Re-enactments and the Politics of Remembrance

A Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 Years after Her Death

Abstract

Forty years ago, on September 8th, 1985, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta died after falling from the window of the 34th-floor Manhattan apartment she shared with her husband, the Minimalist artist Carl Andre. Andre was accused of murder but later acquitted in a highly publicized trial that split the art world. Born in Havana in 1948 and exiled to the United States at the age of twelve, Mendieta became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. At the same time, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba and asserting her identity as Other. For all these reasons, recent major exhibitions and scholarly debates on feminism and decoloniality have returned to Mendieta’s work with renewed attention. I take the fortieth anniversary of Mendieta’s death as an occasion to investigate the intersection of performance and remembrance. One way of considering this is by examining how various artists engage in reenactments of Mendieta’s work as acts of cultural memory and collective remembrance. My goal is to understand how these reenactments open up possibilities for affective, embodied modes of celebration.