Sacred Bonds: Carmen Maria Machado on Ana Mendieta
The celebrated author talks about her spiritual connection with Ana Mendieta and her hopes for future women artists.
Arlette Hernandez, Carmen Maria Machado
Mar 15, 2024
Carmen Maria Machado opens her boundary-pushing memoir, In The Dream House, with an inscription that sounds like a whisper: “If you need this book, it is for you.” Her memoir takes countless shapes, challenging genre and literary conventions with a narrative true to her own experience. After I finished it, I felt transformed. And I imagined this is how Machado felt when she first saw the work of Ana Mendieta, a trailblazing Cuban American artist who made work across a range of mediums including performance, photography, sculpture, and film.
That’s why it came as no surprise to see Mendieta’s name in Machado’s book. These two women, connected through their ties to Cuba and, later, to Iowa, are both shape-shifters. To celebrate Women’s History Month, I spoke to Machado about her connection to Mendieta, whose work is currently on view in Gallery 420: Body on the Line, and the transformative power of art.
—Arlette Hernandez, Associate Educator, Department of Learning and Engagement
Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints–face). 1972
My experience of Ana Mendieta is this one of strange synchronicity.
Carmen Maria Machado
Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Amategram). c. 1982–83
Arlette Hernandez: Can you tell us briefly about your work?
Carmen Maria Machado: I am the author of several books, including the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the memoir In the Dream House.
In Her Body and Other Parties, I was really interested in gender, especially as it relates to questions around the body, sex, sexuality, fatness—just different parts of bodily experience. That is where a lot of my interests lie in that book. In the Dream House deals with being in an abusive relationship and what that means in the context of queerness and in terms of gender. What it means to be at the receiving end of a woman committing violence, which is a narrative that we don’t have a lot of blueprints for, especially in a queer context.
Ana Mendieta. Birth (Gunpowder Works). 1981
In your memoir, you write about Ana Mendieta. Who is Mendieta to you?
My experience of Ana Mendieta is this one of strange synchronicity. I don’t know if I can even explain exactly what it is, but I feel like with every piece I learn about her...it feels like I know her. That’s a crazy thing to say about a long-dead artist who I did not know—but the fact that she was Cuban American, the fact that she was so interested in the body and in embodiment, I just feel like we would’ve known each other. I don’t have this feeling a lot, but I have it about her.
Speaking of synchronicity, I also feel like the fact that she was at Iowa is so wild to me because Iowa is a place that I love and know very well.
My knowledge of her work predates my knowledge of her death, which I feel a little sad even talking about. I think there’s an eerie beauty to her work. Often, I feel like women artists get a lot of questions about the role of our body in our work, and for me, I am always my most interesting subject. So I love that she put her body everywhere, and that even though she is gone, her body is eternal, immortal.
Ana Mendieta. Nile Born. 1984
Can you talk about your particular interest in Mendieta’s Silueta Series?
Mendieta made the Silueta series in Iowa City and in Mexico by creating outlines of her body in the landscape. She did it using all these different mediums—she’s using the earth, she’s using natural elements. Some of these pieces were ephemeral. It happened but it’s gone from the world, but there’s an image, a video, or an object that remains.
What do you think these actions—literally imprinting her body on the earth—say about the relationship between humanity and nature?
It’s like a communion with the earth, where the earth is embodying something about her and it takes on this quality of hers. It just really speaks to the way that we are—or more ideally, should be—a part of our environments. The environment is a part of us and we are a part of it; there’s a harmonious marriage between the two things. It’s not just that nature is something that we might access, but also that we are these creatures that exist in the landscape. I love the marriage of these two things: the way she exists with her earth, her land.
The work currently on view at MoMA, Nile Born, is made of sand and wood. What do you make of the fact that Mendieta chose materials that have the potential to erode?
The ephemeral quality of these pieces offers a way of thinking about time as a part of the work. We know this piece is not going to always look exactly like it does now, and it’s always going to be a little different than before. It’s almost like having a piece of art in another dimension, which I love.
