In 1972 Ana Mendieta photographed parts of her own naked body, including her face, breasts, buttocks, thighs and hips as she pressed them against sheets of glass, in a series called Glass on Body. Using a time delay to trip the shutter, she squeezed and pushed her flesh against the glass, producing grotesque distortions and strange reflections. Between 1975-6, aged only seventeen, Francesca Woodman similarly photographed her naked torso covered by a sheet of glass, with its sharp corners pressed against her breasts, thighs and pubic triangle. With her head cut off or hidden by hair, Woodman used the glass to flatten and threaten vulnerable parts of her female anatomy, including her nipple and vagina.¹ Both sets of images suggest damaged tissue or physical deformities. They refuse the idea of an eroticised, objectified female body, although they invite the viewer to indulge other forms of voyeuristic or fetishistic pleasure. Both women have constructed fantasies of self-mutilation. The sheets of glass do not simply distort and manipulate the flesh; they threaten to cut the skin, to draw blood, to commit an act of violence.

Working in America in the 1970s, Mendieta, who was born in Cuba, was especially influenced by early feminist ideas which encouraged artists and photographers to explore feminine identity in their work. In the late 1960s and 70s artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, Hannah Wilke and Yayoi Kusama used their own (often naked) bodies in ‘art performances’ which questioned conventional gender roles and perceptions of female sexuality.² Photographic prints, sometimes directly controlled by the performing artist, provide the only visual record of these transitory events, and have become highly valued memories of, or substitutes for, the original art form. The value of these photographs is partly predicated on the loss of the performance. Significantly, both Mendieta’s Glass on Body series and Woodman’s Glass self-portraits were produced as experimental student works. In 1972 Mendieta was studying at the University of Iowa and in 1975-6 Woodman was working towards her BFA degree at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. It is not known if Woodman had seen Mendieta’s series, but they may have circulated in the art world at the time, and the younger photographer was familiar with contemporary performance art. The work of both artists explored the nature and limits of the photographic process as a means of documenting and critiquing (self) representations of the female body.

In view of the self-mutilating possibilities which underscore these disturbing images, the tragic early deaths of both women could be seen as eerie fulfilments of photographic fantasies. In 1981, two months before her twenty-third birthday, Woodman committed suicide by making a fatal jump from a window in Manhattan. Mendieta died in 1985 when she ‘fell’ from the thirty-fourth story of another Manhattan apartment after an argument with her husband the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Andre was acquitted of her murder in 1988, but the scandal and speculation which surrounded this incident divided the New York art world, and many continued to believe that she might have been ‘pushed’.³

Knowledge of the subsequent tragic ‘falls’ which ended both women’s lives can affect our responses to the photographic representations. Such knowledge increases our sense of the ominous and aggressive potential of the sharp corners and edges of the glass, which distort the body or threaten to cut the skin. Themes of threatened bodies and self-mutilation preoccupied both artists, although their photographic interests diverged during the 1970s. Woodman had already introduced the theme of painful self-harming in a series from the early 1970s (produced between the ages of fourteen and seventeen) which show her naked, headless torso with wooden clothes pegs clamping her nipples and folds of skin. During 1973 Mendieta produced several works in which the artist’s body is photographed tied-up or threatened with mutilation, including a disturbing series Rape Scene, in which she poses naked from the waist down as a rape victim. The photographs are taken from a performance staged in response to the violent rape and murder of a fellow female student on the University of Iowa campus that year. Such uncomfortable images of self-mutilation, which profoundly unsettle the viewer, can be read as a provocative personal response to women’s fear of violation. The following year, she also used super 8 film to pursue the subject of violence, playing on the idea of its reflection in glass. In Stomach Mirage of 1974 the camera films Mendieta’s performance as it is reflected in a mirror. Seated naked in a field, she holds her stomach as if pregnant. She then raises and cuts into her abdomen as feathers fly out into the surrounding countryside. Birth is thus associated with (reflected) violence, albeit violence which disperses into nature as the feathers float away.

These works also emerged from a 1970s American culture in which masochistic acts of self-harming were widely adopted by female and male artists, often in pursuit of some subjective ‘cleansing’ or renewal. For Mendieta, themes of death and violence soon became absorbed into a more essentialist and organic repertoire, in which the destroyed or decaying female body dissolved into nature, from where it might be reborn – or recycled. In her famous Silueta series of 1973 to 1981, she made moulds or imprints of her own naked body in earth, grass, snow, sand, flowers, stones and twigs, and photographed or filmed the destruction and erosion of each of the moulds. In this series the death – or disappearance – of a woman’s body becomes part of an earthy natural cycle, recorded in both sculptural and photographic form.

Although both Mendieta and Woodman explored themes of female self-representation, their work also emerged from a tradition of ‘fine art’ photography in 1970s America. Both Mendieta and Woodman used techniques of close cropping to frame their truncated or decapitated female bodies. These devices echo the conventions adopted by some Surrealist artists, and by American formalist photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz or Paul Strand.⁴ Both Glass series also suggest many metaphorical possibilities. It has often been noted that the photograph has a skin-like surface and that the sensitivity of the negative is like a membrane-skin.⁵ Each print could be seen then as a metaphoric body, vulnerable to cutting and scarring. And photographic space is cropped and framed, just as the sheet of glass threatens to cut and mutilate Mendieta’s body. Through the effects of editing, cropping, lighting and positioning of the camera, a photograph can probe and explore a body, just as the sheet of glass pulls and presses against the flesh, creating strange corporeal shapes and evoking fears of violation. As Roland Barthes has written: “I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice.”⁶ To extend Barthes’s metaphor of death, we could see those fatal ‘falls’ from Manhattan windows as exercising the final cut, through glass.

¹ This series is in the collection of George and Betty Woodman
² For a discussion of the important role of ‘Body Art’ within such performances, and of the work of (among others) Schneemann, Kusama and Mendieta, see Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998
³ For a full account of Mendieta’s tragic death and the trial of Carl Andre see Robert Katz, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1990. Mendieta’s early death and subsequent absence from mainstream art history is also a central theme of Judith Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999
⁴ Woodman’s debt to various formalist traditions has been much debated. See, for example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Just like a woman’ in Photography at the Dock, University of Minnesota Press, 1991; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets’ in Bachelors, MIT, 1999; and Harriet Riches, ‘Delicate Cutting: Francesca Woodman’s Articulation of the Photographic Coupe’ in Object, no 5, London, 2002/3
⁵ See Harriet Riches, op.cit., 54
⁶ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (first published 1980), Vintage, London, 2000, 11