Close for Comfort
"Converge: Works by Ana Mendieta and Hans Breder, 1970–1980" documents 10 years of both artists' work. Mr. Breder, who started the University of Iowa's highly respected intermedia program, was Mendieta's teacher. During the decade this exhibition covers, the pair were not only lovers; they were also each other's assistants. He used her as a model; she used him to help realize and document her work. This exhibition presents a rare instance in which the muse gained more from the relationship than the mentor.
Mendieta found her way to the university's art department in the late 1960s. Though she started as a painter, she switched to the intermedia program in 1972, finishing her master of fine art degree in 1977. Intermedia was a revolutionary program. Mr. Breder brought in the period's most groundbreaking artists and writers to participate: Vito Acconci, Mary Beth Edelson, Hans Haacke, Lucy Lippard, and Robert Wilson, among others, all of whom were innovating in the artistic realms of body and performance art.
This exhibition shows Mr. Breder to be less inventive in art than in curriculum-building. His black-and-white video "Moon Bright Sonata" (1971) presents two languorous nudes in a stream: One lies on her belly; the other, Mendieta, sits and leans over to kiss her partner's buttocks. Its voyeurism appears indebted to the Orientialism of Adolphe William Bougereau, its avant-garde subject to Manet's "Dejeuner sur L'Herbe."
Breder's photographs also demonstrate a debt to Surrealism. One series shows nude models, sometimes Mendieta, lying in a stream and holding a piece of mirrored glass so their bodies metamorphose into fractured parts, reminding one of Picasso's high Cubism and Man Ray's photographs of women as instruments. There's no doubt that Mr. Breder's art history influenced Mendieta, but this impact is only obvious in pieces from 1972, such as "Facial Cosmetic Variations" and "Chicken Piece." The former is an obvious reference to Man Ray's photographs of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy. The latter presents the naked Mendieta holding a recently beheaded, wildly flapping chicken whose blood splatters the floor, the walls, and Mendieta herself. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jackson Pollock, it is said to reference the Viennese Accessionists, artists known for their violent, ritualistic use of cow blood, to whom Mr. Breder introduced Mendieta. The self-conscious student quality, however, is gone by 1973, and this exhibition is chock full of signature Ana Mendieta, drawing on powerful mysteries of Catholicism, goddess worship, and Caribbean spiritual practices such as Santeria. Photographs show her beautifully proportioned, naked self covered in mud, feathers, and/ or blood, and silhouetted against the earth, goddess-like.
What makes this show so moving is Mr. Breder's seemingly ego-free participation in his student's transformation. Under Mendieta's direction, he styled and shot "Imagen de Yagul" (1973), which depicts Mendieta in a grave-like ditch covered with white flowers. He did the camera work for "Ocean Bird Wash-Up" (1974), a video in which Mendieta-as-bird-woman is gently thrown about in surf. And, at the Hotel Principal, he covered her in a white sheet and splattered her with blood in her haunting Frida Kahlo-meets-murder-scene performance.
In 1980, Mendieta left Mr. Breder to move to New York, where she met, collaborated with, and eventually married Carl Andre. Their marriage ended when Mendieta fell to her death from the 34th floor of their Greenwich Village apartment (he was tried and acquitted of her murder). "Converge" makes the tragedy of the Mendieta/Andre relationship all the more poignant. Would that Mendieta had instead chosen a partner like Mr. Breder who had helped her to soar.
Until March 1 (528 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-315-0470).
