Zoila Márquez


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Beyond the (Othered) Body: 
The Self-Portraiture of Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar


Abstract:

While the body has long been a subject for art, contemporary artists transformed the body into a significant medium in the 1960s. The body as employed by artists has become a site of protest, examination, and re-imagination. For artists Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar, their inherently politicized and highly othered bodies substantially inform their respective oeuvres—visible in Mendieta’s Silueta and Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portrait series. Mendieta and Aguilar situate their bodies into their respective natural landscapes, erasing the division between body and space, yet leveraging both elements to create something new. I conceptualize this hybrid creation as a third space that provides liberation and resolution by moving beyond bodies bound to their physicality and instead reimagining bodies as conduits to something greater. Moreover, I argue, the third space manifests feelings of home, becoming a conceptual terrain that allows politicized, “othered” bodies to fully inhabit, exist, and persist amidst dominant forces of erasure.


Laura Aguilar
Nature Self Portrait #6, 1996
Ana Mendieta
Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978
While the body as a subject has persisted throughout the history of art, the 1960s saw contemporary artists shift from the body as subject to the body as a significant medium. At the hands of contemporary artists, the body has been transformed into a site of protest, examination, and re-imagination. But this transformation can be a trap, as artists whose identities can be described as non-normative, multiple, or “transgressive” become hyper-visible due to their ascribed “otherness.”

As a result, these artists are often defined by and confined to their physical bodies in the reception of their work. Artists Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar both powerfully employed their bodies as medium while negotiating the perils of such hyper-visibility, thus their inherently politicized and highly othered bodies informed their respective oeuvres in several registers at once. Mendieta’s non-white, female, exiled, Cuban body visibly informs her Silueta series while Aguilar’s queer, fat, disabled, Chicana body informs her Nature Self-Portrait series.

Facing the trap of hypervisibility—in which their art becomes inseparable from their bodies and perceived markers of identities—Mendieta and Aguilar enact different (but related) responses. I argue that both Mendieta and Aguilar situate their bodies into their respective landscapes—erasing the division between body and space while leveraging these elements to create something new. Free from divisions, this hybrid creation can be understood as a third space for self-actualization on new, unfamiliar terms. For these two artists, I conceptualize the third space as moving beyond “othered” bodies defined by their physicality and instead, reimagining them as conduits to another way of being.



Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued that for Ana Mendieta, the body “could never be one thing,” and was to be understood as “porous, fragmented, and constantly reconstituting itself.”1  This notion of the body as unstable or unfixed is deeply informed by the intersectionality of her own body (and in turn, identity). Born in Havana Cuba in 1948 to a prominent political family, Mendieta was exiled from her homeland at the age of 12 under Operation Pedro Pan.2 Upon her arrival in the United States, she resided in refugee camps before being placed in an orphanage in Iowa, where she spent her adolescence. Throughout her life in the States, Mendieta faced the categorization of “other”—one she would later come to embrace—both in Iowa and later in New York’s radical feminist spaces.

Mendieta’s early works were characterized by the use of her physical body as a medium—made visceral by her use of blood and terror-inducing scenarios—evoking themes of gender-based violence. As a result, she was categorized as a feminist conceptual artist. After realizing the extent to which racism was ingrained within white feminism in the United States, she resisted any affiliation with white feminism and distanced herself from the larger movement. Mendieta would then go on to create her most recognized body of work, the Silueta series.

Explicit in her desire to ground her work “more insistently in specific contexts and traditions,” Mendieta ultimately widened “the spectrum of both goddesses and bodies” as subjects, and created the Silueta series in 1973.3  

The Silueta series is comprised of the repeated visual form of the female body, carved or imprinted on various natural materials (ranging from dirt, sand, and grass to fire)—as though whatever figure inhabited that place had since transcended it.

Ana Mendieta
Imagen de Yagul, 1973


Imagen de Yagul is often said to have begun the Silueta works.4 Documented with a chromogenic print, Mendieta’s body lies in an empty grave in the ruins of a Zapotec tomb located in Oaxaca, Mexico. Mendieta’s nude body lies amongst tufts of greenery and is almost obscured entirely by a bounty of lush, white flowers—as though the flowers are growing directly from her body, transforming the body into fertile ground. Lying in the tomb, Mendieta is embraced by the land, or possibly enacting a process of return—either to her home, or the earth. Imagen, when viewed within the context of Mendieta’s identity and practice—specifically the violence of her exile and her discovery of Mexico as a “surrogate home”—brings forth a third space for her to inhabit. As the Silueta series continued in Mexico, Mendieta moved away from gestures of bodily presence to evocations of absence and trace.

Ana Mendieta
Untitled, 1976


Untitled c. 1976 presents an outline of a female body pressed deep into the sand with bright, blood-red pigment strewn across. Positioned near the ocean, the figure lies between the waterline and soft sand. The water, which has since receded, has smoothed out the limbs and torso, washing away small traces of red. In this Silueta, the bright pigment evokes a sense of violence or harm—paired with the indentation in the sand, there is a sense of a forced removal that mirrors Mendieta’s own.

