by Olivia Laing
It’s never going to be possible to ascertain what happened from the messy and contradictory fragments that have survived. A doorman on the street heard a woman screaming, No, no, no, no. The bedroom was very disordered. There were raw scratches on Andre’s nose and back and arm. Mendieta was terrified of heights, so scared that when she was invited by the Vatican to view the Sistine Chapel ceiling, an honour very rarely offered, she wasn’t able to climb the ladder. The marriage wasn’t going well. She was planning on leaving him. She was so small that 73 per cent of her body height was beneath the window sill. To fall, she would first have had to leap into the air. She was drunk. He was drunk. She had been mixing her wine with soda water. When Andre rang 911 for the second time his voice was so high-pitched the operator thought she was talking to a woman. Calm down, ma’am, she said. The doorman suffered from auditory hallucinations. Ana had discussed her husband’s affairs on the phone with a friend that night, sometimes in Spanish, which he couldn’t speak, and sometimes in English. Yes, she said divorcio, a word even a non-Spanish speaker can understand. Yes, he was in the room.
During the trial, Jack Hoffinger, the lawyer for Andre’s defence, tried to build an argument that Mendieta was suicidal, deputising her own work against her. ‘Do you know the art where she used her own body to make impressions on the ground?’ he asked a witness. He asked about the photographs in which there was blood running down her face, in which her body impacted on earth, in which she was melding into earth, ‘in which she depicted the body of a woman lying face down with blood coming out.’
Maybe he’d seen a photograph of Mendieta taken in Mexico in 1973, where she’s lying on a rooftop, covered by a sheet that is drenched, truly flooded in blood, an ox heart lying at the place on her chest where her own heart would be. I have read repeatedly, by critics as well as lawyers, that this is a prefiguration of what would come to pass in New York City a decade later, but this is a tautology, since part of what her work was constructed to reveal was the certainty of violence and death, as well as the probability of violent death being gendered. As Chris Kraus says in I Love Dick: ‘Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?’
This was Dworkin’s question too, and though she lost the porn wars, it hasn’t yet been solved. But Dworkin said something as well. In the preface of Intercourse she wrote: ‘Submission can be refused and I refuse it.’ Isn’t Mendieta’s work also about that refusal? About the certainty of destruction, and the certainty too of abiding, resisting, fertilising the future. A woman turning into flowers, a woman rising from the dirt. Like Sarah Ann Ottens, like Rose Keller, like everyone who has been subjected to violence, she was a person, not a thing, bursting with possibility until the end.
Mendieta left a gap in the world, and her absence has served as rallying point for resistance against both the exclusion of women in the arts and the ongoing failure to stamp out what remains an epidemic of violence against women, both of which disproportionately affect women of colour. In 1992, the Women’s Action Coalition organised the first protest in Mendieta’s name. Five hundred women gathered outside the opening of the new Guggenheim Museum, holding a banner that announced: ‘Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta?’ In 2015, a new generation of activists, the No Wave Performance Task Force, protested Andre’s retrospective at Dia: Beacon, leaving chicken blood and guts outside the gallery’s Chelsea outpost. In the intervening years, and in part because of this ongoing activism, Mendieta’s astonishing body of work has finally begun to achieve the recognition it deserves.
Whether she was murdered or not, the fact of her death continues to expose entrenched layers of misogyny. In a hagio-graphic profile of Carl Andre in the New Yorker in 2011, twenty-six years after her death, the interviewer described Mendieta’s work as morbid. Imagine believing that we brought it on ourselves, that we desired, coveted, longed for our own destruction. Now turn to her notebook, full of what she called, conscious of her own value, Important Ideas. They’ll never be realised now, but a phrase keeps recurring: the essence of Mendieta, the antithesis of morbidity. ‘Do it with a size 5 feet . . . Do it outside . . . Do it with a structure . . . Do a volcano.’ She knew that the body was many things at once, that it is always in flux. ‘Document over a long period of time the eruption of the figure’, she scribbled. ‘Make a figure so that it shines like when water runs down a mountainside.’
