by Olivia Laing
Among the students at Iowa that spring was Ana Mendieta, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban-American artist. The impression of her from snapshots is of enormous energy. She always seems to be turning away, impatient to get back to work, a tiny, scruffy, subversive beauty, smiling quickly at the camera in a polo neck and flared jeans. She arrived in America at the age of twelve, one of more than fourteen thousand children airlifted out of Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a programme spearheaded by the Catholic Welfare Bureau and the US State Department in response to widespread fears about the new Castro regime (her parents hoped to follow, but her father was arrested and imprisoned for eighteen years for supporting the failed American invasion of the Bay of Pigs). She spent a traumatic adolescence in brutal Catholic orphanages and foster homes before coming to the university to study art.
In 1972 she gave up painting, literally destroyed all her canvases, saying they weren’t real enough for what she wanted an image to convey – ‘and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.’ That same year she graduated from her master’s and joined the Intermedia MFA, a cutting-edge interdisciplinary course founded four years earlier by the artist Hans Breder. It was a space for experimentation, and she began to work with her own body, playing with her gender, dressing herself up in moustaches and beards. The performance was the work, art as physical transformation, though like many of the emerging category of body artists she also documented the temporary things she did, leaving behind a visible residue in the form of photographs and films.
A few weeks after Ottens’s murder, she invited her Intermedia class to her apartment in the Moffitt building. The door was unlocked, as doors in Iowa City in 1973 tended to be. Inside, her friends found Mendieta tied face-down to the table. She was wearing a plaid shirt, and was naked from the waist, her knickers round her ankles. Blood was smeared over her buttocks, thighs and calves. Her arms were tightly bound with white cord and her face was pressed into a pool of blood. A light was on directly overhead, casting the periphery into shadow, though it was possible to make out signs of a struggle, including torn and bloodied clothing and smashed crockery. Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973: her first serious attempt to mould reality, to seize and shape it.
Mendieta’s classmates stayed for almost an hour, discussing the scene and what it might mean. They were unsettled, but they were still art students, practised at analysing visual material, no matter how graphic. For the entirety of their visit, Mendieta didn’t move a muscle. Her performance was ephemeral, existing in a single place for a single afternoon, but she also asked a friend to document it. In these disturbing photographs, her body is exposed ankle to waist, smeared lavishly in blood. You can’t even see her head, let alone her face. The flash has blasted her calves and the rim of the table with light, throwing looming fairy-tale shadows up the wall. Little moons of broken crockery, bloodied moons of ass, a sticky red patch of something on the floor.
Critics often say Untitled (Rape Scene) is a recreation of what happened to Ottens, but it clearly isn’t, even judging by what was being reported in the local press at the time. Mendieta has given the events her own grotesque flourish, introducing the table and the cord (that same year she’d made a work in which she was tied up with rope and then writhed painfully across the gallery floor). Nor is it a reconstruction from the point of view of the attacker. The explosion of cold white light immediately frames it as a crime scene, not incident but aftermath, casting the viewer not only as voyeur but as investigator, even cop. Incorporated into the moment of image-making, the viewer becomes complicit in the queasy pornographic framing, the way a woman’s body can’t even be just a corpse.
Years later, Mendieta said the work came out of her own fear about what happened to Ottens. She couldn’t get it out of her head, not just the violence but the toxic atmosphere, the way newspapers wrote salacious accounts of the ‘slaying of Iowa co-ed’, speculating about Ottens’s sexual partners instead of reporting on the city’s abysmal rape statistics. ‘I think all my work has been like that,’ she said, ‘a personal response to a situation . . . I can’t see being theoretical about an issue like that.’ In an interview in 1985, she added: ‘A young woman was killed, raped and killed at Iowa, in one of the dorms, and it just really freaked me out. So I did several rape performance-type things at that time using my own body. I did something that I believed in and that I felt I had to do. I didn’t know if it was alright, or if it wasn’t, or it didn’t matter. That’s what I did.’
All summer, she kept making work about the murder. She constructed a crime scene with a mattress drenched in blood. She arranged herself in the middle of Clinton Street in Iowa City as if she herself was a corpse. She poured a bucket of cow blood and animal viscera onto the pavement outside her apartment, a meaty stain that a janitor eventually scraped into a cardboard box, and secretly filmed people’s reactions to it. But though she always used her own body, if she included a body at all, these pieces were not just about victimhood, and nor were they primarily designed to arouse empathy or mourning. Instead, they’re powerfully punitive. Whether Mendieta was in them or not, she remained aggressor and perpetrator as well as prey: the ringmaster of sadistic tableaux that confronted the viewer – and especially the random, non-art student passer-by – with evidence they could never quite decode, that lingered uneasily in their imagination.
