Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre: duet of leaf and stone

In the early flowering of their relationship, Mendieta and Andre participated together in several outdoor sculpture parks, and, indicative of their close collaboration, they exhibited jointly three times. (10) Most surprising of these artistic joint ventures was an outdoor piece conceived in tandem for the Fourth Biennial of Medellin, Colombia, in May 1981. The fact that Andre was in Medellin at all must be credited to Mendieta's influence. She was able to open worlds for him as well as vice versa.

Judging from the official program, both were late entries. Andre's name appears last on the list of U.S. artists, and Mendieta is listed last for the Cuban delegation (though she had become a U.S. citizen in 1971). The local newspaper coverage spotlights the two as an important couple. Reporter Juan Jose Hoyos observes "the man with the beard of a prophet and the petite, sweet woman," who appear to be "two gardeners, silently watering their piece of garden every afternoon." He then identifies the incongruous pair as "really the famous North American artist Carl Andre and the Cuban sculptor Ana Mendieta." (11) According to journalistic accounts, the two were among the few Biennial artists to work outdoors, and, typical of Mendieta but unusual for Andre, they collaborated on two ephemeral earthworks. Mendieta's piece is described as a female figure, a mound formed by grass she planted and probably enhanced by adding fertilizer, though that additive is not mentioned in the newspapers. She had made similar fertilizer pieces previously in Iowa, where the nutrients outlined in the grass caused her silhouette to grow more luxuriantly. However, this work included a new element: grass that Andre pulled out of the ground in creating his own nearby work, a pathway dug in the earth. In turn, he incorporated grass cut from her figure and sowed yellow flowers that were intended to grow with the rain.

In an apparent return to the playful sexual double entendres of the priapic Lever (1966) and Joint (1968), Andre told reporters that his work depicted "an arrow entering an egg." He further explained: "All art has an agricultural origin. I'm very interested in seeing the process of transformation that my work will take as nature modifies it and as it disappears. Here, concretely I wanted to work with Colombian soil. More than a nostalgia for nature, I believe my work consists very much as a dialectical affirmation of the artist's labor over nature." Mendieta emphasized her native roots as intrinsic to her art: "if my branches are North American, my trunk is Cuban." (12) However, she also asserted a similar dialectical process, consistent in her work, in which her form would be assimilated by nature.

In this reciprocal collaboration, Mendieta and Andre remain true to their own paths but also coincide most closely. Mendieta perpetuates her Silueta series, still site-specific, using materials at hand. Andre creates a variation on his "sculpture as place," "sculpture as road" credo, but his materials are earth, grass, and flowers, much closer to Mendieta's stock-in-trade. The ineluctable qualities their works share are evident in the physical and temporal aspects of this joint outdoor piece. Minimalist sculpture asserts a relation to the viewer's body that traditional sculpture does not. Andre's work must be experienced physically by walking on a grid of shimmering, multicolored metal plates or entering the space of a field of boulders. Mendieta's dynamic earth-body works and sculptures, scaled to her body, evoke our senses and desire to touch the richly textured surfaces. The temporal act of walking along one of Andre's sculptural "roads," in this case an arrow, is meant to be a physical and metaphorical journey. Mendieta's outdoor works, such as this living Silueta, as well as her performance-based work captured on film, trace a temporal arc. The grass and flowers took shape in the course of the week they were planted, fertilized, and watered. They continued to evolve for a few weeks or months, growing, blooming, and eventually disappearing.