Ana Mendieta , Jeanne Simmons, and Jennifer Calivas, and some further thoughts on the deeper layers of meaning in Open Casket

Chatting with Chelsea, she mentioned Ana Mendieta as someone I might want to research. I really like her work, but I was especially taken with her Siluetas series. Needless to say, I can't find any good creative-commons-licensed images, but the link above gives a good impression. I really like the aesthetic, and the moulding of the body into nature. It has obvious links to "Open Casket" but other, perhaps less obvious, links to earlier work where I explored the urge I had to merge my body into the landscape. I think Mendieta's motivation is slightly different (she describes them as an attempt to return to a maternal nature). It's interesting to me because I wanted to produce a piece that incorporated nature, but that was sculptural, and I have a love-hate relationship with art that comprises photographs of performed acts. I think a lot of it can be very good, but I need to explore the feeling of confusion it gives me between the art as the act, the art as the visual impression of the act, and the art as the photograph. I think I would want to record the act in a way that isn't a photograph, but that is then difficult and impractical. Of course, Open Casket is one way to record such an act as an indexical mark, but again, is Open Casket the act or the mark? Sometimes I wish I drank.

I also came across (again) the art of Jeanne Simmons, featured in Colossal. She likewise explores the merging of the body with the natural environment and the landscape. She talks about the familiarity of places where one spends a lot of time, and the bond that grows between the body and the landscape. This is very close to the feeling I wanted to explore in my own art, albeit not Open Casket. For me, it's the familiarity, but it's also the timeless/mindlessness/impersonal of the natural environment as an escape from difficult human feelings, as summed up by the phrase I used in my five minute video "... all around me, nature continued with benign indifference".

Lastly, my sister sent me a link to the work of Jennifer Calivas. By taking the photos herself using a trigger release, she plays perhaps with the very ideas I describe above (or maybe she's just really paranoid about IP law?). It's hard to say, as all the material about her seems to be (and sorry if she ever reads this, but I'm confident she won't) breathless marketing slop about toying with the concept of the female body, the earth, and transformation... I don't know, it was a lot of stuff about the earth and feminism, which are both good things, but it wasn't immediately clear how they related to each other, let alone the image. Maybe I just like my stuff a bit less cooked? Maybe I just don't get it. Who knows, really? Anyway...

Anyway, I like the images, whatever they mean. I also find the idea of taking the photo, without being able to see, a really interesting one. Clearly it would be a different image if taken by someone else - by 'breaking the 4th wall', Calivas re-enforces the sense that she is taking these images alone, which makes them feel intimate, lonely, and perhaps a bit dangerous. I guess, in a strange sense, it mirrors my own sometimes pathetic attempts to make Open Casket alone - a close friend pointed out that the act of making something ungainly, that I can't really move alone, is significant. In a way, the mark records my body, but it also records the undignified, unpractical, exhausting effort required to make it without the help and support that I so clearly needed.