Tracing Ana

By Sasha Mills

An androgynous body, arms long and raised aloft, is carved into the sand. In the first of five images, water encroaches onto the right-hand side of the silhouette. As the series progresses, the water sinks into the channels, in one frame entirely covering the outline. A photograph taken later, at a slightly different angle, shows a diminished but still recognisable form, asserting itself against the landscape. 

Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta spent most of her career treading this line between presence and absence. Looking at her work posthumously, the vitality of her form continues to assert itself, even when she herself is not in the image. Seeing her work is similar to catching your reflection when you don’t expect to: the momentary gap between seeing yourself and recognising yourself. There is a connection, but you are not yet enclosed within familiarity. 

In almost every room of Tate Modern's new retrospective are works from Mendieta's Siluetas series. Some are recognisable: her first entry, in which she lowered herself into a tomb and covered herself with white flowers, is an iconic and oft-circulated image. Others, however, have never been shown in London. In one group, the titular silhouette is grafted into the earth. In others, it is filled with red pigment that spreads into wind or water. Sometimes it is set aflame. Throughout, you observe the body, or an impression of the body, from outside. You might feel called to identify with the form, but you are never within it.

"Seeing her work is similar to catching your reflection when you don’t expect to: the momentary gap between seeing yourself and recognising yourself."

Most surprising are the entries in which the bodily trace is barely visible, appearing almost incidental. In one, the silhouette is made of mushrooms sprouting from the ground. Is this a clever trick of the eye, a natural arrangement caught at a specific angle, or Mendieta's intervention in the landscape? In another, rock pools seem to morph into a group of silhouettes. Has Mendieta carved these into the ground, or simply noticed a synchronicity between her repeated motif and this stretch of shoreline?

At one moment you're looking at work produced during her student years at the University of Iowa, where she was a member of the Intermedia Program, and in the next you're presented with work made during her residency at the American Academy in Rome. Works created in collaboration with Mendieta's elementary school class — a welcome detour into her lesser-known role as an educator — sit alongside the Moffitt Building Piece, one of Mendieta's more disturbing explorations of collective passivity in the face of public violence.

A non-chronological curatorial approach is by no means a bad thing, but here it does contribute to a more general sense of rootlessness. Mendieta's floor-based sculptures are marooned on huge plinths, perhaps to discourage visitors from touching them. Some of her site-specific works have been restaged, such as Ārbol de la Vida (1982), originally created for the gardens of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami.

The highlight of the show is the remastered films and the large-scale prints. Mendieta is rarely described as a photographer. More often, she is described as a performance artist, or as working in the tradition of earthworks and land art. Yet throughout the exhibition, Mendieta's mastery of the camera is astonishing. Yes, the Siluetas series is site-specific and ephemeral in the first instance. But Mendieta was picking up the camera and documenting each one: sometimes photographing its disappearance, but photographing it nonetheless.

"It is this balance between violence and beauty that gives her work its vitality."

These images are vivid and sharp, clever in their use of angle and light. Across them, Mendieta is looking at the feminine form from outside, whether it is as a yonic carving made into a wall in Cuba, or in her self-portraits, which appear midway through the show. In one series, she trims the beard of a classmate and applies it to her own face before a mirror, eventually taking on a proud and playful gaze towards the camera. In others, she contorts her face with glass, and her hair with shampoo. The body is her subject, but even more so, it is Mendieta's primary tool.

As such, Mendieta is always acutely in control of the form her body takes. In Body Tracks, she drags her arms down a wall, leaving behind vivid red streaks. As she walks away, you see the pigment reaching up to her elbows. She looks as though she has been elbows-deep in a carcass, or working in a butcher's shop. It is this balance between violence and beauty that gives her work its vitality. In Blood and Feathers, which here is shown both as a photograph and as a film, Mendieta squints towards the camera. It is not pain behind her eyes, but it is not an easy gaze either. 

In a lesser-known filmic work, she manipulates electromagnetic technology so that the outline of her body suddenly bursts into light. At this moment she is anonymous and almost otherworldly, a spectral presence against a dark forest. On the other side of the gallery, an iron cast of her hand is used to brand wood and sheets of paper in Rites and Rituals of Initiation (1978): asserting ‘I am here.’

Transforming her body into a motif, Mendieta’s absence becomes an invitation. Even after her death, the very force of her life extends itself into the future, brimming with energy, refusing to be ignored.