Each culture has blind spots and I think what Mendieta was doing in Iowa City was not unrelated to Kate Millett’s agenda in Sexual Politics. Each time she assembled one of her nightmarish scenes, she was making it apparent that a crime had been committed, a bloody stain that would not wash out. By recreating the unnamed region in which violence happens to women she kept forcing it into visibility, making it indelible, impossible to ignore. This motivation situates her work amid the collective struggle of the period, since one of the many things the women’s movement was trying to do was expose sexual violence, a cultural blind spot so pervasive that it had almost escaped the attention of the sexual liberationists.
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The same year that Mendieta was collecting her buckets of blood from the butcher at Whiteway Supermarket (she kept the receipt in case she was questioned by the police), two other women were also trying to get to grips with sexual violence, to drag something damaged and unpleasant out of the dark. Both were writers who were unusually idiosyncratic and forthright in their visions, and both chose to conduct their enquiries, Kate Millett-style, by interrogating books and films to reveal the political ideology embedded in cultural artefacts. Strangely enough, although their conclusions ran counter to each other, Angela Carter and Andrea Dworkin even focused on the same set of texts. They looked at The Story of O, that staple of female abnegation, at European fairy tales like ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’, and in particular at the eighteenth-century theatre of cruelties dreamt up by the Marquis de Sade from his prison cell in the Bastille.
Andrea Dworkin was twenty-six in 1973, and frantic to finish her first book. She’d grown up in New Jersey, in a left-wing, lower-middle-class Jewish family haunted by raw, undigested memories of the Holocaust, the horrors of which were in the 1950s still walled up in agonised silence. She was molested for the first time at nine by a stranger in a cinema, and though this trauma never left her she was powerfully determined to follow her own erotic and intellectual appetites, to escape the suburbs and taste the world. She went to the liberal arts college Bennington in Vermont, was briefly imprisoned for protesting the Vietnam War, and after graduation slipped the traces and ran away to Europe, a passionate young hippie with a soft, open, laughing face and a mass of dark curls.
In 1969, she married a Dutch anarchist she met in Amsterdam while researching an article on the anarcho-left group Provo. He was so gentle at first, the man who almost killed her, who hit her with an iron bar, burned her with cigarettes, punched her in the breasts, smashed her head repeatedly into a concrete floor. Two decades later, she described this experience in an essay titled ‘What Battery Real
ly Is’. The worst thing, she said, was the absolute isolation of the battered wife, the way that neighbours – her neighbours, her family, her friends – had turned a blind eye to her bruises, her visible injuries.
No one would believe her. No one would intercede or get her out or even acknowledge the reality of what was happening. Even her own beloved father refused to help, and there was no institutional assistance either. Hospitals, the police: everyone she went to disbelieved her, or thought she was being paranoid and hysterical, accusations that would follow her right to the end of her life. It wasn’t just the pain or the fear of pain that made her want to die. It was the fact of becoming invisible, severed from the world by her abject status.
Reality itself began to degrade. ‘You become unable to use language because it stops meaning anything’, she wrote. ‘If you use regular words and say you have been hurt and by whom and you point to visible injuries and you are treated as if you made it up or as if it doesn’t matter or as if it is your fault or as if you are stupid and worthless, you become afraid to try to say anything. You cannot talk to anyone because they will not help you and if you talk to them, the man who is battering you will hurt you more. Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute.’ (In an ironic and no doubt acutely painful testament to the ongoing truth of what she was saying, lawyers at Newsweek halted publication of ‘What Battery Really Is’ in 1989 because they needed either independent verification like hospital or police records, self-evidently unavailable, or for Dworkin to publish anonymously to ‘protect’ the identity of her attacker. She published it in the Los Angeles Times instead.)
She ran away from him in 1971, but for a year her husband kept pursuing her, catching her, trapping her, punishing her again. She hid in empty or derelict places on the outskirts of Amsterdam, moved around a lot, tried to stay beneath the threshold of visibility. A houseboat infested with mice, someone’s kitchen, a deserted mansion, a commune on a farm, a movie theatre, the basement of a nightclub called Paradiso. Part of the nature of the trap was that she couldn’t afford the flight home to America, though she tried to save up money by working as a prostitute.
During this fugitive period, she met a woman, Ricki Abrams, who helped her hide and brought her books, the core texts of second-wave feminism. Sexual Politics. The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan. It wasn’t surprising she became so interested in fairy tales. Her life already had the bare, stripped outlines of the Brothers Grimm, where malevolence is structural and kindness erratic. But even though she was in the middle of an emergency, it still took her months to get her head around Millett’s argument: that what was happening to her, Andrea, was not personal or individual. It was not her fault. This humiliating and painful episode was in fact systemic, shared and culturally ordained. It was the central revelation of her life: that violence against women is political, and therefore capable of being communally resisted and overturned.
Like Mendieta, Dworkin was propelled by a sense of outrage and horror. She wanted to be safe, but she was also driven by a need to testify, to haul the ruined body into the light. It was as if she had come across evidence of a crime that was somehow simultaneously everywhere and completely invisible. (Later, as one of the most visible and radical figures of the women’s movement, she frequently compared violence against women to an unreported, unpunished, trans-historical, globally sanctioned genocide.) On the run, homeless and displaced, she began to write a book with Ricki, an account that would tear back the veil, exposing the secret, deforming nature of misogyny.
