Radical Virtuosity

is widely considered a definitive analysis of this Cuban American artist's pioneering work.As Viso recognized, Mendieta's "reference to African and Afro-Cuban subjects was loose and self-styled in its appropriation" while "her invocation of such content, particularly from Santería" revealed a cursory, admittedly superficial treatment of Afro-Cuban religiosity, which Mendieta herself called "voodoo" in the early 1980s (quoted, p. 124).For Viso, critics' insistence on excavating Afro-Caribbean meanings from Mendieta's work surely contributed to her exoticization and encouraged self-mythologization, especially in traditionally Eurocentric spaces where largely White, privileged audiences engaged mostly White, privileged artists.Subsequently, José Quiroga's brilliant Cuban Palimpsests (2005) demonstrated themes far more central and intentional in Mendieta's art.Mendieta's attacks on patriarchy, Latin American masculinities, gender binaries, and Cuban exiles' authenticity narratives of identity were not only ahead of their time, but derived their visual power from troves of personal experience.For this reason, Genevieve Hyacinthe's interpretation of Mendieta's art seems as provocative and innovative as it is paradoxical and, at times, speculative and unconvincing.Adopting "a reception-based lens," she shows how "Mendieta employs her striking performatives to institute an insurgent message of political identification and action, read here as spiritually and sociopolitically inflected black Atlantic collectivity" (p.26).Casting aside intent and Mendieta's admittedly "surface knowledge" of the Black Atlantic movement as unnecessary, she defines Mendieta's universalizing mixology of Catholic, Afro-Cuban, and "prehistoric" indigeneity as "radical virtuosity," an effort to break boundaries, identify with the margins, and overturn White hegemony.And she offers a strong discussion of Mendieta's confrontational rebukes of the U.S. Earthworks movement, some of which involve the artist's partial entombment as a means for commenting on the exploitation and abuse of women's bodies to that of the Earth.Similarly, Hyacinthe contends, Mendieta's evocation of the Mexican indigenous female deity in Imagen de Yágul (consciously positioning "herself as artist, brush and artwork" [p.17]) serves to "empower her audiences to join her in the struggle for political agency," not by claiming her own body as an evidentiary site for the injustice suffered by the marginalized, but rather by making her body visible only in outlined form against a backdrop provided by nature (such as a tree) or by making it literally disappear under piles of mud or dirt (p.211)

Appropriation · Art · Art history · Literature · Narrative · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy