![\"85_AC01_Castro_No](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_AC01_Castro_No-Wave-Performance-Task-Force_CryingAProstest-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>CRYING; A PROTEST<\/em>, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, March 7, 2015.
Photo : Sean Cain
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According to its website, the No Wave Performance Task Force is a collective interested in producing \u201cperformative social sculptures\u201d and responsible for a handful of projects since 20123<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - \u201cWhat is the No Wave Performance Task Force?\u201d on No Wave Task Force website, accessed March 26, 2015, www.nowavetaskforce.org\/.<\/span>. The group\u2019s first intervention with regard to Mendieta occurred in May 2014, in the context of Andre\u2019s retrospective at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea. A group gathered in front of the institution, wearing white jumpsuits on which was written \u201cI wish Ana Mendieta was still alive,\u201d and unrolled a banner with the same message before proceeding to deposit a large pile of chicken blood and guts by the institution\u2019s entrance. This last action was meant as a direct reference to Mendieta\u2019s notorious use of blood in her earth-body performance art. In the view of Christen Clifford, who took part in the event, it was not a protest against Andre\u2019s work, but an opportunity to use his institutional recognition to turn attention to Mendieta, to stain Andre\u2019s retrospective with Mendieta\u2019s memory4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Jillian Steinhauer, \u201cArtists Protest Carl Andre Retrospective with Blood Outside of Dia: Chelsea,\u201d in Hyperallergic <\/em>(May 20, 2014), accessed March 26, 2015, http:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/127500\/artists-protest-carl-andre-retrospective-with-blood-outside-of-diachelsea\/.<\/span>. While the staff of the prestigious institution rapidly discarded the rotting flesh, traces of blood and a scorching smell lingered, leaving a lasting smear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Jacques Derrida\u2019s view, according to the editors of his book The Work of Mourning<\/em>, acts of mourning \u201cconsist in interiorizing the other and recognizing that if we are to give the dead anything it can now be only in us, the living.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, \u201cEditors\u2019 Introduction,\u201d in Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning<\/em>, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9.<\/span> It is precisely within this framework that the actions of the No Wave Performance Task Force become most meaningful. Through its choreographed set of actions, the group is not frantically vilifying Andre and his work, but seeking to return to Mendieta what was prematurely taken away from her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group\u2019s most recent intervention took place at the Beacon branch of the Dia Art Foundation on March 7, 2015. In an action titled CRYING; A PROTEST<\/em>, fifteen feminist artists, poets, and activists joined together in the museum\u2019s galleries to cry the memory of Ana Mendieta. Divided into two groups, the sobbing women navigated through the space of Andre\u2019s retrospective exhibition and then reconvened in the museum\u2019s main room for the performance\u2019s climax, a chorus of lurid wails. Contrasting with Andre\u2019s \u201ctasteful\u201d geometric lines and shapes, these unwanted visitors\u2019 over\u00adwhelming emotional responses must have appeared all the more turbulent to other visitors and gallery guards. In an article written following the performance\/intervention, Marisa Crawford remembers, \u201cThe space filled with a cacophony of sobs and wails and sniffing snot and choking back tears and gasping for air. It was stunning, and I started crying more intensely immediately, glancing from the artwork to the museum \u00adbooklet and back again.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Marisa Crawford, \u201cCrying for Ana Mendieta at the Carl Andre Retrospective,\u201d Hyperallergic <\/em>(March 10, 2015), accessed March 26, 2015, http:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/189315\/crying-for-ana-mendieta-at-the-carl-andre-retrospective\/.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Precipitously, guards escorted the performers outside as some started shouting \u201cWe wish Ana Mendieta was still alive!\u201d Others began scattering pieces of paper bearing the same message, an allusion to the Women\u2019s Action Coalition protest at the opening reception of an exhibition featuring Andre at the short-lived Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1992, during which images of Mendieta\u2019s work were disseminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her article, Crawford eloquently explains the motivation for the performance: \u201cCrying is often seen as a sign of weakness, of emotional excess, and coded as feminine. As a group, though, our tears were seen as a disruption\u200a\u2014\u200aa threat. Like much of Ana Mendieta\u2019s art, our performance was ephemeral.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> CRYING; A PROTEST<\/em> reconfigured the weakness associated with emotionalism as a powerful tool for contestation and established a haunting feminist shadow over the presentation of Andre\u2019s aesthetic, one historically described as masculine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Making Memory Matter, <\/em>Lisa Saltzman criticizes a contemporary culture in which grief is a public and a performative ritual, a \u201cculture in which any loss has the potential to elicit a public outpouring of grief and in which any site has the potential to become a shrine, an impromptu site of mourning, even if not often of remembrance.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter <\/em>(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11.<\/span> The CRYING; A PROTEST<\/em> intervention at Dia:Beacon was successful precisely because it cashed in on a culture of grief. The feminist group successfully turned the apathetic aestheticism of Andre\u2019s minimalism into an emotional site of mourning. His geometric structures became memorials to Mendieta. Although brief and neither supported nor tolerated by the institution, the crying protest became inscribed within the history of the Andre retrospective; it became inseparable from the reception of his work. From a \u201cperformative ritual,\u201d the feminist group made a poetic demonstration and turned the hallowed space of the art institution into one that blended the spiritual and the political. By performing actions both disturbing and endearing, hopeless and effective, provisional and persisting, the No Wave Performance Task Force is rehabilitating the potential of performance art and activism within a contemporary culture in which remembrance is selective and often used to overshadow matters that were central to Mendieta\u2019s art.<\/p>\n![\"85_AC01_Castro_No](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_AC01_Castro_No-Wave-Performance-Task-Force_We-Wish-Ana-Mendieta-Was-Still-Alive-2-scaled.jpg\")
We Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive<\/em>, outside Dia Art Foundation, New York, May 19, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Jillian Steinhauer (first published on Hyperallergic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n