A sacred vision of the female body and its contemplation as a passive subject of desecration and violence always populated the thought and work of Ana Mendieta (Havana, 1948-New York, 1985). Some of the drawings, photographs and films that can be seen from next Saturday in the small exhibition of the Madrid gallery Nogueras Blanchard testify. But you will probably never know if that early morning of 1985 when he rushed from the 34th floor of his home in Greenwich Village was a suicide, an accident or the confirmation of those ghost desecrators in the form of murder. Did Ana Mendieta throw herself out the window? And because? He fell? And how? Was she thrown by her husband, also the artist - and world star - Carl Andre? And under what circumstances?
From a legal point of view, the third option was deactivated three years after the event, when a New York judge exonerated the sculptor and leading figure of minimalist art for lack of evidence. But on an emotional-emotional-subjective level, the thing is different. Not even the family of the Cuban artist, who was 36 when she died; not many of his followers and collectors; neither activist platforms as Whereisanamendieta, Sisters Uncut or No Wave Task Force have stopped trying to defend the assumption of murder.
Consequence of this are the acts of protest that these groups usually organize before the museums and galleries that mount Carl Andre's exhibitions around the world. In fact, outrage is usually directed at the patrons of the Dia Art Foundation, the American institution that manages the sculptor's work. The most common example was the concentration of more than 500 people called by the Guerrilla Girls and Women's Action Coalition groups before the Guggenheim in New York in 1992 when an anthology about Andre was inaugurated. The protesters scattered hundreds of photocopies with works by Ana Mendieta through the rooms of the center.
There were also problems at the doors of the Tate Modern in London when in June 2016, on the occasion of the reopening of the museum after its remodeling, components of Sisters Uncut and Whereisanamendieta expressed the shout of “Tate, we want revenge, where the hell Is Ana Mendieta? ” in protest against the privileged place that in his opinion they granted to Carl Andre in the new presentation of the collection and the ninguneo with which they condemned the deceased artist, of which the Tate owns several works.
The director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Borja Villel, explains how the events developed when the great exhibition dedicated to Andre opened at the Palacio de Velázquez in May 2015: “We did not have many problems, although there were some protests. But that exhibition came from the Dia Art Foundation of the United States and, as Philippe Vergne, who was then its director, told me in his day, it was very difficult to convince some of the patrons of the foundation to organize it. It must be said that the reputation of Carl Andre had been quite touched after the death of Mendieta, and it is already known: to the art world - well, as it happens to the rest of society, go - he does not usually like to mix with according to what reputations. " On that occasion, a dozen women in blood-stained T-shirts burst into the shout of “In the face of injustice, injustice, and your blood, your blood, we use our bodies as a sign of protest, protest, and we shout with your body thrown into the void no, no, no! ”
The truth is that neither the context in which the death of the author of Rape scene (rape scene) and Death of a chicken (death of a chicken) occurred nor the way in which the trial of Andre passed contributed to the calm social around this tragic episode. Successive pressures exerted by the sculptor's circles of friendship in the art world led to the fact that he was not judged by a popular jury, as it should have been, but a judge. And the very high bond that was imposed on him was paid by his friend, the world sculptor and star Frank Stella. Carl Andre's lawyers put all their effort into highlighting the supposed depressive tendencies of the artist. The Mendieta family did not succeed in asserting as scratch evidence the scratches that Carl Andre had on his face when the police arrived or the cries of “nooo, nooo!” that several neighbors claimed to have heard before the fall of Ana Mendieta.
But not everyone, far from it, defends the thesis of Mendieta's murder. This is the case of Barbara Rose, who was one of the great critics of art and artistic curators in the American scene of the seventies, eighties and nineties, and precisely ex-wife of Frank Stella. “Feminists have always accused Carl Andre of killing Ana, who was then his wife. He did not do it. They were both drunk and she fell out the window. Carl Andre was not able to harm a fly, ”Rose assures El País Semanal from his Palm Beach home.
The postcards that 1984 Ana Mendieta wrote from Italy and Malta to her mother, Raquel, will integrate together with a series of drawings and three short films the exhibition of the Nogueras Blanchard gallery, Tropic-Ana , “a small and intimate exhibition that through of those drawings and his personal notes, he wants to return to the most private of Ana ”, according to the Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto, curator of the exhibition.
