From the archives: Ana and ‘Antichrist’

‘I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’ - Ana Mendieta.  

Above image: Untitled (from the Silueta series) (1973-1977).

I’ve spent a few nights introducing Lars Von Trier films to a few audience attendees at my local arts cinema this past week. As I was rewatching Antichrist and writing my notes, I kept thinking about the scene when a grief-stricken Charlotte Gainsbourg, being counselled for atypical grief by her therapist husband, lies down in the forest, or Eden as it is known in the film, surrounded by grass. At that moment, my brain went to an Ana Mendieta Silueta Series and the tragic connection between the murdered artist and the movie. And then I realised today is the anniversary of her death.

[SPOILER WARNING: I will be referring to something that occurs in the very first scene of Antichrist, so if you have not seen the film, and while this is not a spoiler per se and is the reason what happens in the film, does, I just thought I’d give you a heads up].

Antichrist (Dir: Lars von Trier, 2009).

Antichrist is a 2009 film by the controversial Danish director Lars von Trier. The film begins with a couple, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, having sex as their toddler son, Nic, leaves his cot, walks to an open window, and tragically falls to his death. In the throes of atypical grief, “She” (they are credited as “He” and “She”) collapses at Nic’s funeral; her husband — a therapist with a distrust of psychoanalysis — has her discharged from the hospital and takes it upon himself to counsel her. The outcome, a merging of both the professional and personal, overlaps into some wild and dangerous territory. 

His means of counsel is exposure therapy or having her confront her greatest fears to overcome her grief. As her second greatest fear is nature, they hike to the cabin in the woods where she had spent the previous summer with their son, writing her, since abandoned, thesis criticising Gynocide. But through this journey of grief, something wild and sinister unleashes, and the film powerfully explores themes of grief, sexual violence, sadomasochism, the untamed power of nature, and the violence that resides in all of us.

In a tragic line from the film to Gainsbourg’s personal life. Gainsbourg’s sister, the British fashion photographer Jane Barry, whose work appeared in numerous commercial magazines and newspapers (including Vogue and The Sunday Times Magazine), as well as collaborations with her mother (the late Jane Birkin) and sisters, died as a result of a fall from her fourth-floor apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on 11 December 2013. Gainsbourg has said it’s impossible to know the reasons for the fall, but it remains a profoundly tragic connection to the film.

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a Cuban-born artist best known for her Silueta series, a succession of works where she created imprints of her body in nature to become part of the earth and embody the process of rituals. As she progressed with the series, which saw her body pressed in mud, sand, and ice, she used a range of organic matter (twigs, leaves, even blood), making body prints in landscapes or painting her outline or silhouette onto walls.

While other artists during the 1970s were already experimenting with land, body, and performance art, Mendieta was the first to create “earth-body sculptures,” often using her naked body to explore and connect with the earth. Such examples of this include Imagen de Yagul, from the series Silueta Works, Mexico, 1973–1977, while in Corazon de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) (1975), Mendieta kneels next to an impression of her body that has sluiced into the soft, muddy riverbank. 

Ana Mendieta, Corazón de roca con sangre (Heart of Rock with Blood) (1975).

As the series progressed, Mendieta created a template to replace her need to lie down, which she achieved by laying on a foam board and having her outline traced and then cut out. She would then take this cut-out with her into the landscape and use it to either trace her silhouette in the earth, imprint her image on a surface, or sometimes to directly stand in for her body. Between 1973-1980, Mendieta created over 100 Silueta in various materials, including organic materials ranging from earth to wood, grass to flowers, leaves and moss, algae, mushrooms, pebbles, fire, ice and stone. 

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) (1976).

Of the series, in 1981 Mendieta said:

‘I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’

I was fortunate to see the series close-up at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last autumn. The paintings are small, but seeing them on the wall in succession is an incredibly potent experience - the fusing of woman and earth, fire and blood, life and death, peace and violence. 

On 8 September 1985, Mendieta died after ‘falling’ from her 34th floor Apartment. Before her fall, neighbours had overheard a violent argument between Mendieta and her husband of 8 months, the sculptor Carl Andre. While there were no witnesses before the event, neighbours had overheard Mendieta screaming “no” before the fatality while scratches covered Andre’s face. In his call to 911, Andre said, “My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” 

Following three years of legal proceedings, Andre's lawyer described Mendieta's death as a possible accident or a suicide. In February 1988, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder by a nontribal jury. 

I’m pretty sure you can still purchase sweaters stating otherwise.

P.S. There is a very good podcast called Death of an Artist if you want to learn more.

This piece originally appeared on my Substack newsletter, Love Letters During a Nightmare, on 8th September 2023.