ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS ANA MENDIETA

Abstract

New York Police Department received an emergency call on the 8th of September in 1985. On the opposite end, it was the famous minimalist artist Carl Andre pleading help for his wife who had fallen from their 34th floor apartment in Soho. The ambulance arrived at the location only to find Ana Mendieta's lifeless body. There were no eyewitnesses. The neighbours' gave statements of loud arguments coming from their apartment a few days prior to the event. Investigators took Carl Andre into the custody suspecting seconddegree murder due to the injuries on Mendieta's body and the position of the window. After a three-year trial, Andre's lawyers presented a defence claiming that Mendieta is likely to have had a suicidal personality due to her art and her life story. The court eventually decided that Mendieta had committed suicide after examining her art, and acquitted Carl Andre of the murder case. Mendieta had turned the 'void' into an entity through digging the earth, and the court closed the void filling it with a 'suicidal body'. The death of the artist and her subsequent non-existence, gives a connotative link to her art; centered on crucial questions about time, space, body, and identity, seemed to be the final addition to her famous Silueta' series. Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter, film maker Ana Mendieta analyzes the relation between the earth and spirit, and confronts us with painful questions like love, death and rebirth. Since the majority of her work consists of bodily performances, Mendieta questions the concept of ephemerality over the body, spirit and existence. Although her initial innovative and provocative performances were later replaced by her symbolic and transient work, the matters of body, time, space, and nature and their connectedness continued to become the main ingredients of Mendieta's art. This paper will conceptually analyze Mendieta's methods of expression in her constant search of her physical and spiritual presence. Mendieta's questioning and dissecting of such presence and her raced and gendered self requires an existential exploration. This paper will examine Mendieta's approach through concepts of phenomenologists I Ieidegger's existential space and Merleau Ponty 's 'lived body', which describes the roles of sensation in perception. Furthermore, Mendieta's works will be compared to the works of Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo and Rachel Whiteread on the basis of shared concepts.