Review of Ana Mendieta – she would have been at the forefront of art in this century | Art and design

A A large picture of the old ruins greets you outside Ana Mendieta’s exciting exhibition and immediately tells you that this is going to be different. It’s the kind of thing that looks more like a British Museum exhibition about a lost civilization before Columbia than the concrete walls of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing. Yet in his mind, that’s where Mendieta was as well. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, he was sent to the US at the age of 12 to escape protests. He felt like a stranger among white Americans. Home, for him, was the past, and he unearths the true sources of art and myth.

Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in new ways you would think that these old things were new. He played with fire, drawing a picture of a man with a gun on the ground or on a tree trunk, and then lighting it. A flame leaves a burning shadow of a person, like the people killed by a nuclear bomb or the dead in Pompeii buried in ashes. When you face a line of these charred ghosts emerging from real tree trunks you expect them to speak to you like the shadows of the dead.

Often, the human form that interacts with nature is Mendieta alone. In another photo, he is standing covered in brown mud on a tree so that his body seems to have sunk into the bark until he took refuge in it. Elsewhere, a female figure, sculpted and made of mud, slowly decays in the water.

However Mendieta was not above a joke. He poured animal blood on the side of the road so that it looked like human blood and secretly filmed passers-by as he tried to explain this horrific act of violence. In an early work he tries on a flower mustache, and rudely tells him who he was, and where he came from.

He returned to Cuba for the first time in 1980. Then, in 1981, two years after his father was released from a political prison there, he carved impressive, limestone sculptures in the quiet surroundings of a natural reserve. His black and white photographs make these Rupestrian Pictures, as he called them – it simply means “made of rock”, a sarcastic joke – seem like the complications of a lost civilization: the ancient Rupestrians, perhaps. The curved goddesses like the Venus of Willendorf are other obscure female forms, bat-like or exotic, with genitalia like sacred doors that protrude from the rocks as artistic but culturally fixed objects. Mendieta created them in the hope that travelers would discover his works and ponder them.

He was not the only modern artist who dreamed of, and faked, the American past. Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty wants to be the US’s answer to Stonehenge, sinking and resurfacing in the Great Salt Lake; Photo by James Turrell Roden Crater and Walter de Maria The Lightning Field have similar goals.

But Mendieta is different. He avoided large monuments in favor of unusual forms, such as human figures made of flowers. And instead of the familiar language of American modern art, he portrays real figures of the divine, personal legends that are as amazingly connected as William Blake. In the photos, films and objects are paintings, including beautiful paintings on the pages, in which Mendieta creates this picture. He brings his vivid imagination to nature, and makes him appear in the mud, or a picture made of white flowers in a straw box, or another depth in the mud that is dyed red like blood.

This artist is undeniable. Not only does he do amazing things but he also gives a very accurate theory of astronomy. They try to reconnect art and nature around the female myth of ancient, half-forgotten goddesses, who literally dig out of the earth or reveal what is hidden in trees with fire sacrifice.

These are paintings based on natural materials, leaves and ashes and with unlimited creativity to create unforgettable images. It’s also art here. Mendieta died in 1985 at the age of 36, under very controversial circumstances. This show doesn’t do any of that, nor will I, except to say that his art has more life than that the bricks that her husband Carl Andre sold to Tate years before he was charged, then acquitted, of the woman’s murder.

Mendieta who did not fall from his house may be at the forefront of art in this century. But then again, he would have been equally at home in the stone age. Now it is said that some archaeologists say that the hand paintings found in Palaeolithic caves are of women. Years before that, Mendieta fashioned the shell of his hand and turned it into a steel iron that he used to burn his stamp on the world – and history.