5
A Radiant Net
IT ISN’T EASY FOR a solid body to slip the net. The women’s liberation movement addressed the things that happened to a category of bodies, proposing ways of resisting and fighting back. But what if there was another route to freedom, a way of evading categorisation altogether?
In the sweltering September of 1967, when she was fifty-five, Agnes Martin renounced her life as an artist and left New York for good. She cut off her long hair, gave away her brushes and paints, hitched an Airstream to a Dodge pick-up and lit out for the territories, pausing only to park outside a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and sleep for two days. For more than a year she lived on the road, camping in deserted national parks, swimming wherever there was a river or a lake, looping west, crossing north into Canada and then plunging south nearly all the way to Mexico.
She reached harbour in 1968, pulling into a cafe in the small town of Cuba, New Mexico and asking if they knew of any land with a spring to rent. For the princely sum of ten dollars a month, the manager’s wife leased her fifty acres on a remote mesa, one thousand feet above sea level. There was no electri-city or phone, water came from a well and the nearest neighbour was six miles away. To get into town meant driving twenty miles on unmarked dirt roads. Martin was undeterred. The wide-open space and corresponding sense of going unwatched were more than compensation for the toughness of the life.
She slept in her camper while she built a one-room house out of adobe, followed by a log-cabin studio made from ponderosa pines. She lived up there alone, a stocky, red-cheeked pioneer. But even high on the mesa, with her back to the world, Martin was still a person moving between obstacles, braking and cornering in search of empty space. Her retreat to the desert was tightly bound up with a need to escape the body – to manage illness, to sidestep gender, to outrun sexuality. ‘Now I’m very clear’, she wrote in 1973, ‘that the object is freedom.’
She’d long been trying to leave the figure behind, never mind all the heavy weather it drags with it. By the time she left the city, Martin was famous for the frugal revelation of the grid, a mode of abstraction that goes as far from form as it is possible to travel. She made the first grid at the age of forty-six, initially scratched into paint and then pencilled onto primed and painted six-foot canvases coloured white, burlap brown, deep-water blue, even gold. They were deliberately the size of a person, she explained, so that the viewer would feel as if they could step right into the shimmering ocean of her lines.
To look at one of Martin’s grids is to receive an object lesson in the illusory nature of physical form. Close up, it is plainly a net, composed of thousands of rectangular cells: little boxes that sometimes house small incumbents in the form of dots or dashes. Step away, and the lines abruptly dissolve into a wavering, pulsing mist. There is nothing to hang on to. No one line matters more than any other and so the eye is free to move, an ocular liberty that induces a kind of rapture in the viewer, an experience of being temporarily untethered from the material realm. Because you can only have one of the available viewing experiences at any given moment, there is a sense that the painting always has more to give, that it’s pulsing at a frequency that cannot be fully grasped or comprehended.
Despite its liberatory effects, the grid is manifestly about control; though it induces an experience of abstraction, even borderlessness, it is an art composed of fixed and rigid boundaries. The grid represented a new artistic horizon for Martin, an aesthetic territory grab, as well as a moral and spiritual declaration, humility as the path to happines
s. But there was also the psychological dimension of what it meant to spend day after day, year after year drawing lines that are boxes that dematerialise. Duck/rabbit: a grid is always two things at once, a door onto empty space and a mesh or cage. Does it let you out or hold you in? Both might be appealing, needful, or then again alarming, even dangerous.
When Martin left New York in 1967, it wasn’t that she’d run out of ideas. The year before, she was photographed by Diane Arbus for an article on the American art scene in Harper’s Bazaar. She sits on a wooden chair in her near-empty studio, dressed in quilted overalls, thick white socks and paint-splashed moccasins, testament to the chill her Acorn wood-burning stove could never quite dispel. Her thin hands are clutched in her lap, and one foot turns inward, pressing anxiously against its fellow. An immensely capable person, who could build a house from scratch and also wire it, she looks through Arbus’s lens worn, fearful, eager to please and dangerously undefended.
