Review: Ana Mendieta, Traces
Mary Mattingly, The Brooklyn Rail
May 2014
“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made.”
This quote describes one of the many dichotomies in Ana Mendieta’s work, that of spiritual transcendence and material accumulation. If material accumulation represents the proceeds from an extended thievery of the commons, might a spiritualism restore them? Throughout her work, Mendieta provokes us to value transformation, loss, and decay. […]