Mendieta said that for her making art was “the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” I feel like the quote almost speaks for itself. Broadly speaking, the maternal source is the place we come from. We spend so much of our lives at odds with the natural world, and the desire to return to this place of comfort, this place of creation and birth, makes sense to me. Of course you would want to make art about that.
What role does abstraction play in this work?
When you remove defining features, you remove certain qualities. That creates a space for other people to enter. I also just love the idea of a nonwhite woman making space for herself to be a universal figure. It is really wonderful and subversive.
Often when you are reading a novel or engaging with a piece of art, it’s full of ghosts.
Carmen Maria Machado
Mendieta moved to Iowa when she was 12, through Operación Pedro Pan. She didn’t return to Cuba for another 20 years. Does her biography resonate with your life story?
When you are forcibly exiled or alienated from the place you came from, the land that is familiar to you, or even when you leave it voluntarily, I think that does something to you. You’re always trying to come back to it. I remember the first time I moved away from the East Coast when I was in my very early twenties. There was always this strange sense of wrongness about the landscape of California, where I’d chosen to go, and eventually that wrongness was so strong I had to leave. Not that it wasn’t beautiful or interesting, just that it wasn’t the landscape that made sense to me and that existed in my body.
So to be taken from the place that you know—especially as a child—and brought to this completely different place, that’s a difficult thing. And having lived in Iowa and been to Cuba, I cannot imagine two places less like each other. I actually wrote a story about Ana Mendieta for an exhibition that took place in Iowa City, and that was what I focused on, imagining her and her sister in the Iowa winters and how hostile and terrifying that must have been.
So it makes sense to me that she was impressing her body into this new earth, maybe trying to make sense of it in relation to her body, which has known a different earth, a landscape that is beautiful and strange in its own way, and hostile and welcoming, too.
Often when you are reading a novel or engaging with a piece of art, it’s full of ghosts. When you read a novel by a dead writer, or you watch a movie with actors or a director who have died, you’re having a conversation with someone who’s gone. It’s incredible to look at this piece and others in the Silueta series and know that you are seeing a ghost. As the viewer, you are having your half of the conversation with someone who is no longer around but still has plenty to say.
Another work I wanted to talk with you about is Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations), in which Mendieta took photographs of herself after distorting her appearance with cosmetics, wigs, and various facial expressions. I’m curious about how you see this work about the experience of inhabiting a woman’s body.
I really love this series. There is something wonderful when women do things that make them look strange and express disinterest in presentability. Not to sound a thousand years old, but it’s amazing to think about our current moment and the way the self-portrait exists in society: when taking a selfie, you’re finding your angles and trying to fit into some kind of standard.
I feel like these Mendieta images are deliberately alienating and strange. What does it mean to represent yourself with these weird and maniacal expressions? It’s off-putting in a really delicious way. And the photographs are also very silly, and I think silliness is an underrated quality in art that’s really delightful to see.
“Delicious” is such a great word. In these images, it feels to me like there’s something being said about the experience of inhabiting a body that is read as a woman.
That makes me think about what it means when people say that clothing is “flattering.” Often, what they are saying is that the clothes make you look skinnier. But I love it when fat people are like, “I’m not wearing this outfit to make me look skinny. I’m wearing it because I like it or it’s fun.” Personally, I’m not interested in standards of beauty that don’t apply to me. I want to wear what I’m going to wear. I feel like we’re seeing something similar in Mendieta’s work. She wasn’t interested in making herself presentable, or digestible, to a male viewer. She’s exploring the parameters of her own face in this very funny way. I think that’s how we all should be, honestly.
Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations). January–February 1972
Ana Mendieta. Untitled. 1978
Do you have an aspiration for the future of women artists?
The issue right now in the art and writing world isn’t that women aren’t making good work. The issue is that people are not paying them enough and are not valuing their work enough. Women have been making incredible art for thousands of years, and I think that the future of women in art is institutions giving women the support they need and investing in their success. It’s a tall order and it’s hard to imagine how this will happen, but I do think this is the key. In the meantime, women just have to keep being amazing.
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