There are subtle technical means by which Arbus has generated her mood of apprehension and foreboding. Martin’s chair is set at a diagonal, right at the front of the frame. The shot is constructed so the lines of the floorboards seem to converge behind her, giving a sense that she is being drawn on tracks towards a region of mysterious darkness at the rear of the room. Arbus was almost supernaturally attuned to currents of anxiety and unease, sometimes conveying them when they weren’t actually present in her subjects, and the track lines could also be read more prosaically as a nod to Martin’s grids. But the disquiet she was picking up did in this case stem from a real source. Though the existence of the picture is in itself a testament to Martin’s new-found fame, she was right on the verge of a precipice. In the months after the shutter’s click she suffered a psychotic break.
She wandered the city in a fugue state, unable to speak. After a day or two, she was picked up by the police and taken to Bellevue, a public hospital and place of last resort for New York’s homeless and uninsured. She didn’t know or wasn’t able to give her own name or address and so she was confined on the locked public ward, alongside violent and disturbed patients. While she was there she was restrained, heavily medi-cated and given electro-convulsive therapy. In this controversial procedure an electric current is applied to the brain, inducing a fit or seizure. It can relieve depression and catatonia, though it doesn’t always work and often has a side-effect of memory loss.
Later, Martin told a friend she had shock therapy over a hundred times. These days patients are routinely anaesthetised and given a muscle relaxant before the electric current is applied, but in the 1960s, and especially in underfunded hospitals like Bellevue, they were often fully conscious and strapped down in a brutal process known as unmodified ECT. Sylvia Plath, who was given two courses of ECT, the first unmodified, described the process in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. The first is terrifying: the narrator feels something split and shake her until she believes her bones might break. The second course, based on Plath’s treatment at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, is administered more gently, and the metaphors are correspondingly softer: ‘the darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard.’
Martin had been in the grips of what she called a trance, an acute episode of the schizophrenia diagnosed in her early adulthood. Schizophrenia is generally not a constant condition, but tends to involve unpredictable cycles of acute episodes punctuated by longer chronic phases. Like many patients, Martin was broadly sane and capable much of the time, though subject to ongoing symptoms that included auditory hallucinations she called voices, logorrhoea and mild catatonia. These basically steady periods were punctuated by acute episodes of psychosis, frank breaks with reality in which she became paranoid and delusional, beset by fear and dread.
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Visiting the Agnes Martin Gallery at the Harwood Museum in Taos in 2007, three years after Martin’s death at the grand old age of ninety-two, the critic Terry Castle deployed an unusual metaphor. The gallery was designed by Martin herself. It’s octagonal, and houses seven paintings, all made of horizontal layers of softly glowing blue and pink. Castle described this unusual space as ‘a tiny orgone box of a room, full of faintly pulsing energy currents, but also strangely full of grace, a promise of contact.’ When I first read that sentence, I was filled with pleasure. When people write about Reich’s doomed invention they almost always concentrate on its failings as a medical or scientific device. By comparing it to Martin’s paintings, Castle opens up the possibility of a whole new spectrum of meanings.
Though they seem at first glance poles apart, there are many odd parallels between Martin and Reich. Both were driven by that promise of contact, which they longed to make available to humanity at large. They wanted to connect people to a kind of universal love, and at the same time they both suffered from a paranoia that inhibited their capacity to achieve it, which might explain why their liberation devices – the grid, the orgone box – took the paradoxical form of cells, cages, closets.
In his fifties, Reich too found himself overwhelmed by paranoia in the wide-open spaces of the American south-west. He believed he could control the weather using a giant home-made gun made of metal pipes, a sci-fi weapon he called a cloudbuster, which he used to fight a ‘full-scale interplanetary battle’ with alien spaceships he thought were attacking the Earth. He wrote frequent letters to Eisenhower about his revelations, talked of formulas so secret he had never confined them to paper, identified publicly and in print with Jesus and Galileo, speculated that he would be put in prison for his own protection, but also told family members and his few remaining supporters that he believed he would be killed there. A letter to Eisenhower written on 23 February 1957 closed plaintively: ‘I am doing my best to keep in touch w an at times elusive and complicated reality.’
