Review by Ana Mendieta – If She Were Alive, She Would Be at the forefront of Art This Century | Art and design

A A huge color photograph of an ancient ruined site greets you outside the dramatic Ana Mendieta exhibition, and immediately tells you that this is going to be different. This sort of thing looks more like it belongs in a British Museum exhibition about a lost pre-Columbian civilization than the concrete fortress of the Blavatnik Wing at Tate Modern. But in her imagination, this is where Mendieta belongs, too. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the United States when she was 12 to escape the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. For her, home was the past, and she was exploring the origins of art and mythology itself.

Mendieta created works of art out of blood, feathers, flowers, and sand, and in such novel ways that you might think these primitive materials were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on a tree trunk, then setting it on fire. Flames leave behind a scorched shadow of a human, like the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii buried in ashes. Facing a row of these burning ghosts emerging from real tree trunks, you almost expect them to speak to you like the shadows of the dead.

Most often, the human form that merges with nature is that of Mendieta. In one photo, she stands covered in brown mud against a tree so that her body appears to sink into the bark to the point of disappearing into it. In another image, a female figure is the artist but also a universal totem object made of clay, slowly dissolving in a pool of water.

However, Mendieta was not above joking. She spilled animal blood on the sidewalk so that it looked like a splatter of human blood and surreptitiously photographed passers-by as they tried to spot this disturbing trace of some horrific act of violence. In another early work, she tries on a flowery mustache, and speaks comically of her uncertainty about who she is and where she is from.

She returned to Cuba for the first time in 1980. Then, in 1981, just two years after her father was released from political prison there, she carved stunning limestone sculptures into quiet corners of a nature reserve. Her black-and-white photographs make the Robestrian sculptures, as she calls them—meaning simply “made of rocks,” a filler joke—look like mysterious relics of a lost civilization: perhaps the civilization of ancient Robestrians. Graceful, Venus-like fertility goddesses of Willendorf and other abstract female figures, bat-like or perhaps grotesque, with vaginas like sacred portals rise from the rock formations as eroded but enduring masterpieces of human culture. Mendieta created it with the hope that pedestrians would encounter and contemplate her works.

She was not the only modern artist to dream up, and even falsify, the ancient prehistoric past of the Americas. Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty project aspires to be an American answer to Stonehenge, where it sank and then resurfaced in the Great Salt Lake; James Turrell’s Pit of Roden and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field have similar primitive aspirations.

But Mendieta is different. She avoided monumental monuments and moved toward more personal gestures, such as a human silhouette made of flowers. Instead of the abstract language of modern American art, they depict real divine figures, personal myths as strangely coherent as those of William Blake. The images, films and objects are interspersed with drawings, including beautiful drawings on tree leaves, as Mendieta developed these surreal images. She brings her painterly imagination directly to nature, leaving her mark in a muddy wasteland, a figure made up of white flowers in a grassy rectangle that looks like a coffin, or another deep imprint of herself in clay filled with a red pigment like blood.

This artist is irresistible. Not only does she make amazing interventions, she offers a thoughtful theory of the universe. She strives to reconnect art and nature around the feminist myths of ancient, half-forgotten deities, which she literally digs from the soil or reveals hidden in trees by fire sacrifice.

This is an art rooted in organic matter, in leaves and ash, and has an unrestrained ability to produce unforgettable images. It’s also art at the moment. Mendieta died in 1985 at the age of 36, in highly controversial circumstances. This exhibition means none of that, and I won’t, except to say that her art has infinitely more life than the bricks that her husband, Carl Andre, sold to Tate years before he was accused of, and then acquitted of, her murder.

Mendieta, who never fell out of her apartment, will be at the forefront of art in this century. But then again, she would have lived just as well in her Stone Age home. Some archaeologists now claim that painted images of hands found in Paleolithic caves are female. Years before this thesis, Mendieta made a cast of her hand and turned it into an iron brand that she used to burn her handprint into the ground—and into history.