Mendieta_BodyTracks


 * Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks. 1982.**

Commentary by Ellen Schattschneider

Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks emerge out of the dramatic body sculptures she performed in an art space in 1982. Covering her arms and hands in tempura paint and blood she has left us permanent, potent traces of her ritualized actions. Among the African-inspired religious of Cuba, where Mendieta was born, the Orixa or divinities are often honored by “feeding” them blood, which is thought be to imbued with the divine energy of ache, the Yoruba term for spiritual power. The blood that runs in the veins of persons is felt to connect them to the ancestors, the gods, their living kin, and their posterity, and to rivers of time and memory that link lands and civilizations. This spiritual fluid, filled with reproductive energies, also binds visible and invisible worlds.

In these three paper works, Mendieta would also seem to celebrate the fecund potency of the female body, in ways that may resonate with spiritual power of the priestess in the Afro-Cuban faith of Santeria. For many viewers, the works take on particular poignancy in the wake of Mendieta’s tragic and untimely death in 1985. She has left behind for us these beautiful, painful rivers of blood and energy- tracing the great and mysterious patterns of birth, death and regeneration.