How could the lucid, politically engaged figure of the 1930s have become so thoroughly unmoored? What happened to Reich after he left Berlin in 1933 is a tragedy that perversely bears out the truth of his belief that all bodies are continually assailed by larger forces, sometimes too powerful to withstand. Though his enemies began whispering about schizophrenia that year, he never accepted the diagnosis, and nor was it confirmed by any doctor he saw. In 1957, by which time he was convinced that aliens were patrolling above his house, two psychiatrists concluded that though he was prone to paranoia and could become psychotic, he was not insane. He had delusions, but like Martin that doesn’t mean the fact of his paranoia was in itself unjustified or lacked an intelligible source.
During the run-up to war, Reich lost his home, his clinic and his country. His marriage to Annie broke up and he was separated from his two daughters. But the worst blow was his expulsion from psychoanalysis. Reich had his last private conversation with Freud in September 1930, just before he moved to Berlin. Freud had a holiday house in Austria, by the beautiful lake in Grundisee, and Reich went to call on him there. In a photograph taken that summer, Freud looks old and fragile and very thin, leaning heavily on the arm of his daughter Anna, who is wearing an airy green dress with short sleeves. Her father, by contrast, is in an immaculate three-piece suit and tie, his beard neatly shorn, a small dark object – perhaps a glasses case – protruding from his waistcoat pocket. He was seventy-four, and suffering badly from the cancer in his jaw.
In 1923, he’d been diagnosed with a malignant ulcer. The right side of his jaw and palate were removed, a major operation conducted under local anaesthetic. It turned his mouth and nasal cavity into a single gaping hole and destroyed the hearing in his right ear. He couldn’t eat or speak without his horrible prosthesis, nicknamed ‘the monster’ by his family, which caused constant pain and irritation, distorting his voice so that it sounded as if he’d been gagged. Over the years, he’d had dozens of operations (thirty-three by the time of his death). It’s worth bearing in mind that during his conflict with Reich, Freud inhabited a body in serious pain.
The orgasm theory had irritated him, but Reich’s shift into politics troubled Freud more deepl
y. Reich had come to discuss his new ideas and the conversation quickly stalled. ‘Freud wanted nothing of politics . . . He was very sharp and I was very sharp too.’ Neither man shouted, but it was clear that they had reached their parting place. Reich stayed perhaps an hour and a half, and when he left he looked back and saw Freud in the window, pacing ‘up, down, up, down, fast, up-down, up-down in that room.’ Reich had spent his whole adult life observing and interpreting bodies. His overwhelming impression was of an animal in a cage.
The two men never saw one another alone again, but over the next few years Freud kept a close eye on Reich’s political activities. He thought total political neutrality was the only way psychoanalysis could survive under Nazi rule, and Reich’s very public activism and Communist alliances struck him as dangerously inimical to this strategy. As Anna Freud explained in a letter written on 27 April 1933, a month after Hitler’s frightening Enabling Act confirmed the powers of the new regime: ‘what my father finds offensive in Reich is the fact that he has forced psychoanalysis to become political; psychoanalysis has no part in politics.’
That spring, the new Nazi government gave the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute a choice: submit to Aryanisation or close down. Reich fought for closure but was outvoted. Most of the Jewish analysts went into exile (this is when Reich fled over the mountains disguised as a ski tourist) and the Institute stayed open under the leadership of Nazi sympathisers. Within a few years, Freud’s surviving books would be locked in a ‘poison cupboard’, while the famous free clinic itself was transformed from a seedbed of left-wing idealism into what Elizabeth Ann Danto describes as ‘a horrible triage centre where psychoanalysts condemned their patients to death.’