There Was Blood
R.C. Baker, The Village Voice
February 2016
In the 1960s and ’70s, a hardy cadre of artists left such easily commodified mediums as painting and sculpture behind to explore the desert frontiers of land art and the inner ecstasies of performance art. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) played hide-and-seek amid the shifting levels of the Great Salt Lake while Carolee Schneemann unfurled a feminist manifesto from her vagina (Interior Scroll, 1975), each setting standards in their genres. Ana Mendieta’s work spanned both of these seminal movements, even as she brought various other postwar aesthetics into astonishingly resonant short films. Of the fifteen in the Lelong exhibition, nine have not been seen before. […]