In this marked absence, a new space is formed by implication—a third space protected from vision, where she can enact a resolution of her persisting desire to be returned to the homeland she was forcibly removed from. Mendieta’s transformation of “the body” into a trace of its own consumption calls attention to the impossibility of representing complex intersectional identities within the art world’s insistence on hyper-visibility for those deemed “other.”

While Ana Mendieta challenges hyper-visibility by way of refusal, removing her body from direct view (and at times from the earth entirely), by contrast, Laura Aguilar enacts an assertive presence—a refusal to accept and feed into the trap of hyper-visibility that had both ostracized her from the art world and defined her as “other.”




In Laura Aguilar’s self-portraiture work, her multitude of marginalized identities are brought forward. Utilizing photography and video, Aguilar asserts her “othered” and “undesirable” body—one comprised of mixed identities that stray from any of the narrow stereotypes normally afforded Chicanas. A precursor to her later series Grounded, Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portrait #14 presents a beautiful, striking portrait of the artist.

Laura Aguilar
Nature Self Portrait #14, 1996
The black and white photograph depicts Aguilar’s nude body inserted in a strange, seemingly hybrid landscape of desert earth and pools of water. Resting on her side, she turns to face the deep black pool of water in front of her. With her hair tucked behind her ear, she leans over with her hand outstretched, her face is only visible in profile as she gazes into her reflection. While evoking the classical figure Narcissus, there’s a tenderness in the way Aguilar peers into the water. Inserting herself into the natural landscape, creating and occupying a space of her own, Aguilar moves further—acting against a system that rendered her and her work invisible throughout her career.

The third space materializes in the pool of water, where Aguilar makes herself visible as both creator and subject. Acting as a portal, the pool creates an intimate space where she can conceptualize herself on non-social terms, significant in that it’s where she is able to literally view herself. This act evokes a sense of care, overcoming her erasure as an artist and simultaneous stigmatized visibility as a fat, queer, disabled, Chicana. Speaking about her self-portraiture she states: “I’ve been able to find some comfort and peace through my own body…I’m a large woman—I’m not supposed to be comfortable with myself. I wonder what people think.”5 This sentiment about her suitability as a subject in the terms of Western Art seems to be directly confronted in the Nature Self-Portrait series and is also particularly visible in her Grounded series.

Laura Aguilar
Grounded #111, 2006—2007
Grounded #111, presents a self-portrait of Aguilar immersed in a desert landscape complete with sandy earth, dried brush, and hints of color from desert evergreen plants. A large rock formation is central to the composition—larger than the confines of the image—set against a rocky mountain range and light blue sky. Sitting with her back to the viewer, the curves and creases of her body mirror the slight indentations and crevices of the rock behind her.  Moving beyond the confinement of flesh and physicality, her body is transformed into an integral element of the surrounding landscape. In this transformation, like Mendieta, Aguilar seamlessly collapses landscape and body, moving beyond social positioning and ultimately towards liberation.

It is important, at this point, to address the nature of the landscape in which Aguilar inserts herself. To assume that landscapes are neutral and free of politicization would be remiss. Land, like “othered” bodies, is highly politicized, reflecting the lasting repercussions of the colonization processes by which it was stolen.  Furthermore, throughout the history of art, both land and female bodies have been visual metaphors for conquest. Facing these two legacies, Aguilar creates an environment where she can reclaim the territories of both her body and the land. By using photography to generate the third space, bringing a new terrain into being, Aguilar creates an environment where she can redefine her identity and enact a resolution.
Laura Aguilar
Nature Self Portrait #6, 1996
Ana Mendieta
Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978
The third space, accessible when delineations between body and landscape cease to exist, allows these artists to expand their respective landscapes—both literal and metaphorical. The third space becomes a conceptual terrain that allows these politicized “othered” bodies to fully inhabit, exist, and persist amidst dominant forces of erasure. It is in this hybridity that the third space provides liberation and resolution, cultivating what can be characterized as feelings of home—comfort, intimacy, acceptance, and sensations of care and nurturing. The act of home-making becomes a significant tool for marginalized artists to assert and reclaim space and identity simultaneously—their bodies pushing against a legacy of colonialism that persists in both landscape and the genre of the female nude.

For the broader realm of art history, it becomes a meaningful framework for examining works in which “transgressive” bodies and landscapes are equipped as mediums. Artists like Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar can never simply present a body in a landscape. In the same way that their bodies are not simply bodies—Again, Mendieta’s is non-white, female, exiled, Cuban, and Aguilar’s is queer, fat, disabled, Chicana—landscape is never neutral. The tension that arises from hyper-visibility and navigating “otherness” requires the creation of a new space where one can move beyond the othered body and towards liberation.


Footnotes:

1 Bryan-Wilson, Against the Body, 27
2 Ultan, From the Personal to the Transpersonal, 31
3 Bryan-Wilson, Against the Body, 32
4  Rosenthal, Traces, 10
5  Jones, Body / Art, Performing the Body, 222

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