“ Neither here nor there ” 1 : traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta

This article addresses the questions triggered by the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who has a large part of her work composed exclusively of camera performances and what she termed earth-body-works. Through her strategies of representation based on the disappearance of the female body, Mendieta draws our attention to the legitimized violence and erasures through the establishment of fixed identities – ethnic and gender – within the hegemonic discourses of power. The notions of performance as an instrument for transmission of knowledge and cultural memory, of performativity as a constitutive factor of the categories of identity, as well as of archive, repertory and live event will be explored in the effort to problematize as the themes of exile and feminine, regular in the art of Mendieta, reach a deeply political dimension based on their artistic propositions that integrate photography with performance art.


Introduction
The decade of the 1970 was permeated by an intense experimental aesthetic, besides a strong political engagement in the field of artistic creations.Demands for various rights and individual freedoms were often expressed through a multiplicity of creative interventions on the landscape or the human body.Manifestations such as performance, bodyart and landart have gained space as possibilities for an ephemeral and extremely diversified art, which privileges the concept and the creative gesture to the detriment of the object.These languages -heirs of the transgressor character present in the European vanguards on the beginning of the 20 th century -have developed all over the world, and have been especially prominent in the North American artistic-political context.It is in this scenario that the trajectory of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta is inscribed.Born in Havana in 1948, she moved to the United States in 1961, along with her older sister, due to political differences between her family and Fidel Castro's regime.It was at the University of Iowa that Mendieta studied plastic arts and had contact -through the Intermedia Program2 -with the enormous artistic effervescence of the 1970s.The expressions of body art and environmental art strongly inspired her work and became a hallmark of her creations.Another evident influence on the artistic life of Mendieta was the proximity that she came to have with the feminist movement.Many artists at that time actively participated in the struggles for women's rights and used their own bodies as an artistic material and questioner of the social roles attributed to the gender and the objectification imposed on the female bodies.Mendieta had her involvement with feminist claims and used her work as a way to open the countless oppressions and eras suffered by women inside and outside the art world.
The aspects of femininity, together with issues of nationality, exile, and ancestral rites of Latin American cultures are recurrent approaches in Mendieta's extensive work.The body in her work is almost always represented in the midst of the elements of nature, such as earth, fire, water, plants and animal blood.She herself termed her creations as earth-body works or earth-body sculptures3 , and stated: my art is the way I reestablish the bonds that bind me to the universe.It is a return to the maternal source.Through my earth / body sculptures I become one with the earth...I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.This obsessive act of reasserting my ties to the earth is really the reactivation of primitive beliefs ... an omnipresent feminine force, the post-image of being wrapped within the womb 4 .
Such a connection with nature, described by Mendieta, however, does not seem to refer to an essentialist relationship with the feminine or with the ancient rituals of her culture of origin.We will see that, on the contrary, the disappearance and dissolution of the body in the middle of the landscape can be read as a metaphor for a refusal to attach herself to any category of identity -whether national, ethnic or gender.Another important factor in her aesthetic choices was the massive use of photography, often as the only means of public access to her works, thus problematizing the notion that alludes to an essence of the performing arts as primarily live events.
Mendieta died tragically in 1985, the same year that she married the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.The artist fell from her apartment, located on the thirty-fourth floor of a building in New York.Andre was charged with the murder, but was later acquitted, and the defense alleged that Anne had committed suicide.In June 1992, a feminist group staged a protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, where an exhibition which included works by four white male artists -among them Carl Andre -and only a female artist.Demonstrators threw photographs of Mendieta on Andre's sculptures and displayed a banner that read "Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim.Where is Ana Mendieta?"(Blocker, 1999, p. 1).According to Jane Blocker, when asking where Mendieta is, the protesting women really wanted to point out where she was not.The question performatively produces its absence and thus questions the power structures that confer visibility or invisibility based on the discursive construction of color, race, gender, religiosity.On the power speeches surrounding Mendieta's work, Blocker states: although it often appears in expositions and texts that attempt to map the unknown territories of performativity, femininity, and latinity, it is so often absent from them for good and evil.Mapping the margins can only serve to reinforce the centers and, ultimately, the power of those who occupy them.(Bloker, 1999, p. 21) In this way, we will investigate the discursive productions that permeate the artistic work of Ana Mendieta and often establish a mapping of her works -as well as her personal trajectory -within a Latin artist identity, deeply intertwined with the pain of her exile and to the idea of an exotic femininity.Moreover, we will see how the artist's own works offer us possibilities of reading that subvert her fixation on such identities through the play of presence and absence, including the use of the photographic device as a mean to guarantee the permanence of creative actions understood as essentially ephemeral .