She finally made it back to New York in 1972. Someone asked her if she’d take a suitcase on the plane, for a payment of $1,000. The suitcase, which she knew contained heroin, never materialised, but she had the money and the plane ticket, a rare piece of luck in a long run of terror. Back in the city, she made contact with the women’s movement and finished her book – now called Woman Hating – alone, writing an impassioned foreword in July 1973, just as Mendieta was recreating rape scenes in the Iowa woods.
What Dworkin was trying to do was to find a language for sexual violence. The task wasn’t easy, either emotionally or stylistically. Violence occurs when one person treats another as expendable, an object, garbage, but part of the violence, and the abiding horror of the violent transaction, is that their humanity does not vanish, but is made to coexist with being an object; ‘just some bleeding thing cut up on the floor.’ Back in 1940, Simone Weil wrote in her essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force a much-quoted line defining violence as that which ‘turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’, but what she goes on to say is much stranger and more accurate.
From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.
Bottom line, the body becomes its own inescapable prison, its needs turned against it, reduced to unbearable, unignorable sensation. This is the true horror of violence, that the you of you is still inside.
As Dworkin knew from her own experience, it isn’t easy to speak from this place. When the rape victim Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, tongue cut out, hands chopped off, writes the name of her attackers in the dirt with a stick held in her mouth, she might be said to be enacting a metaphor, surmounting what Jacqueline Rose once described as the ‘obstacles that litter the path between sexual violation, indeed all sexuality, and language’, and of which scorn and denial are by no means the least difficult to overcome. Years later, introducing yet another room of college students to the concept of rape, Dworkin fantasised about standing on a stage and screaming instead of speaking: a communal scream that contained embedded in it the silence of all those women who had not been able to find language, or who had not survived long enough to tell their story.
How do you convey the systemisation of violence against women if there is a conspiracy of silence around it, if it is so tolerated and sustained as to have merged with the fabric of ordinary reality? Dworkin’s tactic was to amplify. To go hard. To find a language ‘more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography.’ It’s this strident, stylish, uncanny voice that makes Woman Hating and the dozen books that followed so exhausting and estranging, but also impossible to unhear.
Writing about misogyny did not, unsurprisingly, make her enough money to live on, and so the lecture circuit became a way to survive. In 1975, the year after Woman Hating was published, she started giving a speech called ‘The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door’. In an era in which, as Dworkin’s brilliant biographer and editor Johanna Fateman points out, marital rape was still legal in fifty states, this marked one of the first attempts to articulate the pervasive and everyday nature of rape.
It was hard enough just giving the speech, but the more Dworkin revealed, the more she discovered. ‘The Rape Atrocity’ made her the repository of thousands of women’s stories: ‘women who had been sleeping, women who had been with their children, women who had been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going home from school or in their offices working or in factories or in stockrooms . . . I simply could not bear it. So I stopped giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.’ While I do not always agree with Dworkin, I wish that every one of her detractors stopped for a
minute to imagine what it might be like to hold that kind of information inside their own bodies.
These communal experiences of misogyny, gathered personally and stored at a high cost, fuelled all her later books, especially her third, 1981’s terrifying and incantatory Pornography: Men Possessing Women. I can still remember where I was when I first read it. In the mid-1990s, I started an English degree at Sussex University. One of my courses was on feminism, and one of the set texts was Pornography. I read it in the library in a state of mounting physical horror. That library was a strange place. It was a marvel of brutalist architecture, shaped like a camera, but in those days every desk in every reading room was covered in a dense scrawl of pornographic graffiti, a palimpsest of fantasies and jokes. Working in the remoter regions, at the end of some dark avenue of stacks, it often felt almost overpoweringly erotic. As I read Dworkin, this pervasive atmosphere became more sinister, the pleasure of being able to inhabit a sexual body shifting into the horror of never being allowed to be anything else.
Like Weil said, the reduction of person into thing is the base equation of all violence, and in Pornography Dworkin presents it over and over again, naked, unadorned and, unlike Mendieta, from the perspective of the person to whom it’s happening: how it feels, what it looks like, how it smells. She recreates by way of words the ongoing, annihilating, manifestly non-consensual depersonalisation of women, their transformation into literal or metaphorical meat. Her intention is inoculation, the homeopathic dose of poison that cures, and yet this aspect of her writing is – in means if not in ends – reminiscent of no one so much as the Divine Marquis, the Madman of Charenton, Citizen Sade: aristocrat, revolutionary, prisoner, and the figure against whom Pornography is organised. Sade was famous as a libertine, an icon of sexual freedom. But freedom for whom, Dworkin asks. Her attack on Sade was about nothing less than the nature of freedom itself.