Camouflaged in the landscape

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas Series, 1976

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. 

One of the exhibition wall texts reads as follows: 

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.

 

Ana Mendieta, Tate restaging of the Old Westbury installation, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978

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. 

Traces

The Hayward Gallery's current exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces is well worth a visit.  Her Siluetas (1973-80) were an important contribution to the development of art in the landscape and I discussed them here six years ago, contrasting her approach with Antony Gormley.  The Super-8 film I mentioned then, Yagul (Burial Pyramid) (1974) can be seen in the Hayward's show.  In Yagul, Mendieta was struck by the way ancient Mexican ruins were overgrown with nature and in one of her best-known photographs, Imagen de Yagul (1973), she lies among the old stones, covered in flowers.  A similar Ovid-like metamorphosis can be seen on the cover of the catalogue (above).  There is a charming story told by her art teacher and partner Hans Breder about the first such work, made spontaneously one day at college, when she simply took off her dress, lay down naked on the ground and asked her fellow students to cover her in grass.

From 1975 onwards Mendieta no longer felt the need to include her own body as an integral part of the work and begun to create the Siluetas, earth-body sculptures shaped by her silhouette.  Some of these resemble archaeological images of ancient tombs or tribal markings, others look at first like simple landscape photographs until you notice the small island of mud or bare patch in the grass, suggestive of the human form.  Mendieta distanced herself from Robert Smithson and what she regarded as the brutalisation of nature in large-scale earthworks. In a 1985 interview quoted in the catalogue she said, 'I would say if I have an identity with someone spiritually, and their use of nature, it would be someone like Richard Long, although I think his work is definitely very English.'

The Siluetas are undoubtedly her most impressive work but this exhibition introduced me to the variety of sculptural approaches she pursued in the early eighties.  There are David Nash-like burnt wood pieces, flat floor sculptures made by mixing earth with a binding agent, and large-scale photographs of figurative forms carved directly into limestone in her native Cuba.  She started drawing simple shapes on leaves of the 'autograph tree', clusia rosea, which children in the Caribbean used as writing paper during colonial times.  She also used leaf prints as the basis for lithographs in a book made jointly with her new husband Carl Andre (his images were based on a Roman flagstone).  It looks like a beautiful book, but impossible to view objectively without thinking of the circumstances of her death a few months later.  I left wondering how her art might have evolved by now and whether she could have developed new ways of engaging with landscape and nature.

Siluetas

I never got round to writing about the Antony Gormley show in London earlier this year. The body casts he positioned in Event Horizon on the buildings and streets around the gallery were, among other things, a form of landscape art: marking out a section of the city and drawing attention to a skyline that might otherwise go unregarded. In an earlier work, Another Place, installed on the sands of Crosby Bay, Gormley had similarly inserted his own body into the landscape, by creating its bronze trace and placing multiples over a wide area.

It might be interesting to compare these Gormley sculptures with the ephemeral body imprints made in the seventies by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. In her Siluetas series Mendieta 'inserted her naked figure (or its outline or contours) in a natural setting,' fusing 'aspects of Conceptual, process, performance, body, feminist, and land art.' There are currently photographs of these on line here, here, here and here (this last one to illustrate 'feminism and the sublime'.)

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Siluetas Series, 1978 (printed 1991)

In London, Gormley's masculine sculptures were placed on the commanding heights, made of solid material and were... how can I put this... impressively well-endowed. Mendieta's Siluetas in contrast were overtly feminine. Indeed, as Michael Duncan notes , one critic Mira Schor, 'faults the bond that Mendieta sought to establish between her own body and that of "Mother Earth," seeing in it a kind of feminist essentialism. She claims that Mendieta's approach reveals "a problematic lack of ambivalence that seems a relic of the first years of feminist art."'

All discussions of the Siluetas acknowledge the important influence of Afro-Cuban Santeria myths, along with Mandieta's explanation that the works symbolised her own sense of uprootedness. Michael Duncan explains how 'they transcend any simple celebration of nature. The Siluetas evoke a variety of emotional states; there is the apocalyptic bleakness of a Silueta composed of burnt gunpowder and charred ash, the magical transience of another work that is seemingly blown together with tufts of hay, and the stolid sobriety of a form molded out of earth... An uncanny filmed performance of 1974, Yagul (Burial Pyramid), presents a Silueta formed from a mound of rocks in a Mexican landscape. Slowly the rocks begin to twitch, pulsing with seemingly primordial life; finally, Mendieta herself gradually shakes off her rocky sepulcher. Yet she remains prone, as if her new visibility is enough.'

Postscript 2026: I have added an image above from the 2026 Tate Modern Ana Mendieta retrospective.