Beginning with a basic definition of what an identity is, this research provides a connection between Santeria, as religion and Afro-Cuban folklore, and identity for a better understanding of the works of Cuban migrant artists. Following a general conclusion that identity is not stable, the question that becomes essential is, what happens during migration? By explaining what Santeria is and how it became an important religion in Latin America, the resea~ch concludes that it is more than a religion or folklore. Santeria is a way of life, a way or representing and preserving the Afro-Cuban heritage and cultural identity. In an effort to maintain their roots, the African slaves in Cuba used the religion as a source of preservation that aided their sense of belonging and survival needs. Today, the religion has b~come an inspirational source for artists such as Wilfredo Lam, Ana Mendieta, Raquelin Mendieta, and Juan Boza. These migrating artists used Santeria as a form of portraying cultural and ethnic identities. Furthermore, using these artists as example, the research concludes that a migrant artist may create their personal visual language as he or she defines his or her identity.

Tesis para optar al Grado de Magíster en Artes con mención en Teoría e Historia del Arte

Artist Ana Mendieta frequently conjoined the female body with nature to express her search for personal identity and support for feminist topics. Her last intended and least scholarly examined work, La Maja de Yerba (Grass Goddess), continues specific visual and thematic elements of her previous Silueta Series (Silhouette) yet also presents an aesthetically unique creation. Despite its incompletion as a result of her premature death, the preserved maquette directly stipulates a female form to be planted in grass on the Bard College campus grounds. This alignment of women and nature garners criticism for its reliance on universalism and categorizations of women’s experiences; however, Mendieta’s use of essentialism in public art contributes to circulating feminist discourse to a wider audience. This paper considers the artistic influences, thematic concepts, and employment of strategic essentialism in Mendieta’s La Maja de Yerba.

Orientador : Leandro Karnal / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-03T19:48:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernandes_LuizEstevamdeOliveira_M.pdf: 525046 bytes, checksum: f27c798b1fc25226cd30361f2d721be3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Mestrado

Many scholars have considered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to be a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. In her 2019 monograph on the artist, for example, Genevieve Hyacinthe writes: “brownness made Mendieta a powerful translator of Black Atlantic forms into contemporary art language because she was not, and could never be, part of the dominant white culture.” Mendieta also announced herself as a translator (and inheritor) of Siboney and Taino cultures. Her gallery notes that to celebrate her return to Cuba’s “maternal breast” as an adult, the artist titled the rock carvings she made there with “names of zemis, or Taíno spirits, such as Bacayu for ‘Light of Day.’” I argue that alongside her claims on Taino cultural heritage we might consider her actual ancestry and claims on Indigenous women in the art of Cuban settlers before her. My dissertation considers Mendieta as a translator not of Taino myths or Black cultural practices but of ethnological texts and nationalistic folklore which catalogued and caricatured Black and Indigenous cultures. “Bacayu,” for example, is not a Taino “zemi” but rather a word she culled from a glossary of Black and Indigenous terms: a performance of knowledge over Indigenous cultures rather than a Taino cultural product. It hails from a lecherous story written by a Havana dentist about the death of an “Indian doncella.” Each chapter considers her translations of such pieces, focusing in particular on her translation choices which I suggest are motivated by her feminist and anti-imperial politics. My first chapter considers the influence of ethnographic studies on Abakuá and particularly the writings of Fernando Ortiz in her Iowa campus performances which reference crime scenes and “sacrificial” initiation ceremonies. Rather than offering unmediated access to Black religious practices, I suggest she is performing an abased view of Abakuá as seen through the (exterminationist) lens of Ortiz’s scholarship from his criminological ethnography, Los negros brujos (1906), to his less punitive but still highly fetishizing account of Abakuá in “La ‘tragedia’ de los ñáñigos” (1950). I don’t believe Mendieta translates this work to oppress Black people. Rather as a bodywork artist composing a militant, corporal language of feminist critique, she aims the violence of cultural translation toward her chauvinistic art school cohort. The second chapter considers her literary translation of “La Venus Negra, based on a Cuban legend,” which was composed by Adrián del Valle, Ortiz’s secretary at La Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País for which he collated Cuba’s first public library among other projects. The original legend can be contextualized by del Valle’s broader stewardship of Cuban letters: he penned “La Venus Negra” for a collection celebrating the Centenary of Cienfuegos from the family notes of a prominent cienfueguero, Pedro Modesto. Examining the tacky national showcase in which the legend originally appears, I consider the ways Mendieta repositions la Venus Negra as a display of her own “will to continue being Other.” In particular, her translation imposes a “Siboney” ancestry on la Venus Negra and dispenses with the conditions which determine the protagonist’s muteness (in the original, la Venus Negra is a nude Black woman who is captured and displaced from her island hideout by criollo enslavers). In Mendieta’s translation la Venus is not muted Black protest incarnate but becomes an anti-colonial symbol. Mendieta publishes the piece in the feminist magazine Heresies, illustrating the legend with a silhouette of her own body from her Silueta Series. Again, I don’t think Mendieta poses as a Ciboney woman or absents Black women in a gesture of ill will toward Black and Indigenous people. Rather, she does so as an anti-imperial strategy consistent with Fidel Castro’s cadre, as her unavowed translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” into her “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” curatorial statement indicates. In the essay, Retamar, a white Cuban scholar, aligns the revolution with Black and Indigenous Cuba by “reclaiming” the caricature Caliban, which, as Coco Fusco writes, Shakespeare himself had based on an “Indian” exhibited in London. In the third chapter, I consider Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres, not as tributes to Taino spirits but as monuments of settler longing for mutilated Indigenous women. The legend I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, “Bacayu,” for example, is settler fanfiction about a daughter of a “cacique” whose death portends the coming of the white man and includes a lengthy description of the dead woman’s body. I also point toward the misnamings of Black women which appear within this rock series (Black Venus, Mother) which are often overlooked by scholars who ask us to read the work as Taino myth. Finally, building on these themes, I suggest a comparison to the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: emphasizing the similarities in their “cannibalistic” approaches to translation. Although differently aligned politically (leftist, anarchist), Oiticica’s family, like Mendieta’s, were culturally and politically prominent settlers; and, like Mendieta, Oiticica is often read as a translator of Black Atlantic culture. Further both artists engaged in the caricaturing of Indigenous “American” cultures. In New York, Oiticica translated Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) to contextualize his work and the work of his friends. Artists in Brazil had adapted de Andrade’s manifesto into a translation program “cannibalizing” European and North American cultures, a practice they misidentified as Tupi as de Andrade had. Comparing Mendieta and Oiticica as translators reveals shared patterns of Latin American vanguards employing caricatures of Black and Indigenous cultures in anti-imperial performances. These caricatures and their resemblance to caricatures in the U.S. also point to older (and enduring) transnational networks of white nationalism in the Americas.

