ABSTRACT
From 1972 until her untimely death in 1985, Ana Mendieta created Super-8 films and videos, performances, actions and site-specific installations, drawings, prints, objects, and sculpture. Throughout her career, she produced an art whose fugitive appearance contains the disembodied trace of the real, of the remains of life amongst the ruins of modern culture. Two critical approaches to the making of art appear central to Mendieta’s concern: the question of the performative having to do with issues of the body, authorship, and the self, and the work of art as a trace. That is, the work displaces the location of meaning and identity from the fixity of the image or place onto the performative and the marks of inscription. In these terms, the work emerges as a profound critique of the social sphere, and an attempt to think the outside, the heterogeneous as a site of restitution and dissolution.
