The Poetic Act as an Act of Resistance in the Feminist Practice of Ana Mendieta

Abstract

Between the potential to and the potential not to, according to Giorgio Agamben, there is a process of a creative (poetic) act, as an act of resistance towards the end of one's own completion, in this context analyzed through the work of feminist artist Ana Mendieta. Regarding the (in)completeness, Mendieta’s oeuvre exemplifies a perfect illustration that the disappearance of her art work is a way of communication that resists production of any formal finality, as a process within which the traces of the media used (her own body) also disappear because of the time and circumstances left to nature. The dematerialization of artwork in Mendieta’s case epitomized one of possible aspects of exposing the act of resistance as a realization of a quantum of potential through the event, appearing as a poetics of inoperativity as defined by Agamben and erasing boundaries between the inception and the performativity of the poetic time, a duration that is not limited to one existence or aesthetic phenomenon. In the intersection between early feminist art practices (based on essentialism) and the second wave that relied on anti-essentialism as a new conception, Mendieta's work positioned its own dialectic among the separated feminist views about the use of the female body as a medium