Mendieta vs. Smithson: Land Art in the 1970's

While reading about Ana Mendieta, I realized that the male-dominated, “dematerialization” trend in art that started in the 1960’s is something that I am interested in further exploring and analyzing through the art of Ana Mendieta and Robert Smithson. I will focus on how Mendieta’s use of negative space and her body in land art has left her in the shadow of Smithson’s aggressive manipulation and fabrication of the earth in art history.

As Blocker mentions in her text, “Where Is Ana Mendieta?” the post 1960’s trend amongst artists was to eliminate the art object and redefine the “art experience” for a variety of different reasons.

“…artists, inflamed over the economic involvement of art institutions in the Vietnam War, distrustful of the commodification of art, or angered by the racism, sexism, and elitism of gallery and museum exhibitions, tested a variety of ways to democratize and disseminate the art experience. Conceptual art, earthworks, installations, video, body art, and performance all worked actively to redefine the spaces in which art was viewed and to integrate the audience into the process of artistic production.” (pg. 5).

In this way, the artists of this time period were critiquing the art world itself, attempting to redefine what art was traditionally known as; the commoditized object. Mendieta’s work was especially engaging to read about in this article, since her work was about the absence of her human form imprinted in the earth, something that could not be removed from it’s site specific location and sold as a commodity. Other artists were interested in this subversion of the art as “object” as well, taking the exhibition of artwork out of the traditional gallery or museum and creating art experiences elsewhere.


While I was reading about this historical account of the 1970’s anti-commodity “earth art” movement, I realized that in the past, Mendieta was only vaguely discussed as a contributing artist to this movement in my various art history classes. When I first learned about earth art, I studied Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Robert Morris’ Observatory in the Netherlands, and Andy Goldsworthy’s handmade walkways and flower sculptures. While I think all of these artists have made interesting work that should be discussed and studied, I find it somewhat offensive that Ana Mendieta was mostly left out of this dialogue, especially since she was making equally important and engaging work as her male colleagues. Although there was this movement to eliminate the sexism and racism in the art world, the traditionally white, male-dominated practice still seems to take precedent. I think this realization lends itself well to the title of Blocker’s article, “Where is Ana Mendieta?” Why do I not remember learning about Ana Mendita? Why do I remember the endless hours I spent watching the Spiral Jetty film in both art history and film classes, but do not remember looking at any film documentation or slides of Mendieta’s work?

Perhaps the answer lies in the two different ways in which the two artists were making their art. While Mendieta certainly manipulated the earth to make her work (carving out an impression of her silhouette in the ground, setting the earth ablaze, etc), the finality of the piece focused more on the negative space that her body took up within the earth, creating an interesting union between herself and the land. As Blocker states, Mendieta influenced a kind of anthropomorphism with the earth. “To anthropomorphize the earth is to endow it with sentience, desire, and identity; it is to think of earth more than merely a sculptural material.” (pg. 18). While Mendieta worked with the earth in a somewhat spiritual exchange, Smithson was using the earth solely as sculptural material. His piece Spiral Jetty is less about the union of the artist and the earth and more about the power struggle between man and nature: man builds structure by manipulating the earth and, over time, the earth changes that structure through erosion and natural decay.

Posner reflects on the exchange between the self and world in her text, “The Self and The World: Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca Woodman.”

“As the projected site of heterosexual male desire, women Surrealists had to struggle to liberate themselves from the passive object position and assume the role of active subject. To reclaim their own image, unlike their male counterparts, these artists explored their inner life and external reality through frequent recourse to the self-portrait or self-representation.” (pg. 159).

This exploration of the self in female artists’ work perhaps seemed less intellectual and more emotional in the eyes of critics. While perhaps Smithson represented the “powerful-yet-humble” artist working with the earth, Mendieta potentially represented the female artist exploring the earth and her connection to it, a notion that could be seen as flighty or unstable.

Both artists were working in a time when the larger community of artists were working against the traditional modes of art-making and both were certainly influential in their contribution to the anti-commodity movement. While I do appreciate Smithson’s work, I am somewhat resentful of the fact that women like Mendieta can still be overlooked in the art history classroom as important contributors to this specific art movement of the 1970’s.

