Ana Mendieta (body)

Sandwoman, 1983 

Incantation to Olokun-Yemayá FIGURE 4

Untitled (from the Silueta Series, August 1978

Mendieta’s work is heavily ritualistic, but seems to speak to all women especially by using the impression of the body, as this could be any woman, anonymous, forgotten, or lost.  It creates a gravesite for the singular body of the forgotten corpses in Akutagawa’s “Rashomon.”  There is no attention or interest in giving a face or identity to these impressions.  Mendieta removes the body and leaves only it’s trace.

[...] The impression of the body is almost like an echo of that body reminiscent ofTess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, where Tess is an echo that always receding and disappearing and eventually becomes part of the landscape, dissolving into it.  There is a history to this treatment of women as the echo.  It can be traced back to Genesis where woman is created as an echo of man and also traced to the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo.  In this myth, Echo is a nymph who is punished with the loss of her own voice, only able to repeat the words of others.  Echo is the literal figure of repetition compulsion with no ability to break from it.  Echo existed only as an extension of those around her, becoming a kind of spectral haunting, a voice detached from a body. 

[...] Mendieta has literally carved out the breech of the traumatic event, the gap or wound within the earth as the female body.  The body itself is the breech and the trauma that cannot be represented or assimilated, and so it is impressed into the ground, not buried because it cannot be recreated in order to be buried, leaving it always a wound open and present.  The repetition of these images in the series repeats the traumatic gap as something which will never heal and cannot be sealed, covered over, or buried.  She exposes the symbolic breech and carves into the earth to create a wound which becomes a shared wound with history.  The wound in the earth is also a tomb, and becomes both the womb and tomb of all women.  The tracing of the tomb and the archive also evokes the spectral, the phantom non-presence of a body which has disappeared or has been made to disappear.

Text from Afterimage blog

Images sourced Americana Journal, Boystown Tmblr and Afterimage blog

Posture (continues)

RUTH BERNHARD

Golden Light, 1962

Chromogenic Print, 10 x 8 in Sourced from Deborah Kuschner

Posture

Etruscan cista (casket) handle from Palestrina c. 325-250 BC Bronze w. 14,5cm

This bizarre posture of a woman is said to be the depiction of an acrobat, an entertainer and it is said to be the top handle of a metal box.

Image sourced from The Walter's Art Museum 

New work (continues)

Caryatides at St Pancras Church, London. Part of a new photographic series. 

Courtesy Despina Rangou 2011.

New work

First step of my new project.
Some new casts of the wall resembling the one from Bank of England. The latex measures 1m x 0.6 m but the plaster is smaller due to plaster shortage. Full cast will follow in the next days.

Ways of Seeing

'Choose from this book an image of traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. Either in your mind's eye or drawing on the reproduction. Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.' 

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, p64

Although, I 'm a skeptic myself, I can't fully see this 'revolutionary' transformation on these paintings. Yes, man is somewhat very similar to woman when it comes to their depiction but is this bad? In my opinion instead of differentiating the two species the painters, in these cases Titian and Tintoreto, have portrayed how man and woman closely resemble one another and how in their similarity they can be seen as equal. To be more specific the body is the one that shares the most resemblance and according to Simon De Beauvoir and her book The Second Sex  '(...) if the body is not a thing, it is a situation, as viewed in the perspective I am adopting – that of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty: it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world (...)' p66 In these two paintings woman can be a man but the context in which the bodies are placed suggests a world solely of female existence. Hence, the experiment could be triggering more questions than Berger originally thought it would. Is this style of painting a way for men to be depicted as women and therefore the painters or the owners face their vanity in it, or is it a tool for portraying equality through the perpetual share of interests and erotism between the two sexes at the time. Whatever it is the experiment can be seen as successful. It is more and more clear to me as I gaze at the two animated paintings that the two women could easily resemble men.