Routes, latinity and exile
Diane Taylor (2013) provides us with means to understand performance as an epistemic system, a way of transferring knowledge, memory and social identity through embodied practices such as dances, rituals and traditional ways of doings.
She points out that Western thought has placed great emphasis on documents and texts as a way of describing social dramas, granting certain groups the privilege of recording their narratives to the detriment of actions performed by other actors.Taylor questions this system of knowledge and argues: "Neither here nor there": traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta .Olga da Costa Lima Wanderley if, however, we reorient the ways in which we have traditionally studied memory and cultural identity in the Americas (...) to look through the lenses of performatized, embodied behaviors, what would we then know that we do not know now?Whose stories, memories, and struggles would become visible?What tensions could be shown by performance behaviors that would not be recognized in texts and documents?(Taylor, 2013, p. 20) The cultural histories and traditions made visible are legitimized through scripts that the author describes from the voyage of Columbus to the Americas.The discovery scripts produce the relationship between a "we" -the discoverer, the seeker -and an "other" -the savage, the one who is looked at -establishing their positions within a system of power.The native has his work emptied of being mapped by the discoverer -like the Amerindians in Taylor's example, who "although physically present they are recognized only to 'disappear' in this act" (Taylor, 2013, p. 100).Such structure is reenacted from time to time, conferring authority through race, nationality, gender, religious beliefs.As Taylor described, "as a paradigmatic system of visibility, the script also ensures invisibility" (Taylor, 2013, p. 92).
The concepts explored above relate to the work of Ana Mendieta insofar as she uses her own body as a mean to access and transmit the cultural memory of her Cuban origin.The use of land in her works is inevitably linked to reflections on nation, belonging and exile.The artist's move to the United States, when she was only 12 years old, is a fundamental part of her history and has continuous references in her creations, through the incorporation of the religious and cultural practices of her ancestors.
The Siluetas series, comprised of more than 100 earth-body works produced between 1973 and 1981 in Iowa and Mexico (and known to the public through their photographs), exhibits a constant dialogue of the female body -that of the artist herself -with the nature.Mendieta acts on the landscape using fire, water, earth, blood and vegetation to print its contours, letting these elements also act on her work.The long sequence of works exposes strong ritualistic traits influenced by her knowledge on Santeria (set of Afro-Cuban religious practices) and the ancestral practices of pre-Columbian indigenous populations.
If, on the one hand, we can not separate Mendieta's work from the influential presence of Latinity and its exile, on the other hand, to fix it on a Latin artist identity becomes extremely restrictive.By locating the artist within a hegemonic script about Cuban exiles in the United States, there is a risk of reducing their work to a purely personal and therapeutic bias -a way to overcome the pains of their traumatic expatriation and rediscover the lost roots of their culture.As examples of this banalization, Jane Blocker highlights the criticisms made by Christine Poggi and John Perreault: her feelings of loss and uprooting were the sources of her series Silhouettes in progress.[Mendieta] uses her work as a mean to establish a "sense of being", of healing the "wound" of separation.(...) Perceiving herself as an exile, Mendieta used her art to heal herself thus by provoking and perhaps healing others.(Perreault & Poggi 1988quoted in Blocker 1999, p. 77) The artist herself was constantly referring to herself in terms of her exile, as she stated in an interview: "I make sculptures in the landscape.Because I have no country, I feel a need to join the land, to return to her womb" (Mendieta quoted in Blocker, 1999, p. 77).However, in addition to a mystical and curative sense, her works reach deep political meanings, for in performatizing her liminarity -national, ethnic, and cultural -Mendieta brings to the visibility, at the same time she questions, the rigidity of a molded identity to the Latin-Americans.Seeking its roots in the land -not in the country -it claims, in Blocker's words, "an identity anywhere" (Blocker, 1999, p. 78).
