On Renewal: Yagul by Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta
Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973
Lifetime color photograph
20 x 13 1/4” (50.8 x 33.7 cm)
Collection Hans Breder
Original documentation: 35 mm color slide

Cuban American artists Ana Mendieta (1948 - 1985) created the photograph Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) in 1973. She lies naked at the bottom of a shallow, rocky grave. Her face and torso are covered by stalks of delicate, white flowers that seem as if they are stemming out her body. she is placed perpendicularly with her arms set along her body while her hands slightly touch her thighs. She has her legs extended and close to each other. The skin’s fleshy tones contrast with the rough surface of the ground and freshness of the flowers. Colors are used sparingly. Whites, grays and blacks in the work are subdued, except for the vivid green vegetation. On the dirt floor, small weeds, twigs and pebbles surround her body. Angular and irregular stones built the tomb. The surface is rough, dark gray like volcanic material and whitish like calcareous limestone. The tomb is in the ancient site of Yagul from the Zapotec culture. Yagul is one of the smaller archeological sites in the Oaxaca area.

Imagen de Yagul is the first of Mendieta’s Siluetas photograph series. Using her body to create this work, she increasively began to trace it as the series built up. Allusions to life, death and regeneration are conveyed through the composed visual elements. The artist’s body represents life, and the promise of regeneration is signified by the blossoming plant. By choosing this tomb as the site of her work , Mendieta made a direct allusion to death. Nearby Yagul is Mitla, the City of the Dead, where the cult to death springs from. Life and death are aspects of the same process. The belief that death is a regenerative process was pervasive in ancient Mesoamerican tradition and is still part of the Mexican cultural legacy. In reference to this philosophical view understood as a concept of Duality, Mexican writer Octavio Paz expresses, “The opposition between life and death was not so absolute to the ancient Mexicans as it is to us. Life extended into death, and vice versa. Death was not the natural end of life but one phase of the infinite cycle.
Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process which repeated itself continuously.” Mendieta would have been also inspired by the work Roots of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo where themes of life, death and renewal are addressed as the subject matter. In Roots, Kahlo’s body in depicted as a transformed tree with roots deep into the earth. According to Olga Viso in Ana Mendieta; Earth Body, referring to Mendieta’s works” The Arbol de la Vida (Tree of Life) became a theme she would explored throughout her career as she adopted the theme of rebirth to her own interpretive ends (51).” By working in Mexico, Mendieta was searching to come to terms with her own Cuban cultural heritage.
Lucy Lippard in “Quite Contrary: Body, Nature, Ritual in Women’s Art” says that Mendieta’s body tracings are driven by a desire to reconnect with her ancestral origins through direct contact with the earth,” By choosing Yagul as a working site, Mendieta made a direct connection to the past of the ancient people of Mesoamerica. For Mendieta, Mexico became her surrogate country. By staying in Mexico, she felt closer to her own land, Cuba, and by working in ancient Mesoamerican archeological sites it was her way of connecting and paying homage the Tainos, the ancestral people of the Caribbean. Lippard also refers to Santeria , the Catholic and Yoruba syncretic religious practice that “holds the belief that the earth is a living thing from which one gains power.”Mendieta understood this belief as a source of empowerment, and she consciously tried to convey it through her works.

In the book Ana Mendieta: a book of works, a posthumous compilation of Mendieta’s notes and works created in Cuba, she talks about her vision in relation to her own art practice by saying, “Art must have begun as nature itself, in a dialectical relationship between humans and the natural world from which we cannot be separated.” For Mendieta, the creation of her works was an intellectual pursuit, and yet it was at once a synthesis produced by her cultural heritage. She created works of deep sensibility to materiality and to what its intangible. In this manner, Mendieta synthesized nature, culture, belief and art. Coming from Cuba, she was informed by her own cultural background; however, she was influenced not only by Kahlo’s artistic production, but also she was imbued by Mesoamerican cultural beliefs of life and death and renewal.