A SECRET ART CLASS

A few years ago, I wore big sweaters and sat in a swivel chair with the handful of other students who signed up for this new, odd, contemporary art class.

It was in some back corner of campus in a room with no windows and I remember stumbling into it in what felt like a tumble of fate. There were about seven of us, which was unheard of for a big school, and would, in turn, become my favorite secret.

I did not yet know how deeply it would reach me. I had no idea it would become a defining memory of my college experience and a space that my mind would return to again and again for artistic inspiration as the years unfolded before me like an accordion.

But mostly, I did not yet know who Ana Mendieta was. That was to change.

ANA MENDIETA

If you have never heard of her, Mendieta was an extremely avant-garde artist from the 1970s. Her work was edgy, grotesque, and perhaps most importantly, ephemeral. Or, that gorgeous word that I inject into nearly everything that I write these days. It was her work that first schooled me in it’s true meaning.

Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta grew up in an aristocratic family, enjoying the lavishes of life until at the age of twelve she was uprooted to the United States in asylum from the Cuban Revolution. Landing in Iowa, Mendieta faced an adolescence of discrimination that isolated her and her ever-present longing for home. A home in which she would not return to until the 80s when her adolescence, those shaping years of anyone’s identity, had long passed.

In her struggle to grasp the dimensions of loss that she fell through in being forced to leave her homeland behind, Mendieta turned to art in all of its expressive glory.

Displacement

While she was physically displaced from her home, feeling the loss of that connection bleeding out of her like a severed umbilical cord for all of her life, I think that it speaks to the metaphorical distance that we all travel from the places we knew in our youth. We’re all a bit lost, grasping in the dark for some place that we cannot ever return to, aren’t we?

For Mendieta, the only way that she knew to cauterize that bleeding was to fall into the earth, the very thing that so many of us took immense comfort in during the pandemic, when we too were severed form everything that we knew. Mendieta, stolen away from her family and home, found those primal, gritty roots to be the only ones that she could actively connect to. They nourished her. The earth itself became the womb from which she was reborn.

FLOWERS ON THE BODY

This is captured quite perfectly in one of my favorite shots of all time, her “Flowers on Body” piece from her Silueta Series. It depicts her naked body resting on the earth, covered in flowers that reach their stems across her flesh in a maternal embrace. Her body is one with the soil of the earth, exterminating the idea that they are ever truly separate from one another.

The visual juxtaposition of sedentary Earth and mortal flesh served to birth an identity that could not be taken away from her, one that did not rely upon religion or culture or family, but rather life in all of its forms. She laid down with the earth as a way of demonstrating that she was an un-categorizable being, defiant to definition, defiant to the interpellation that modernity subjects us all too. That’s quite meta, if you ask me.

For in my never-ending quest to retain individual consciousness outside of the walls of society, outside of conformity and mass-produced ideology, it’s pieces like this that I return to again and again. Much like my obsession with mortality, remembering that the earth was my first mother keeps me grounded in my own life.

As a child, I knew instinctively to sit in the grass and take off my shoes and press ruby red rose petals to my lips. And in the throes of heartbreak, it was the ocean that pulled me into it with a force that I still cannot quite account for.

So of course, when my teacher put that shot of Mendieta at one with the earth up on the board, I was floored. The kid next to me was asleep, but I was just waking up.

EPHEMERALITY

Quite serendipitously, considering that I have published two posts about the impermanence of life in the past week, Mendieta also deals quite fiercely with the experience of inhabiting a mortal body. Much of her work only exists only through photos, having long since been devoured by the earth.

What does that mean?

In another one of my favorite projects of hers within that Silueta Series, Mendieta carved out the shape of a body on the coast, on that very edge of a continent, only to watch the earth erase it, wave by gushing wave.

It’s such a simple idea, one that I unknowingly internalized as a small child on the coast of California, playing with sandcastles, learning early that what we create can only truly live forever within ourselves. That there is grace in letting go, grace in surrendering to the earth.

Yet how profound of a reminder it is to me now, as an adult. How indulgent it feels to look at these shots and be humbled by their transient beauty, the only kind that we can ever truly know.