*Mendieta photo taken from http://reconstruction.eserver.org
*Smithson photo taken from http://www2.warwick.ac.uk

Response to Berger: Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s The Yuppie Project

After reading this short article about Nikki S Lee’s work The Yuppie Project, I thought about the similarities between Lee and William Pope.L, an artist we talked about in class several weeks ago. In Pope.L’s piece, The Great White Way and in Lee’s work, The Yuppie Project, the two artists execute their work in different but equally interesting ways by challenging their audiences to recognize whiteness.

In Pope.L’s piece The Great White Way, the black artist crawls across Broadway in Manhattan over the course of several years. Nick Stillman notes in his text, “Artseen: The Great White Way, Fulton Street to Reade Street, Manhattan,” that when Pope.L crawled through the Financial District, he was, “a man battling not just nature, but outcast status among his own species as he crawls pathetically along the dirty, heavily populated street.” Many reactions to his work include laughing and indifference. To a more receptive viewer, however, a black man crawling through the historically symbolic epitome of white privilege brings up questions of racial identity, status, and the exclusion from whiteness.

Nikki S. Lee’s piece, The Yuppie Project, also brings up issues of race and exclusion and one of her locations of choice is Wall Street as well. As Berger mentions in his text, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project,” Lee is bringing to light the complexities and “fluidity of human identity.” While she seems to “fit in” with other groups of people, Berger notes that she never quite fits into the yuppie world. “Though she masquerades in the fashions, make-up, and body language of white yuppies, her Asianness and her visceral discomfort read as distinctly as their whiteness.” (pg. 56). Lee is drawing attention to the distinct difference between blending in with other racial minority groups as a minority herself and trying to blend in with “white privilege.” By locating herself within these different racial groups and by drawing attention to the difference of fitting in with the white power culture, Lee challenges her audience to recognize this whiteness as part of a larger dialogue about racism.

I think both of these artists make important and interesting work that comments on whiteness and exclusion in America. When artists like William Pope.L and Nikki S. Lee comment on such race relations in complex and engaging ways, it complicates the definitive identity, both racially and socially, of the viewer as well as the artist.

*Lee photograph is The Yuppie Project (17.) Taken from www.albrightknox.org
*William Pope.L photograph is The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 5 years, 1 street. Taken from www.tenbyten.net

Connecting Different Worlds: Response to Althea Thauberger

Duke brought up several interesting points in her text, “Althea Thauberger: Experimentalism is Dead. Long Live The Internet.” What resonated with me the most about Duke’s analysis of Thauberger’s work is best articulated at the end of the article:

In all the works I’ve described here, the viewer gains access through identification with Thauberger’s characters or subjects. But these girls and women are not fearsomely glamorous or talented. They do not intimidate. They are ordinary…if we can be moved, we must acknowledge that we, too, have the power to move. (Duke 4).

Duke investigates this idea of Thauberger using unconventional ways of making art by discussing her use of narrative and by using unconventional, or “untrained” women in her work. By using these “ordinary” women, the audience can better connect or empathize with the narratives that are being told, and, potentially, identify with these performers in some way.
I am very interested in the idea having an “untrained” or “ordinary” subject in my work. I want to use this blog as an opportunity to connect my own projects and ideas for future projects with Thauberger’s work that joins different or detached worlds (such as the art community and military families that had common ground in Thauberger’s piece Murphy Canyon Choir).
I recently performed at the Milwaukee Art Museum in an attempt to “build a resume” to send to the New York based choreographer (see above photo). Tere O’Connor. My character performed at the museum to prove that she is a dancer who is worthy enough to even perform at a prestigious art institution like the MAM. Although an illusion of glamour and talent was indicated, it was far from a glamorous or talented dance performance. In fact, it was quite the opposite: my untrained “dancer” body and ordinary self dressed up in sequins and dancing at the MAM is not intimidating. While I didn’t quite connect two different worlds in the same way Thauberger made connections, I did connect myself to a world that I am not necessarily a part of.
The performance at the MAM has inspired me to make more performance pieces where my “untrained” self performs at various, inappropriate venues. Part of the Tere O’Connor piece was focused on the disillusionment of the character thinking she can dance in his dance company and become as “famous” as he is. I want to further investigate this kind of disillusionment. I want to start interacting with other artist’s artwork in museums and galleries. By documenting, or “legitimizing” my performances at the various art venues, I will continue to fulfill this disillusionment of becoming famous by “getting my foot in the door,” connecting myself to a world that I am not a part of.