“A Howling in the Paperwork” explores the relationship between ethnography, archival practice, and experimentalism in the work of twentieth century women artists whose syncretic ambitions lead them on a geographical itinerary to and through the greater Caribbean. This dissertation proposes a special synergy between artists with “scattered” bodies of work, in perpetual search of the right form for their creative energy, and the space of the Caribbean with its history of genocides, migrations, and displacements. I focus on women artists, in particular, to foreground the relationship between social precarity and aesthetic innovation. The flight from one technique to another has a push as well as a pull, as women artists have been excluded or expelled from institutional homes for their work, including the university. In the absence of reliable support, the artists I consider come to rely on and refine rigorously subjective methods that prefigure the necessary crisis of objectivity, especially in the social sciences, that would enter mainstream discourse decades later. But even as the artists I consider foreground their own bodies, lives, and communities in their work, they engage diasporic theories of spirit possession, inheritance, and collective creativity that amount to implicit—and sometimes explicit—critiques of the artist as self-contained auteur. Whether or not “there is something strongly feminine” in Caribbean culture, as Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests in The Repeating Island, the idea that there is places women in particularly charged relation to their own creative production in a Caribbean context. My project pays particular attention to the ways these artists attend to one another, taking up the detritus of those who came before as the raw material for new projects. For example, the Cuban-American émigré Ana Mendieta turns to the amateur anthropology of Lydia Cabrera as inspiration for the stone sculptures she carves in the caves of Jaruco, north of Havana, on a return trip to her home island. This relational consciousness does not establish a linear narrative of descent so much as it imagines a transhistorical collaboration in which I, too, participate. Alongside traditional methodologies of close-reading and archival research, I engage their work in more personal ways: I’ve traveled to the caves of Jaruco to visit the almost-ruined remains of Mendieta’s sculptures, I’ve translated Marigloria Palma’s poetry into English, and I’ve interviewed Julie Dash for a literary magazine. Much of the meaning of their work resides in its unmistakable invitation to collaborate in its development and dissemination: the second half of this dissertation considers my own inheritance of feminist practice in the context of Puerto Rican culture.

