[finder] Ana Mendieta

[dot_fennel]

In a recent trip to SFMOMA, I spent some time in the reading room. One of the books there was a giant Taschen volume on women in contemporary art. Almost every page I flipped to had work that was both new and interesting to me.

One artist that struck me was Ana Mendieta. Her bio commented that the morbidness in her work eerily prefigured her early death, caused by a fall from a tall building in New York. The book gave no other details.

But this rang a bell with me. In high school I was a devotee of Scientific American math columnist Martin Gardner, whose books I still think would make a fantastic supplemental course in math for kids who find that just accelerating the standard school curriculum isn't repaying the mathematical impulse they feel.

Anyway, in his later years, Gardner digressed more. A column of his led me to the OuLiPo, for which I feel a substantial debt. At another point, he spent *two* months of his column tearing into minimalist sculpture, particularly the work of Carl Andre. (Google image search.) Andre, I recalled, had been accused of pushing a girlfriend out of a window to her death. I didn't remember Gardner saying anything about the girlfriend in question being not only an artist, but a serious artist with an aesthetic totally different from Andre's.

But it turns out, of course, that she's the one. I find it creepy that Gardner didn't mention Mendieta's accomplishments (or have I just forgotten?) and the Taschen book alluded to her death being violent but glossed it in as un-violent a way as possible, even though it seems to have been either suicide or murder. (Andre was found innocent of it in court; he said she had committed suicide. This seems to rule out it being an accident.) I can understand not wanting to be sensationalist, but I find euphemism and cover-up a lot more lurid than just stating the (admittedly unpleasant and enigmatic) facts of a case like this.

Comments

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

Holy sha-moly. I had no idea Andre was mixed-up in something like that.

But that's the thing, right? Who knows what happened? In the meantime Andre has to go on living his life, Mendieta's friends and family have to go on living their lives, and if everyone in the world knows, it pretty much guarantees that clueless yahoos of all persuasions will come to their own absurd conclusions. In American culture we often seem to assume that we have the right to know about anything legally find-out-able, but that way leads to an unlivable society.

It doesn't seem that this concern is Gardner's motivation for his omission, though. I agree that it's creepy to go after Andre for what happened without mentioning the accomplishments of Mendieta (whose work I am not familiar with at all). But in the other case, the Taschen book, I think in that context it does a disservice to the consideration of Mendieta's work in its own right to dwell on or even mention sensationalistic details of the artist's life, whatever they might be. And I would say the same goes for Andre, even though in the general case, girlfriend-murderers get a particularly strong dosing of Dr. Kretek's Infernal Retributive Preparation.

[dot_fennel]

If Taschen had left out any mention of it, that would be fine. But they called her death "violent" and tied this to her work, which...

Well, okay. My impression is that Mendieta photographed herself a lot, often naked, in ways that make women's bodies and sexuality a topic of her work. In some cases, maybe all of them, the point was to DEsexualize the body and put it in the context of nature, where "nature" can be both peaceful and dangerous. If her death (far from natural, and far from nature) was an accident, the book's comment about its relationship to her work is vapid or even incomprehensible; if she was killed by a romantic partner, the comment is still glib, and still best left out for the reasons you give, but it's easier to see how someone could have written it. So if I'm remembering both the book and her work correctly -- big if -- then it seems to me like the writer was trying to allude to the particular circumstances of Mendieta's death but without using forbidden words, rather than trying to skirt the issue entirely.

I will probably break down and buy the book soon, since I liked it, and then I can see just what it said.

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I agree with you completely.

I wonder if maybe the writer was nodding to those in the know without spelling out for the outsiders. Artists can be cliquey like that. :)