Regarding Ana Mendieta, 2011

transcribed by Raegan Truax-O’Gorman
From Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21, no. 2 (July 2011): 183–190.

Richard Move: Next is a woman who I am so honored to have with us. She does not need any introduction. I love love love and worship her. She is absolutely one of the most important artists of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century and I encourage you to see her most recent work. I am so happy that we have with us Carolee Schneemann.

Carolee Schneemann: I am thrilled to be here, and I want to remind Richard that I think his film is extraordinary. It is a true and deep homage as it clarifies so many dense sources that Ana opened and then tangled again for all of us.

Facing cultural resistance was something that she and I constantly could discuss once we became friends. I am just going to share some associative connections between the remarkable coincidence and correspondences of our physical actions – because they really have to do with urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realm in which the body manifests its own energy against constrictions and prohibitions. There is usually a 5- or 10-year difference between the images which I will share of our related works.

My influences began with the psychic phenomena of a Scottish nanny; it was she who taught me to pray to the moon and to inhabit the body that belonged with sheep and trees and rivers; and of course it was secret, my family was never to know. We had a pact – I was probably four or five years old, my family must never know what she showed me at midnight looking out the window. These forms of what, for me, would have been described as pantheism, reify themselves when I see the work of Ana, and when we finally meet each other in the mid-70s – when we’ve already produced this relay of connected work. The struggle has to do with the confines of essentialist theory, which was a way of constraining and marginalizing our fuller historic implications. Both of us were committed to the saturation of material, in that the body moves and is sustained by saturation within the extensivity of our sensory energy.

We are both researching, by the mid-70s, Maria Gimbutas, so that the Paleolithic as well as the Yoruba aspect of the inhabited body, the sacral body, are active – coincidentally, and these are very interesting coincidences. So for both of us, it seems there is a phylogeny that recapitulates mythology. It is the sense that there are certain energies and momentums that will be opened and coincidentally discovered and explored: so here’s the explicit body taking the deeper roots of genital sexuality into the recognition of forms of nature, and how we would interact and inhabit those forms of nature. In my notes I say that we have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired – rage, envy, domination. The use of the body was truly live and declared narcissistic. In the use of our bodies we shared the confluence of being despised in the art world throughout our early experiments, as mine from the 60s were hugely resisted and then Ana enters the force field of feminist issues in the 70s where feminist theory and research begins to tear down the determinations of narcissism, exhibitionism, but what enters in the field at that moment is the abject and the essentialist! In order to recognize that we were facing a new construct of deflections, that if the identification of the vital energies with nature and the body can only be ‘‘essentialist or abject,’’ we are still going to be denied full aesthetic authority.

In the 1960s any deeper eroticization had been profoundly suppressed: there is no female pronoun used for women until the mid-70s – hard to remember! There was no vocabulary for female genital sexuality. And Ana and I used to ask each other, why has the history of the chastity belt – the chador; clitoridectomy; nunnery; silencing the female – endured? How very lucky we were to exist barely escaping these punishments. We said that the violence against women relates to the whole patriarchal sense of violence against the natural world, and the resistance to gendered integrations, and of course Judeo-Christian traditions had prescribed the
denial of sexuality as a source of wisdom and knowledge and the silencing of women’s experience.

I also meant to mention the influence of Maya Deren on both of us. I was very lucky when I first came to New York City in the 1960s to meet her through Stan Brakhage, to visit her place on Morton street and to recognize the very contrary configurations that young artists could go and study, as acolytes to distinguished influential artists; but since she was a woman I saw that the guys, the young guys, expected her to feed us, to give us whiskey and cigarettes – even though she didn’t have enough funds at the time to print her Haitian footage! We were very privileged to have her run the original film through her projector. We faced a very desperate configuration against the authority of women artists, and especially a sexualized vision; and then it begins to break down, it is always breaking down.

In our friendships we like to party, we like to drink. It was very important for Ana that when I came to her house, being tall, I could change her light bulbs.

With her death, it became significant that Ana did not like to even stand on a chair. She could throw herself in the water and onto branches and bury herself in dirt, but she had vertigo. In the mid-70s I’m enduring mud pieces where I’m drying myself in puddles; it’s an ordeal work, it takes forever, and then there’s the silueta of Ana at the same time. We felt a profound affinity; a deep sisterhood as well as we did with Mary Beth Edelson. There was this sisterhood and it was dynamic and helped us do the work. And what has changed is that we’re all here thinking about the power of the work, the sustainable beauty, the incredible presence, how inhabited it is, that it escapes any of the delimitating definitions that surrounded it earlier on. The dream that Ana sent me – which is so well described in Richard’s film, and described by my incredible disbelief when the guys building the shelves in my loft come in and say, ‘‘Gee, look at the newspaper,
Carl Andre’s wife is dead!’’ – the dream she sent me was to go out into the snow and make forms with my body. I ran out in a nightgown and made images just with my hands in the snow and then I realized I wanted to stabilize it, to sustain it, so I gathered blood and ashes and what else, maybe there was red paint. The local IGA grocery in the country where I live was very suspicious when I wanted pints of blood; it was for Spanish sausage, I explained! So that’s the homage and as some of you know if you’ve read Naked by the Window, Ana sent quite a few
artists dream instructions so this was not a unique manifestation. There’s another realm from our beyond that produced homage to Ana.

Thank you everybody.