In the earth work titled Isla (1981), Mendieta carved the shape of a female body on the bank of a stream in Iowa.With its well defined contours and surrounded by water, the image created by the artist, as well as the title given to it, suggests a territorial unit that refers us to the island of Cuba.This figure, however, is between two places, or "between two cultures," as Ana herself declared about herself (Mendieta quoted in Brett, 2004, p. 24).She is strange to that landscape.However, due to its ephemeral character, it will soon dissolve and integrate with the other elements of the environment."It's a map of Cuba made in the Iowa mud and as a result it's neither here nor there; is a body in exile" (Blocker, 1999, p. 80).To Jane Bloker, the meanings of nation and exile worked by Mendieta are produced through their narratives and performances.The idea of nation is not tied to a geographical space, but to the emotional connection and the feeling of communion among its members.In this way, nation and exile can not be thought of in binary and oppositional terms.This opposition is, according to Blocker, "which hegemonically preserves a conceived purity of the nation by defining it against a category perceived as being more complex and unstable" (Blocker, 1999, p. 75).Mendieta's works, therefore, subvert the oppositions drawn by the discovery scripts (us and the other, nation and exile, here and "Neither here nor there": traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta .Olga da Costa Lima Wanderley there, political and personal) through the incorporation of repeated practices.They shift from invisibility to visibility -from the edges to the center of their artistic performance -memories, rites and social behaviors historically marginalized.

Mendieta and the female subject
"At a time when women use their own body in art, they are actually using their own being, the most relevant psychological factor, for they thus convert their face and body from object to subject" (Lippard 1985, p. 190).This statement, made by Lucy Lippard, concerns one of the most important aspects of Ana Mendieta's work: the use of the body as a material and political agent in her art.
Her creative work began to flourish in the 1970s, amidst the strong influences of conceptual art established in the previous decade5 and the prominent discussions of the feminist movement with which the artist had a strong involvement.The feminist art of that time was intensely engaged in the struggle for women's liberation and in the claims for the presence of women in artistic institutions -spaces previously dominated by white male artists.The issues of representation and identity that permeated such claims caused divergences within the movement itself, as regards the debates surrounding an essentiality proper to the category of women.
Judith Butler points to the limitations of an identity politics that positions women as the subject of feminism.For the author, the term women becomes problematic in assuming a universal and stable category, in the name of which representation is sought.It can only claim recognition within a system of power that which is produced as a subject, according to the norms of this same system.In this sense, to be recognized is also to be defined within a regulatory and oppressive structure.Thus, in Butler's words: it is not enough to ask how women can be represented more fully in language and politics.Feminist criticism must also understand how the category of women, the subject of feminism, is produced and repressed by the same power structures through which emancipation is sought.(Butler, 2003, p. 19) The American theorist argues that the distinctions between sex and gender -as well as the social functions attributed to their categories -are deeply marked by discursive practices.For her, the discourses around the naturalness of sex work as a way to safeguard their internal stability in the service of socio-political interests.Sex is, above all, a norm, a regulatory dynamic that materializes in a taxing way, that is, a practice "whose regulatory force manifests as a kind of productive power, the power to produce -demarcate, circumscribe, the bodies it controls" (Butler, 2002, p. 18).Likewise, the interpretation of gender as a social construct can produce a naturalizing effect that limits its possibilities within a dual logic or, in the words of the author, "in terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse, based on binary structures that present themselves as the language of universal rationality " (Butler, 2003, p. 28).
Moreover, Butler argues that gender distinctions are irrevocably tied to other categories of identity -racial, class, ethnic -equally constructed through discourse.According to the author, it is "impossible to separate the notion of gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained" (Butler, 2003, p. 20).In the same sense, Diane Taylor emphasizes the impossibility of isolating cultural memory, race and gender, since identity issues act on the way in which bodies participate in and are produced by the system of transmission of knowledge and memory (Taylor, 1999).These questions are extremely relevant when analyzing the female and Latin body in Mendieta's artistic production.
The body, however, is not limited entirely to the normative logic that overlaps with it.There is always a power of deconstruction of the compulsory order, which Butler problematizes by articulating the notion of gender performativity.To the extent that we understand the gender categories in their performativity, that is, as the reiteration of a set of norms that acquires the condition of act in the present and effects on the materialization of sex (Butler, 2002), we consider that sexual differences, symbolic -and even materialconstruction of bodies can be reconfigured, thus subverting established positions of sex and gender.This subversion concerns not only the crossing of boundaries determined by the binary man-woman distinction, but also the breaking of the standards imposed within the same category of sex / gender.