These postcards, which have never been exposed in public, will never constitute legal proof of anyone's guilt or innocence or the resolution of any possible crime. But they do suggest some idea about the mood in which Ana Mendieta must have been just a few months before her death. It did not look like someone who was scheduled to take off in the short or medium term: “Dear Mamita, just a few lines to give you the good news that I am going to have a show in Rome that opens March 21 the Primo Piano gallery. In short, my work begins to bear fruit. I hope you are well and that the cold has passed from Iowa [sic]. I received a letter from Ignacio very affectionate and photos of the new nephew. I am very happy for everyone. A big kiss. Your little daughter Ana, ”he writes from Naples.
Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, niece of Ana Mendieta and responsible for her legacy along with her mother and sister of the artist, Raquelin, explains the value of these documents from New York: “Those postcards reveal the inspiration generated in Ana when visiting places like Malta and his enthusiasm for his first solo exhibition in Rome ”. It was precisely in Rome where Mendieta executed the drawings that can now be seen in Madrid. Raquel Cecilia Mendieta is the author of the documentary Whispering cave (the cave of the whispers), a beautiful road trip in search of the sculptures on rock that Mendieta made in 1982 in the mountains of Jaruco, in Cuba. At the present time another film about the life and work of his aunt.
Ana Mendieta started painting at a young age, but soon she felt she was facing a conventional support and creative possibilities for her expressive cravings. “He stopped painting because he felt that the paintings did not convey the magic he hoped to project, which he discovered when he started using his body as a medium,” details his niece and today the greatest expert in her work. Ana Mendieta pursued the earth, and the air, and the water, and the fire, in an almost obsessive path of fusion between nature and art. That led her to land art . But above all he pursued his own body and, from him, the female body. So it led to body art. All this screened by a certain spirituality on horseback between his Catholic education and his great love for the rituals of Cuban santeria.
Daughter of a prestigious politician and a professor of chemistry, her father soon broke with the Castro revolution and fell out of favor. Ana, 12, and her sister Raquel, 14, were sent to the United States in 1961, within the framework of the so-called Operation Pedro Pan orchestrated by Catholic circles in Havana. From house to house and from State to State (Florida, Iowa ...), Ana Mendieta spent 5 years without her mother and 18 without her father. Exile, loneliness and feeling of loss would be embedded indelibly in his life and in his work, which was forged primarily at the University of Iowa by the hand of artist Hans Breder. It was there, in 1973, when he performed - as a tribute to a classmate who had been raped on campus - his performance Rape scene , the work that catapulted his name to the art scene in the United States with only 25 years.
Manuel Borja Villel admires his figure and the title of “very important artist on the international scene”, although he regrets his late recognition: “Beyond his tragic death, which adds myth to the thing,” he says, “we must say that the The generation of creators of which Mendieta or Nancy Spero are part took years to exploit because it was caught between two tectonic masses: that of the great American artists of the sixties and seventies - almost all men - such as Donald Judd or Dan Flavin, and the next generation of the eighties, with artists rather linked to neo-expressionism and the avant-garde, such as Schnabel ”.
The director of Reina Sofía, who hopes to confirm shortly the donation of a work by Mendieta by one of the patrons of the museum, analyzes the creative dimension of the painter, sculptor and performer born in Havana: “She is an artist who It clearly stands between two cultures: the Cuban and the American. And this intercultural element is now fully accepted, but in those years it was much more disruptive. And it was even more so at the time, the introduction she made of all those elements and issues that have to do with feminism, blood, the body of women and violence against her ..., and also all with a touch as grotesque that I think it came mostly from Goya. ”
Feminist? Activist? Artivist? Faced with the fury that his figure always aroused in those circles, his niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta puts things in their right place: “She did not consider herself a feminist, but she was a woman who used her body and her experiences as a woman in her work. In fact, his early work has a lot to do with his own interrogation of his identity as a Latina, as a woman and as a displaced person from his homeland. ” Nor was it allowed to be used by certain activism professionals who, upon their arrival in New York in 1978, saw it as a priority objective as a banner. "He soon discovered," adds his niece, "that feminism was 'a movement of white women' and became disillusioned."
It was in that effervescent New York of the eighties that Ana Mendieta found herself too soon with death. The success of prestige and commercial probably awaited him. But his body ended up on the roof of a food shop on Mercer Street in Manhattan. Crime, suicide, accident ... Only Carl Andre knows. “The family maintains the position that Ana was murdered by her husband, who had violent tendencies towards women. She was very happy, full of plans for her future as an artist and with the idea of divorcing Andre, ”says her niece. The mystery Mendieta is still there. And it will continue for the remains, in all probability.