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Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre: duet of leaf and stone
Art Journal, Fall, 2004 by Laura Roulet
Puerto Rican artist Juan Sanchez, who became a friend of Mendieta's in the early 1980s, notes that at the time they were both exploring the indigenous culture and imagery of the Caribbean. (29) While Sanchez used ideographs as originally carved on Taino artifacts, Mendieta adapted the symbols as personifications of herself. He comments that she was fascinated with recurrent imagery from the ancient cultures of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. She pointed out to him the similarities in petroglyph motifs from Ireland to Cuba. In ever-more-abstracted form and diverse media, these elemental shapes, such as spirals, labyrinths, lozenges, and goddesses, recurred in her work.
Similarly, feminist historians and artists had explored the universal theme of the Great Goddess in the 1970s. In the issue of Heresies devoted to this topic, an essay by Gloria Feman Orenstein positions Mendieta among the contemporary women artists exploring the Great Goddess archetype, along with then-better-known Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneemann, Donna Henes, and others. (30) In the exuberant rhetoric of the day, Orenstein delineates this feminist phenomenon: "In its modern transformed meaning, it is about the mysteries of woman's rebirth from the womb of historical darkness, in which her powers were so long enshrouded, into a new era where a culture of her own making will come about as a result of a new Earth Alchemy." (31) In the same issue, Mimi Lobell lists eighteen of the world's "Temples of the Great Goddess," from the Catal Huyuk Shrine of Anatolia to the Ise Shrine of Japan. (32) At the time, Mendieta had already visited Stonehenge on England's Salisbury Plain (temples 7 and 8). Of the remaining sixteen sites, she would travel to five with Andre: the temples of Malta and Egypt. While not following it as a strict itinerary, she seemed to keep Lobell's essay in mind and had long aspired to visit Egypt, a dream realized on her honeymoon with Andre in February 1985. One of her travel photos from the trip exactly duplicates the article's illustration of the sky goddess Nut overarching the cow goddess Hathor from the Temple of Dendera. She and Andre also toured the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, which is described by Lobell as a center of healing.
During the year before her honeymoon, Mendieta had created a sculpture, Nile Born (1984), incorporating soil brought back from Egypt by a friend. In an interview with artist Linda Montano, she speaks of her materials and the challenges of working in a studio: "So I've given this problem to myself, to work indoors.... I was working and working and not sure if anything was there and then one day, I came into the studio and saw that the sculptures had a presence. All of them have a 'charge' in them. A friend of mine brought me sand from Egypt and so one of them has an 'Egyptian charge.' Each one is different." (33) Mendieta's sister disclosed that bags of earth labeled "Nile" and "Red Sea" were found in her studio after her death. She had also collected soil from Pompeii and Malta. Significantly, what is crucial to Mendieta is the intangible spirituality embedded in her materials, their connection with place. The challenge had been to convey the powerful energy of her outdoor earth-body works, with the implied ritual of their creation, into permanent sculptures.
