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• 1 media/creek.jpg 2020-05-13T17:13:03-07:00 Silhuetas Series 4 plain 2020-05-15T02:45:50-07:00
  
  
  Untitled: Silhuetas Series (1973) — Ana Mendieta
  
  Ana Mendieta's extraordinary, haunting Silhuetas Series began in 1973. Mendieta, an exiled Cuban citizen, emigrated from Cuba to the United States in 1961 to study at the University of Iowa. As a student, and a woman of color, she grew disorientingly aware the social, cultural, psychological, and political violences ceaselessly directed at women, particularly immigrants, and she began to create art graphically depicting rancid, brutal scenes of these violences, the anger palpable and simmering, the monstrous-feminine already abloom. In Silhuetas, however, she merges the undercurrent of rage with impressions of the gendered, "female" body upon the earth itself. She wields her body as a simultaneous invasion of these natural spaces and as an organic element of the environment. She imprints these silhouettes against sand, dirt, mud, water, in forests and beaches, mountainsides and caves, all in an ongoing, ghostly dance with the history of monsters. Mendieta's obsession with the indigenous Santería religion informed these works, as she deliberately manipulated the physicality of the body, its weight and fixedness, thus constructing an imagined, transient monstrous feminine in the spaces of earth that should not, it seems, be visited or invaded by humans. These silhouettes disappear quickly, usually created from fire, flowers, dirt, sand tracings, and other natural materials. That disappearing invites a temporary venturing into the abstract and abject, into the monstrously bare. Mendieta described these silhouettes as an attempt to cultivate and speak to an "omnipresent female force."  Such a rejection of the imagined permanence of the self, of legacy, a distinctly masculinized siteof monstrosity, is difficult to look away from. In viewing Mendieta's silhouettes, it is impossible not to imbue their meanings with the actual events of her life, in her true ending. Likely pushed out of the window by her husband, the artist Carl Andre, Mendieta died violently and Andre was acquitted for her murder by a male jury, despite compelling evidence. Is it a form of monstrosity to impose this context upon her very individual, very separate work? The forced disappearing of the feminine, of women, lives as the primordial motif of Mendieta's oeuvre, and the inability to truly detach the self from these themes, as a woman of color, is perhaps not an issue to be ignored. The accessibility of the identity of the artist is still limited; the violences and underminings of misogynistic culture still narrate and determine the ability to make art without intrusion or violence. 
  
  Kristeva writes, of the abject within the surface of milk, "I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within thesame motion through which "I" claim to establish myself" (Kristeva 3). In these silhouettes, Mendieta declares the nameless, empty shape of her body only for moments before expelling and abjecting herself in the same breath. The liminality is shown as her permanent state of being, as womanhood itself appears monstrous, in its constant liminality, an oxymoronic state of living. The incessant, existential threat of annihilation ensures that liminality is ongoing and unperturbable in femininity,  an inescapable, forced state of monstrosity.