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born American artist whose unique body of work incorporated performance, activism, Earth art, installation, and the Afro-Cuban practices of Santería. She began her career at the University of Iowa, were she initially received her degree in painting in 1969. It was not until 1972 that Mendieta shifted radically to performance art. Though she was raised Catholic, she developed an interest in the rituals involved with Santería, a culturally predominant Cuban religion, and it deeply influenced her work in her choice of materials and settings. Santería is one of the major faith-based lifestyles of Cuba and is characterized by a synthesis of Afro-Cuban and Catholic characteristics, along with its own unique teachings and rituals. Also a prominent theme in Mendieta’s work was her sense of displacement and her insatiable desire to reconcile her Cuban heritage, which she attempts to resolve, not only through her art, but also during several trips to Cuba. Greater still in its contribution of influence to Mendieta’s work was the ecofeminist movement which amalgamated elements of the feminist and environmental movements; Ecofeminism’s emergence in the United States coincided with the rise of Mendieta’s career during the 1970’s. The movement focused on the correlation between the oppression, degradation, and exploitation of women and the oppression, degradation, and exploitation of the Earth. This thesis examines the life of Ana Mendieta and analyzes how her works may be viewed in an ecofeminist context. It analyzes how Mendieta’s work acts as a reflection of her cultural, social, and political reality and discusses ways in which characteristics of Santería and ecofeminism as a discourse influenced the imagery and symbolism used in Mendieta’s artwork throughout her brief career. Formal analysis of Mendieta’s artwork and contextual and historical analysis of Mendieta’s life, the ecofeminist discourse, and Afro-Cuban spirituality are explored in this research.

La presente tesis está dividida en un bloque teórico y un bloque práctico. En la parte teórica se realiza un estudio referencial, análisis y discusión de una serie de creaciones artísticas pertenecientes a la época de los años 60 y 70 mayoritariamente en EE UU y minoritariamente en Europa, que hacen uso de la imagen en movimiento monocanal y el cuerpo en acción en la naturaleza con carácter site-specific. En la parte práctica se realiza una obra videográfica que trabaja a partir de los mismos elementos de las obras de estudio desde un punto de vista actual y dentro de la línea de creación personal de la autora, aportando temáticas, motivaciones, procesos creativos y recursos formales que complementan y dan continuidad a la investigación teórica, al tiempo que enriquecen la línea de trabajo personal. Por lo que hemos podido comprobar, no tenemos constancia de que se haya realizado una investigación que analice y compare las distintas aproximaciones a las obras de nuestro estudio desde un punto de vista unitario, sino que han permanecido consideradas como piezas aisladas en muchos casos, dentro de las trayectorias de los propios artistas y sin atender al denominador común que todas ellas comparten. En el bloque teórico se acota el marco conceptual que delimita la temática a la que nos enfrentamos, a la vez que se muestra un recorrido por los puntos más importantes de la investigación, claves a la hora de analizar, discutir y concluir acerca de las creaciones. Estos puntos son los siguientes: La naturaleza como lugar; el cuerpo en acción: performance y danza site-specific; y la imagen en movimiento: cine y vídeo monocanal, entre testimonio y creación. Una vez aplicado el marco teórico, se acomete un estudio referencial que aborda el contexto artístico de la época, una serie de obras periféricas en relación con la investigación, y finalmente las obras destacadas de la tesis. Se realiza un visionado y un análisis completo de las obras destacadas a través de una metodología de análisis creada específicamente en esta investigación para este tipo de piezas. Y se concluye con una discusión que profundiza en el estudio transversal de las obras, el marco teórico, el contexto y las periferias, poniendo a disposición de la comunidad investigadora una visión inédita sobre estas creaciones, y una serie de conclusiones novedosas acerca de la temática. / Ontiñano Abadías, MC. (2014). Cuerpo en acción, imagen en movimiento y naturaleza en el arte de EE UU y Europa durante los años 60-70, con caracter site-specific. Estudio referencial, análisis y proyecto personal [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/36868

The broad focus of this study is on how, through inequalities in power in constructed human socio-political, socio-economic and legal structures, the value and dignity of human life is destroyed. The researcher as artist wished to represent these observations though visual metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche in an installation, "Follow the thread". The dissertation contextualises that work within the works of Sheila Hicks, Amita Makan, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Ana Mendieta, all of whom use organic materials related to ideas about life and death. The first three use fibres as a metaphor for life. Through the analysis of metaphors in the selected artworks, the allusiveness of these metaphors is examined to offer insights about their indirect, referential, and evocative nature. It is revealed in the study that the success of metaphors operating within the visual language is closely linked to their complexity, their range scope and multimodality, and their ability to provoke multivalent, layered interpretations of artworks. My sculptural drawings that resemble fragments of the human body in the installation are a metaphor for the abuse of human dignity and for the disregard those in power have when life is reduced to bare life, rather than life appropriate to a legal citizen. / Arts and Music / M.V.A.

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