Facebook: Identity Performance. A response to Merchant and Volkart

The world of online social networking provides an interesting and complicated arena to view performances. I want to examine this idea of the multiple and semi-fictive portrayed self on Facebook, a popular social networking website, and how this widespread, familiar, and accepted practice of self-expression is both a private and public performance.

In Guy Merchant’s text, “Identity, Social Networks and Online Communication,” he raises interesting ideas and questions about social identities that are performed and exhibited online. Merchant acknowledges that through the study of adult e-communication, “much online interaction is interwoven with identity performance.” (Merchant 235). Merchant goes on to state that because there is an absence of physical presence when communicating with others online, we work much harder to produce our identity in this “communicative medium.”

Yvonne Volkart also suggests that we work in such ways to produce an identity. Volkart takes this notion further by noting that these identities are often semi-fictive and can be “multiple.” She goes on to describe various new media artists and their works that comment on these fictitious, multiple, technologically-dwelling personas that live in cyber-space.

While reading these two texts, I also kept thinking about Marvin Carlson’s text, “What is Performance.” He suggests that, “all human activity could potentially be considered as “performance,” or at least all activity carried out with a consciousness of itself.” (Carlson 70). Carlson goes on to explain that in the awareness, or consciousness, of carrying out certain actions, a quality of performance is given to the action. The functions available on Facebook can be interpreted as extremely performative acts. When one publishes their “status” on Facebook, one is consciously aware of publishing their emotional existence on the site for others to see and potentially identify with. Sometimes these statuses seem over exaggerated, thus raising the question as to whether or not the person posting the status is trying to communicate or trying to perform. The question is raised: Is this status true or is this status partially fiction?

With the function of making several photo albums of various life events, e.g. weddings, parties, family gatherings, etc., one portrays themselves as having several identities. For example, one of my friends has various photo albums in her Facebook profile that define her as having various identities: She is a bride/wife in a wedding photo, a classmate among her friends in a photo taken at her graduate school, and a photographer who exhibits her images in one album titled “ ‘999.”

The public and private performances displayed on Facebook are fluid among themselves. Friends can post on each other’s “walls,” making the communication between two people very public. This act is extremely performative, in that when one communicates on a friend’s wall, one is inherently making a spectacle of the communication for many to witness. The private performances come from the actual user. By posting various photos, general interests and favorite quotes, one does perform, to an extent, by carefully choosing what to say and how to portray themselves to others.

I am interested in the performativity surrounding these social networking sites. When I was thinking about what kind of photo I wanted to post in this blog, I remembered that I have two dramatically different photos in my Myspace album (Myspace is another prime example of a performative-social networking site). The black and white photograph was taken by a friend of mine many years ago, and I always thought I looked mysterious in it, what with its film noir feeling. In the Polaroid picture, I am still posing for the camera, but my expression is more humorous, which is more conducive to my real personality. Posting these two very different photos were extremely performative acts and I was, in hindsight, trying to project my various identities to others by having these and other photos available for the public to view. The performativity of oneself in social networking sites is a topic I wish to develop and comment on through my next photography project. I have been “studying” the various facial expressions people have in their photos posted on Facebook and Myspace, especially young women, and create my own version of these facial expressions. The experiment is sure to be a performative one.

Adrian Piper and Jen Davis

In chapter 5 of Jayne Wark’s book Radical Gestures, titled ‘Roles and Transformations,’ Wark describes Adrian Piper’s work as both subjective and objective, as defined by Piper herself. Piper indicates that her work is objective by “inhering in the reflective consciousness of an external audience or subject… and my own consciousness of me as an object, as the object of my self-consciousness.” (Wark 142). After attending Jen Davis’ presentation at the Milwaukee Art Museum and seeing her photographs for the first time, I was amazed at the similarities I found between Piper and Davis’ work, albeit the two artists approach what they represent in very different ways. I will examine the similarities between Piper and Davis and how the artists represent their work on both subjective and objective platforms.

