Rediscovering Ana Mendieta: the traveling Mendieta retrospective currently at the Hirshhorn Museum comes nearly 20 years after the artist's death. At the core of the show are photographs and little-seen films documenting her ritualistic, visually searing performances

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

The last New York retrospective exhibition of Ana Mendieta's work opened at the New Museum in 1987, when the controversy over the circumstances surrounding her death two years earlier was still red hot. The show was overshadowed by an air of tragedy and speculation about the role her husband, Carl Andre, may have played in her fatal fall from the window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. (After a polarizing trial, Andre was acquitted.) "Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985," organized by the Hirshhorn Museum but premiering at the Whitney Museum last summer, is free of the sensationalism that surrounded the 1987 show. And while the earlier exhibition emphasized her late sculptural work, the new retrospective, curated by Hirshhorn deputy director Olga M. Viso, is far more comprehensive. It brings together little-seen films, numerous photographs from Mendieta's extensive slide archive--some of which were printed in her lifetime and others posthumously--as well as a generous selection of her drawings and three-dimensional output. As a result, it invites a fresh assessment of Mendieta's career.

As Viso points out in her excellent catalogue introduction, criticism of Mendieta has been unusually subject to the shifts of theoretical spin. She has been seen as the ur-feminist, returning her body to mother earth; the Cuban exotic, drawing from a variety of romanticized Caribbean spiritual traditions; and the psychologically damaged exile seeking to heal her divided identity through art. She has by turns been considered an essentialist, an exemplar of postmodern hybridity, a victim of patriarchy, a postcolonialist and a pioneer of postminimal art strategies. By refusing to settle on any one of these descriptions, the current retrospective survey attempts to present this protean artist in all her complexity. In the process, it also conjures a sense of the remarkable artistic and intellectual ferment of the period in which she emerged.

One of the most striking aspects of Mendieta's work revealed by this exhibition is the unusual degree to which it maintains a dialogue with other art, both of its own time and of the present moment. One keeps making connections back and forward to works by artists both older and younger than Mendieta. In fact, it is impossible to talk about her art in isolation. Just as she absorbed the work of contemporaries and near contemporaries like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneemann and Dennis Oppenheim, Mendieta also has served (as Viso points out) as an inspiration for younger artists such as Janine Antoni, Tania Bruguera and others interested in the radical redefinitions of art explored by artists in the 1970s. Because of her position as intermediary, Mendieta is a figure whose work reopens the possibilities inherent in ideas often dismissed as retrograde, among them the identification of woman with nature, the impact of primitive art and culture on contemporary. thinking and a fascination with the sacred. At the same time, her art undermines the romanticism of such attitudes by resisting any simple identification with such totalizing categories.

Critical understanding of Mendieta's career has undergone a number of shifts over the years. This is particularly evident in the various ways her connections to feminism and body art have been construed. In the '70s, Mendieta was associated for a while with what is now sometimes referred to as feminist essentialism. Her portrayals of the female body merged with nature, her reference to goddess myths, as well as her reenactments of violent rape scenes all fit comfortably within the search for uniquely female expressions and experiences. However, even as these notions began to lose critical favor by the early 1980s, Mendieta had begun to distance herself from such associations, preferring to ground her work instead in a more universal spirituality derived from her interest in her pre-Columbian and Afro-Cuban roots.

Her work had little in common with the more iconoclastic versions of feminism which came to the fore in the 1980s, positions that tended to interpret all representations of the female body as constructions of the male gaze. With the '90s came a return to the notion of the body as thing of flesh and blood, with all the messy processes and physical residues that implies. Within this context, Mendieta's performance and installation work has reemerged as an important precursor to present day concerns.

Mendieta's relationship to the politics of identity is similarly fluid. So-called identity art flirted with essentialism in the early '90s, with the categories of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation regarded as all-important indicators of an artist's intent. In this context, Mendieta's Cubanness became the prism through which critics viewed her work. More recently, however, fixed notions of identity have given way to an interest in hybridity and multiple identities. Now Mendieta is seen as an exemplar of heterogeneity. As a Cuban-born artist, she embraced her political heritage as well as the mixed spiritual artists Acconci and Allan Kaprow, Cuban artist exiles in America and the art community of Castro's Cuba. Each of these groups found some of their own artistic concerns mirrored in her work.