I have written about Ana Mendieta on this blog twice before. In 2013 I gave an overview of how her work connects with landscape art, based on a major London retrospective of her work at the Hayward Gallery. Many of those pieces are back in London and on show in Tate Modern's new Mendieta exhibition. I highly recommend going, even if you're familiar with them already - I've been twice! She is a fascinating figure, a radical land artist but also someone you can discuss in terms of feminism, body art and performance, ancient cultures and symbols, ethnicity and identity, experimental film and site specific sculpture. Here though, I will add a few more words on my central theme, landscape, which was an active participant in the making of her art as you can see from the action of the waves in the Siluetas photographs above.
In the late 1970s Mendieta’s Silueta Series became further integrated into nature. Some of the Siluetas became hard to find, or as Mendieta described them, ‘camouflaged’ in the landscape. This shift occurred around the time she left Iowa to live in New York City. Her friend and fellow artist Eduardo Costa told her that such work encouraged him to see ‘readymade siluetas’ everywhere. The subtlety of these works created the sense that a Silueta could be encountered suddenly and at any moment.
I like this notion that eventually an art work can become a dematerialised idea that we might spot when we are out in the landscape. It would similarly be possible to suddenly come upon accidental Richard Longs or Andy Goldsworthys, although the shapes they use have less significance than the Silueta form. Of course this is not a new idea - 18th century tourists were always spotting Salvator Rosa motifs in broken trees and looming rocks, or admiring Claude-like vistas in the soft light of Italy.
It is easy to imagine glimpsing a patch of moss in the woods and seeing in it echoes of Ana Mendieta. The photograph above was taken in Tate Modern, where they have recreated a life-sized forest she made with students for the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Ana Mendieta's original piece 'was designed to be viewed from afar – it was a forest that could not be entered.' This distancing of the spectator was a feature of contemporary land art, made at some distance from gallery spaces and experienced at a remove, through photographs and documentation. It seems to me that the Tate installation stands in an interesting point somewhere between landscape art, which always assumed a viewer and a view, and sculpture, which can be moved around and examined. It is made of real natural objects but remains static in a gallery, where there is no wind to move the branches or rustle the leaves, or any real rain and sunlight to nourish and illuminate the moss.