Scandal at the Gallery:
Ana Mendieta's 'Silueta' and 'Body Tracks'

In the seventies and early eighties, during the second wave of Feminism, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta undertook a project to subvert centuries of male-dominated artistry. Using her own nude body as the subject and medium for her art, Mendieta attempted to unravel the masculine canon that conformed the female body to its personal vision.

Mendieta's signature series, "Sileuta," unites her naked body (or its contours) with natural settings to suggest that art is not always about being seen by some "other" but rather an affirmation of the artist's ego. The creation of art is not an uncontested act in which an artist captures and transmits beauty or truth, but is rather an act in which the artist imprints his ego onto the world. This experimental series included performances and site-specific installations. One film documents Ana standing completely nude, covered in mud, up against a tree. Mud camouflages her body against the bark and the absolute stillness she assumes makes her almost indistinguishable from nature. In another part of the series Mendieta films of herself floating down a river naked. The series becomes increasingly evanescent; at times the audience sees just a trace of the being that stood there, transient images of the body, or merely a silhouette. The focus of the art is always on the presence and absence of the artist herself, and her relationship with the canvas of nature. A relationship, presumably, that is conflicted in the eyes of the audience due to her role as an artist and her gender.

In addition to making art that was distinctly feminine, "Silueta" subdued art down to a human-sized scale, an act that gently deconstructed the monumental environmental gestures of the time from artists such as Robert Smithson.

Mendieta's investigation into social taboos and transgressions appears in her series "Body Tracks," which she began in the early 70s when still a student at the University of Iowa. For "Body Tracks," Mendieta mixed red paint with (animal) blood, dipped her hands in the concoction, and with sweeping gestures painted womb-shaped paths of blood on the wall or on paper pressed to a wall. In itself, this gesture acted as an affirmation of femininity, but it also referenced and denounced the sexist male artistic establishment. Mendieta's menstrual-colored wall pieces directly mocked Yves Klein, an artist who patented his own pigment of blue, and created his fame through performance pieces during which he covered naked women in this pigment and then rolled their bodies across canvases. The infusing of paint with blood suggests the inherant ideological and political undertone of the actual materials of the artist — every artist.

Although Mendieta's contributions are recognized on an international level, unfortunately she is probably best known for her mysterious and untimely death. In 1985, the artist plummeted 36-floors from her New York City apartment to the pavement in what was ultimately ruled a suicide. Her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was implicated, tried and ultimately acquitted for her murder; however, questions still remain as to what actually transpired.