The performative inscription of the female bodies in the art was countless times classified as narcissistic."Because women are considered sex objects", Lippard describes, "it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her naked body in public is doing so only because she thinks she is beautiful" (Lippard, quoted in Blocker 1999, p. 12).Mendieta's performances were defined by critics as the symbol of a docile feminine essence, linked to the untouched nature, sometimes as "an erotic being (the myth of the latino caliente), aggressive and somehow linked to perversion" (Mendieta quoted in Brett, 2004, p. 24).
However, the artist's work challenges the essentialist definitions of women, since their strategies of representation produce significations for the female body from the disappearance.According to Jane Blocker, Mendieta knew that simply adding the marginalized to discourses of power would do nothing to change such discourses and that, in fact, doing so often works to reinforce them.The effort to become visible can legitimize the colonizing terms of visibility.(Blocker, 1999).In the same direction Laura Mulvey, quoted in María Ruido, states that: in a world ordered by sexual inequality, the pleasure of looking is divided between masculine/active and feminine/passive.The determining male gaze projects his fantasies on the female figure, which is organized according to that.In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are seen and exhibited at the same time.(Mulvey, 1975quoted in Ruido, 2002, p. 22) Figure 2: Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), Ana Mendieta, 1972 Source: Galerie Lelong Thus, the body in the art of Mendieta follows the opposite direction to the mere exhibition of an identity.It is a body that flows, bleeds, burns, explodes, has its forms disfigured, its femininity denatured.It is an absent gift that, through the performance apparition, denounces the invisibility, violence and control to which women are subjected.In 1972's Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints) series, the artist presses a glass plate over parts of her body and face, distorting them almost completely (Figure 2).The acquired grotesque features call attention to the cruelty of the normative and stereotyped construction of an ideal of feminine beauty.The use of the body in this work is not done in a random way, because, in manipulating her own flesh, Mendieta becomes a subject of representation and bets on deformation as a radical strategy to combat fetishism and domination of male visual pleasure (Ruido, 2002).
In the 1972 Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant) performance, as a completion of her studies at the University of Iowa Art School, Mendieta asked a friend to cut his beard as she "transplanted" his hair into her face, becoming conceptually a man.Through this artistic action she problematized the discursive mechanisms that permeate the construction of sexual and gender identities and parodyed the social roles attributed on the basis of these distinctions.In the account of her action she wrote: hair has always fascinated me.The way it grows, where it grows and the meaning that ancient civilizations gave it.(...) I like the idea of transferring from one person to another because I believe that it gives me the strength of that person.After looking at me in the mirror, the beard became real.It did not look like a disguise.It became a part of myself and was by no means foreign to my appearance.(Mendieta, 1972quoted in Ruido, 2002, p. 92) José Miguel Cortéz states that "when a man or a woman crosses (...) there are multiple possibilities for reconfiguration of the cultural imaginary; the meaning of any masculine or feminine identity is questioned" (Cortéz, 2004, p. 72).By using the hair on her own face, as a symbol of strength tied to masculinity, Mendieta plays with the binary game of sex-gender structures and creates for herself a mobile, subverting and walking through these identities.Mendieta affirms her political performance through aesthetic creation by rejecting the female subject as a fixed category that must be represented in the discourses of power.Instead, the "feminine" in her works appears as a trail, a constant mutation and expansion of the limits imposed by gender.Her work conforms to Butler's critique of identity politics as the founding structure of feminism.By insisting on the disappearance and deconstruction of the body as a representation strategy, Mendieta imposes her liminality and refuses the colonizing patterns of definitions of identity.

Photoperformance, present and absent
It has already been mentioned that Mendieta's works -as well as her trajectorywere often classified in terms of displacement, absence and loss.These characteristics, and their paradoxical aspects of affirmation and permanence, were highlighted not only in the themes explored by the artist, but also in the creative media with which she developed her works.
The ephemerality of the live performance, with its ontological condition of disappearance, is challenged from the documentation made with the photographic camera.Mendieta left several photographs (and also videos) of her performances.She performed her work in the here and now of the present, however, aiming at the record for a future time.This factor can be articulated to the concepts of archive and repertoire, developed by Diane Taylor.