So many artists are obsessed with longevity, with creating something, anything, that can outlive them and carry on their legacy. As a writer, I know that I take great comfort in my journals and papers and posts because they serve as records of my existence, records of what life has felt like. They prove me.

Mendieta, while obviously succeeding in artistic longevity, did not seem all too obsessed with it at all. She was, by contrast, far more interested in the erasure of it. The erasure of all earthly existence, and how we can make peace with the naturalness of that.

PERSONAL REFLECTION

All to say, Mendieta’s work sends me falling through dimensions that I can only describe as transcendent, pushing me into the vacant space of a world imagined.

A world where the incessant chatter of contemporary life quiets down and the maternal melody of the earth pulsates against my eardrums, reminding me that my atoms were coalesced for grander experiences than what the rat-race of society permits one to imagine.

When I look at her naked body pressed against the earth, the “maternal source”, as she calls it, I see the cosmic oneness of me residing within her.

I see my hands, my feet, dancing with dirt and stems as they did when I was a mere child, only capable of the immediate awareness of the present moment that I now strive to attain. In this way, Mendieta reminds us all of the truth we knew as children and have since long forgotten—that the earth is our playground, our mother, our home.

We reserve the right to recognize this as a miracle if we so choose. And in doing so, we allow ourselves the opportunity to gain a grander perspective, one that can only be attained through the awareness that each and every one of our atoms came from this brilliant earth that we mindlessly trudge upon day in and day out.

TRANSCENDENT ART

So Mendieta’s fierce engagement with this cosmic birth of humanity pushes me into a realm in which I feel free to traverse the grander maybes of our existence, a realm in which the realization of the cyclical dust-to-dust nature of our bodies resides.

It is there, in that realm, that I can begin to fully come into my most authentic self. A devotion to awareness springs out the ephemerality of Mendieta’s art and blankets itself across my consciousness, freeing me from all that is not truly important, from all that stands to dissolve amidst the fleetingness of life.

Because when a piece transcends the confines of conventionality and takes you with it on a journey through the consciousness of the artist, through the raw sentiments of love and longing and loss that we all recognize so intimately, it is then that one is witness to the true wonders of art. 

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE

I think that this ability of Mendieta’s work to so intimately connect with the viewer is valuable to society today more than ever, for it highlights why her avant-garde art remains relevant. In a digitalized age where authentic connection is sparse, the ability for artwork to make someone feel less alone is more valuable than ever before. Humanity is practically nose-diving into the ever-deepening abyss of isolation, causing artist’s work from decades ago to retain their value as a means of understanding ourselves.

When you look at the Silueta Series and you think of ephemerality and the beautiful connection Mendieta observed between the natural world and the human soul, you are brought into the sacred space of humanity where we remember the fragile cosmic miracles that are each one of our lives.

And there is something inherently unforgettable about a space like that, for it reunites you with what it is to be a human upon traversing the travesties of a world we so often neglect to look at. It reminds you that you are not alone in your eternal state of unease at the fleetingness of what you love.

For soon, this will all be washed away in a swell of the tides, eaten by tongues of fire, and what will you have to show for the collection of natural wonders that was you?

world as lover

This instinct to remain connected to the earth, to still press rose petals to our lips and point our toes to the sky, knowing all the while that it won’t ever last, reminds me Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self, a true gem of a read. I’ve already written a whole post about it that you can read here, but in short, Macy works from a similar plane as Mendieta in that they both seem to possess a deeper awareness of the human connection to the earth than most.

The very connection that yanks us down from the embarrassingly high pedestal that humanity has hauled itself onto, and puts us in our rightful place. As mentioned in my last post, we like to think that we are above the earth, above animals and plants, and that we can use science and technology to elevate ourselves to higher and higher realms of possibility.

But the higher we climb, the harder the fall.

I think it’s much more admirable to be like Mendieta and Macy. To accept and love that we are just little cosmic things climbing through the universe, worrying about what to wear. That to love and understand the earth, and it’s natural processes, is to better understand ourselves. And really, to know that when all else feels elusive and gone away, it is the earth that we can always come home to, again and again

Isn’t that we’re all after anyway? A place to feel perpetually held by?

I think so.

Love, m.

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