title does not include the words mammy or sphinx. That would be too easy. Instead, it was nearly as epic as the main event. An announcement at the entrance read:
At the behest of Creative Time, Kara E.
Walker has confected:
A Subtlety
or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
an Homage to the unpaid and overworked
Artisans who have refined
Kara Walker. At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. 2014. A project of Creative Time. Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, NY, May 10–July 6, 2014. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the
Kitchens of the New World
on the Occasion of the demolition of the
Domino Sugar Refining Plant.
There is so much to unpack in this piece, it could easily furnish an entire chapter of its own, with lots left over for its very own doorstopper of a book. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the clickety-click of dissertations well underway.
So, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. A brief and very much not-exhaustive tour:
Commissioned by Creative Time, an organization dedicated to ambitious public art projects, A Subtlety was anything but. Except, actually, it was. It turns out “subtleties” were once elaborate edible sugar sculptures made to adorn the tables of the über-rich. Who knew?
Well, Walker, for one. And in addition to using the very material that same factory processed to create a monument to its demise (Domino donated 160,000 lbs/72,572 kg pounds of sugar for its construction), she mined sugar’s dark past, one she’s compared to the “blood diamonds” of today: “Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and ‘true,’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.”
The Sugar Baby looks black, but she’s white. The ghost of America past.
In its day, the Domino Sugar plant processed more than half the raw sugar in the United Sates, a busy blue-collar factory in a thriving blue-collar town. Now it’s gone the way of subtleties past. The nineteenth-century building—with its soaring space and spanning girders, a kind of industrial-age cathedral—was slated for imminent demolition after the Subtlety show. To be replaced by upscale apartments, half a million square feet of commercial space, and a waterside promenade.
In its review, the New York Times wrote, “The smell hits you first: sweet but with an acrid edge, like a thousand burned marshmallows.” Which, together with the white colossus herself, reminded me of the otherworldly, gigantic, and malevolent Stay Puft Marshmallow Man at the end of the first Ghostbusters. “I do what I’m feeling and what I’m feeling is monstrous,” Walker said in a conversation with filmmaker Ava DuVernay. “And I do it in the nicest possible way.”
Though the sphinx of ancient Greece (the female one, as opposed to the male Egyptian version) was malevolent, Walker’s creature is anything but. She is terrible, in the sense that she is large and imposing—awe-inspiring as an ancient god—but she is also reserved, regal, above the fray. She is ennobling, even in her position, which is an unfortunate one.
Some of the Instagram and Twitter posts were, predictably, lame. Too many selfies posed not in front, but behind, pointing at or goofing on the Sugar Baby’s epic-sized labia. On this point, Walker is philosophical: “I put a giant ten-foot vagina in the world and people respond to giant ten-foot vaginas in the way that they do. It’s not unexpected.” In this piece and many others, Walker is the opposite of the Internet scold. She’s saying—in effect—this life, our history, our lust and livelihoods and loves, are deeply complicated. Also, they are fucked up.
But public disregard for the brutal history embodied in her Sugar Baby infuriated many. The piece bred plenty of controversy, including protests online and in person. Along with it: effusive praise for the artist.
Not so surprising for a woman who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant at age twenty-seven, the second-youngest recipient ever. (In case you’re keeping score, the youngest: eighteen.)
For those of you reading this book straight through: we’ve come full circle. Like Artemisia Gentileschi, and the vast majority of women artists before the modern era, Walker became an artist because she was raised by an artist: “One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too.’”
Walker spent her first thirteen years in Stockton, gateway town to California’s Central Valley, where Dad—Larry Walker—was a professor and chair of the art department at the University of the Pacific. In her father’s (correct) view, Stockton was an artistic backwater and it was holding back his career. For his daughter, it was an upbeat ’70s “Free to Be You and Me” childhood of pleasant activities and thoughtless diversity. She was black, sure, but everyone was something.
Things were very different when Larry moved the family to Atlanta in 1983 to take a similar position at Georgia State University, a bigger school in a much bigger city. But even by the 1980s, it was a place not far enough removed from Jim Crow. The Atlanta Child Murders were a recent terror, there were monuments to the Confederate Army in the neighborhood park, and the KKK left scary notes on her white boyfriend’s car. Walker processed almost none of it at the time; that came—volubly—later.
Walker studied at the Atlanta College of Art, then the Rhode Island School of Design for grad school, where she had her breakthrough. When New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz happened on some of her work in a shared studio space he was visiting there, “I felt like a thunderbolt had hit the back of my head. I was sickened, thrilled, and terrified.”
That’s an almost perfect summation of my first encounter with Walker’s work. This was at the Drawing Center in SoHo in 1994, back when she was still a RISD student. It was a little like catching the first Beatles set at the Indra Club in Hamburg. Front row at the revolution.