In Piper’s first Catalysis performance she walked around a “hang-out” space for artists in New York wearing a blindfold, earplugs, nose plug and gloves. Wark notes that, “her self-objectification also turned her into a spectacle; yet, paradoxically, this enabled her to function as a subjective agency capable of affecting change in others.” (Wark 140). Davis, an overweight woman, addresses the normative ideal of beauty by turning the camera on herself and photographing her “non-normative” body, creating in herself both the spectacle and the agency capable of affecting change in others, by forcing the viewer to reflect on what the normative ideal of beauty actually means.

Wark notes that the merging of personal and social politics is central to Piper’s work, particularly to The Mythic Being, a piece about the antagonistic “other” who represents the “hostility and alienation… that represented the alien in all of us.” (Wark 144). Piper reflects on her work and the relationship between herself and the viewer, stating that, “My purpose is to transform the viewer psychologically, by presenting him or her with an unavoidable concrete reality that cuts through the defensive rationalizations by which we insulate ourselves against the facts of our political responsibility.” (Wark 144).

Davis is representing the “other” in her work as well. Her alienation as an overweight woman is portrayed in her single-subject self-portraits, forcing the viewer to look at her body and to break down their own preconceptions that the viewer might have about her weight. Davis makes her work socially political by challenging the viewer to deconstruct assumptions they make about normative beauty.

Piper and Davis both execute their work in very different ways. Piper, a conceptual performance artist, executes her work in sometimes aggressive, physically direct ways. Davis, a photographer, presents her work in a more physically indirect way by presenting her body through the still image. Although they both have different ways of presenting their work, the impact of their objective/subjective message is powerful.

*Adrian Piper photograph, Catalysis IV, taken from “The Postmodern Body” website on departments.risd.edu
*Jen Davis photograph, Untitled, taken from “Yale MFA Photographers” on flickr.com

Response to Judith Butler: Cindy Sherman and Gender Roles

Cindy Sherman has once again proven to me that she is, indeed, an amazingly complex artist. While I was reading Butler’s ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,’ I thought about Cindy Sherman’s photographs and how she represents gender and the femininity. Butler states that gender is not pre-determined by sex, but is created by a reproduction of pre-existing, historical, repetitive acts. Butler also states that, “one ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation.” (Butler 158). This can be deconstructed to mean that by radically transforming the social situation of women is to re-legitimize the idea that women are socially oppressed or different in the first place. I propose that Cindy Sherman’s photographs defy this re-legitimization of the woman being oppressed by portraying the woman in these historically defined gender roles, while also criticizing these gender roles. Sherman is calling attention to the fact that these roles do exist and, by “recreating” film stills (please note that I am not stating that Sherman recreates any one film in particular), she is addressing the fact that gender roles are a product of history.

In Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #35 (as shown above), one can assume that the woman in the photograph is fulfilling a typical female gender role by wearing an apron over her dress, signifying that she is cooking. Yet this woman in the photograph has a menacing stare, directed at someone or something not seen in the frame. Her hand on her hip could signify a triumphant defeat, or it could be seen as an angry gesture towards that undefined subject outside of the frame. What is most disturbing about this photograph is the dirt, or blood, smeared across the bottom, right-hand side of the door. A black coat is draped over the adjacent wall of the door, perhaps covering up something that this woman wants to hide.

When I was first looking through Sherman’s photographs to use as an example for this blog post, I was drawn to this photograph because she was wearing an apron and I immediately assumed she would be portraying a gender-specific role. My emotional reaction to this photograph stems from the blood streaked door and the menacing stare, not from the fact that she is wearing an apron. This performance by Sherman is put on me, forcing me to evaluate my assumptions of gender roles. Sherman could have been wearing an apron, smiling and offering a plate of cookies, but instead, this woman appears threatening, thus complicating my reaction to her. Sherman forces me, the viewer, to question my reaction to this woman in the apron, not fulfilling her historical “duties” as the woman in the kitchen. Thus, Sherman defies the re-legitimization of the oppressed woman by both representing the historically conditioned woman and by giving this woman non-traditional authority, both within the frame and over the viewer.

*Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #35 taken from MoMA.org