M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Ana Mendieta
Untitled, from the series Silueta Works in Iowa, 1978; photograph;
gelatin silver print, 19 1/2 in. x 15 1/2 in. (49.53 cm x 39.37 cm);
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of
Collectors Forum, Emily L. Carroll, Jerome S. Markowitz and Maria
Monet Markowitz, and Judy C. Webb; © Estate of Ana Mendieta
Collection, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
and man-made pigments. In 2000 we exhibited a large
grass photograph in the tapestry gallery at the V&A. The
surrounding 15 th century tapestries of the Devonshire
Hunt series depicted scenes of flowers and trees, but no
green in sight. The grass was blue. The yellow mixed to
make the green dye was very volatile and over time had
disappeared. Our grass photographic tapestry was only in
shades of yellow and green, and served as a haunting
reminder of what had been lost over the centuries.
We like Freud’s paper “On Transience.” “Transience
value is scarcity value in time. ….Nor can I understand
any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of
art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its
worth because of its temporal limitation.”
As mentioned before, Mother and Child used a
stay-green grass developed by our science colleagues at
IGER. We had not however quite taken into the
equation just how influential light would be on the longterm
preservation of the image. The ephemeral nature of
our creations had been tempered somewhat using the
stay-green, so the fading of the work was no longer
happening along the physiological but occurring along the
pathological route. The shorter wavelengths present in
light are potentially destructive to sensitive pigments and
given the opportunity will bleach them away. It is a task
of museum conservators to anticipate and avoid direct
exposure of precious paintings, photographs, textiles and
tapestries to light. Mother and Child was the first artwork
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presented publicly using the stay-green seed. It was
developed, grown and dried in 1998 in response to an
exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art,
California, Out of Sight: Imaging/Imagining Science.
Displayed behind plexi-glass the grass photograph
received direct light over the course of the six week
exhibition resulting in fading in areas of the image
subjected to the most intense light. It became apparent
that to conserve the image in the long term it would be
necessary to display the work in a non-direct, subdued
light.
This became the subject of an exhibition
Presence in 2001 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum in Boston. Alongside the creation of new
artworks in response to the museum’s collection, the first
ever Mother and Child grass photograph was brought out
of storage and exhibited within eye-view of a freshly
grown piece.
Mendieta explores a wide range of organic
materials in her work, which become potent
cultural and social signifiers. Aside from the
technical reasons for using grass as your primary
medium, does it also generate any particular
metaphysical resonances for you?
Discussing specifically what it is about the material that
interests us…it is a living medium, a fact in itself, and
carries associations of a living agent. It is ever-present in
the landscape and therefore within our memory,
formative and present. Our perception of this living,
growing agent has shifted, though never to the exclusion
of earlier understandings. In our first installation The Other
Side (1990), we subverted notions of interior/exterior,
ground/vertical space, and there was a response we had
to the instant, non-intellectual experience of the sensory
nature of our materials. The materials, clay, seed, water,
light are prime materials, the stuff of creation myth,
essential, life-maintaining. We explored these
connections in Dilston Grove (2003), where we grew the
interior of a deconsecrated and disused church.
Germination, growth, and decay are explicit processes
each carrying many associations. Transformation,
regeneration, life/death are some of the irresistible
themes we explore. Yet, the grass also pointed the way
to another more complex manifestation of a biochemical
synthesis – the ability to create photographs
using the controlled production of chlorophyll. Grass has
a uniformity that presents a light-sensitive surface. So the
medium carries a message as well.
Our large architectural works challenge the
building mass and subvert expectations of a familiar
growing medium. It is a catalyst. The work presents the
viewer with a shifting landscape of colour, growth,
texture, tonality, decay and degradation. It presents an
abstract canvas that perceptions and preoccupations can
be projected on.
The seedling grass planted on the vertical surface
is light, gravity defying. We work with the seed shoot.