For the author, the archive refers to "supposedly enduring materials", such as documents, texts, audio records, photographs and videos, which transcend temporal and spatial barriers.Already the repertoire "is seen as ephemeral, embodied practices and knowledge" (Taylor, 1999, p. 48), as performances, rituals, language, gestures.Because it is ephemeral and changeable, the repertoire requires physical presence and is often regarded as non-reproducible.According to Taylor's statement: the "live" performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive.A video of a performance is not a performance, although it often ends up replacing performance as something in itself (...).Embedded memory is live and exceeds the file's ability to capture it.However, this does not mean that performance -as ritualized, formalized, or reiterative behavior -disappears.(Taylor, 1999, p. 51) Peggy Phelan takes a very radical stance by putting disappearance as the very condition of the existence of performance -her argument refers especially to artistic performances.Phelan's text establishes ontological characteristics according to which performance survives only in the present, "can not be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations" (Phelan, 1993, p. 146).Contrary to the ontologies of performance that characterize the live and the mediatized -repertoire and archive -as oppositional forms, Philip Auslander problematizes the theoretical-practical shifts of live performance within the culture of mediatization.He points to paradigmatic changes (the increasing insertion of screens, photographic and video devices into live events or the very presentation of technologically mediated events as live), reformulating assumptions as physical presence and proposing, for this logic, a sense of liveliness (Liveness).
As a backdrop to his argument, Auslander brings the relationship between theater and the emergence of television.The first TV broadcasts embraced the theatrical makeup and were made live only.Although the media no longer has this characteristic, vivacity is still part of television language, with its alleged properties of immediacy, proximity and truthfulness.However, within the mediatization environment, there is a subversion of the roles and the mediatization is that it serves as a model for the live performances."Within our mediated culture," the author comments, "any distinction we may assume between live and mediated events is collapsing because live events are becoming more and more identical to the mediatized ones" (Auslander, 2008, p.32).The live, therefore, becomes part -both technically and aesthetically -of the economy of reproduction.
Mendieta developed most of her performances without the presence of the public, with the sole intention of documenting them.The experience that most people have of their works is thanks to mediation by photography.The document space, then, becomes the only space in which performance takes place (Auslander, 2006).The photographic device imparts vivacity to the artistic action and actualizes in the present the meanings produced by the absence of the performance body.
"Neither here nor there": traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta .Olga da Costa Lima Wanderley The permanence and reproducibility of performance photography also has a political character, since the archive is inevitably linked to the establishment of power discourses.Diane Taylor asks: "Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performative practices lack the staying power to impart vital knowledge?"(Taylor, 1999, p. 30).
In making the transition from representation to reproduction, from the repertoire to the archive, Mendieta not only endows her works with an economic power of circulation 6 , but, above all, gives them a greater political impact.Thus, the presence of photography does not invalidate the existence of performance, but goes beyond its ontological vision, conferring political power by ensuring its permanence over time, expanding its audience -through galleries, museums, books, catalogs and other spaces -and making possible new meanings from the expressive language of the photographic medium.

Conclusion
As we have discussed, the work of the artist Ana Mendieta not only escapes the fixed structures of gender, ethnicity and artistic language, but completely breaks with any attempt to categorize these senses.In her brief period of creative expression, Ana has developed about 200 works involving live performances, as well as photographs and videos of her earth-body works.
Their themes have been traced to the search for a return to the land and practices of ancestral cultures (motivated by their exile), the denunciation of violence against women and the questioning of the social differentiation attributed to male and female genders.In much of these works, Mendieta resorted to the disappearance and disfiguration of the body as a form of representation in performances that transform the artist's personal facts into art with deep political meanings.
Through bodily action in the midst of nature, Mendieta was able to make visible a serie of stories, memories and behaviors systematically silenced by the structures of power.The use of photography as a record and only place of survival of the performance enhances the strength of her performance and the resistance to classify herself in the binary oppositions of nation/exile, male/female, ephemeral/perpetual.
In the light of the above, we may consider that repeating the question posed by the protesters in front of the Guggenheim Museum -"Where is Ana Mendieta?"-means recognize that this important artist has not been left anywhere.Mendieta was a multiple artist and affirmed her presence in the art world and in other relations of power questioning and expanding the limits imposed by rigidity in the establishment of categories of identity.

Translated by Gabriel Wanderley
6 Performance photographs become marketable objects in the art market.