Digging up the past: Ana Mendieta
old ideas, new art, weird wide web
Vignette:
Noun
1. a brief evocative description, account, or episode.
2. a small illustration or portrait photograph which fades into its background without a definite border.
Another vignette coming to you today. Last night I pulled out the stack of essays and papers that I have been carrying around for the past 2 years. Some of it’s stuff from college, the rest accumulated in the time since. Amongst the printed pages are haphazard notes, scribbled in my own frantic scrawl during workshops and museum visits.
There’s actually some interesting stuff in there. I guess I always intended for it to become something more. But as I’m sure you know, it’s often safer to keep things in the ideas stage, to avoid execution altogether.
Well, let’s see what we have here…
Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Silueta Series, 1976.
An echo of a body, traced into damp earth.
More than an echo - an impression carefully crafted.
Less than an echo - a symbol pressed into the soil.
The curve of the arms is stylised, calling to mind the swirling patterns of an ancient past. A deep, red pigment fills the lower form, the head , the left arm. Without an accurate sense of scale, the mind can extend this body out and out, spreading across the shaded hills of a desert at dusk.
Here is the violence of an essence long forgotten. A prehistoric knowledge carried in curved arms, in heaving red hips. Here is the aggression of an instinct repeatedly quashed. A deep unknowing of the self that cleaves the figure from her feet and cuts off her waving hands.
When I look at this image, I am aware that there is something increasingly ungrounding about life in a city. Life in a modern city. Modern life. Relentless sensory input leads, for me, to a sense of numbness. A paradoxical state of emptiness and disconnect. “I” as a symbol for “me”.
Mendieta’s work speaks to me of a deep, hopeful, remembering. The traces of bodies pressed into earth speak of a deep release, a radical surrender, celebrated with plumes of red pigment. Earth stained, marked, reclaimed. Memories awakened, unfurled, opened.
I wrote this during a writing workshop last summer. It was hot, I was pretty unsatisfied with life, and I wished that I could sink myself into the cool, wet earth and just lie in silence for a while.
This week’s discoveries…
Din Burns
I’ve been admiring the work of Din Burns on my Twitter feed for a while now. They are always a welcome relief amidst the chaos of scrolling (which, by the way, is a totally bananas way to view art, but here we are).
These imaginary portraits have a surprising amount of life in them, a kind of emanating force that pulls you in. The gentle glow beckons you in, and the intricate patterning keeps you there, your eyes pouring over every detail.
The forms are mapped with contour lines, suggesting a topography much greater than a mere human. Each figure is a vast being of peaks and valleys, and dark abysses. Where do these creatures come from? Are these gods from the cosmos, watching over us? Or are they our very human experiences and emotions incarnate, made larger than life?
You can buy his work on Objkt, Foundation, and Exchange.art
TempleOS
TempleOS is an operating system (think Windows, Linux), designed by American programmer Terry A. Davis and released in the early 2000s. It’s a biblical-themed system, created as the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. Davis created this after a series of manic episodes, and would later describe the project as a revelation from God.
Aesthetically, it’s got all the hallmarks of early net art (check out Olia Lialina’s website to understand what that means - it’s like a time capsule). Artists receiving creative direction from higher powers is nothing new, with Hilma Af Klint and Agnes Pelton coming to mind.
Of course, Davis did not create it as a work of art per se (though it was posthumously included in an outsider art show in 2017). To me, it’s interesting to think about programming as this intensely creative act, rather than as some kind of sterile, purely “logical” action.
And Finally a shout out to artist/designer Jean Pierre whose “trail cam rave flier” event poster is deeply satisfying.
