Mendieta was interested in transforming the human body. She completed a series entitled Glass on Body, in 1972 at the University of Iowa. She took a square sheet of glass and pressed her face against it. This action distorts the face, beyond recognition while manipulating the skin into a sculptural form. Mendieta documented the transformations of her body's flesh.
Jenny Saville has basically re-created Mendietas work. Jenny Saville has taken her torso and pressed it up against glass. When Saville lectured at Boston University she did not cite Ana Mendieta as being part of her source material. Jenny Saville as been called an artist who, " reclaims female subjectivity by emphasizing woman's potent flesh" (1 Kuspit). Mendieta not only moved beyond reclaiming the female body or flesh as a subject matter. She engaged in the political issues that surrounded the art she was making.
Mendieta shows us what is actually happening when she presses her body against the glass. The viewer can see the edges of the pain of glass. In some cases the edges of the glass interact with Mendietas body. Savilles work is a straight on view. She does not let the viewer know that that the body is pressed up against a sheet of glass. Savilles photos act more like paintings. Mendieta's Glass on Body causes the viewer to experience a deeper since of connection to his or her own body.
Most individuals know what it feels like to be cut with a sharp edge. Mendieta captures this essance of pain and distorts the body simultaneously. Saville is dealing with the same issues of mutilation of the body. She is only able to capture the distortion of the body.
Saville stated that, "I can't look at any other contemporary art." She can only look at art from the past, for example Courbet or Degas. Saville can not look at contemporary art, because, "if I look at anything else, it gives me other options,"
(1 Elton). She is putting herself in danger of recreating someone else's work. She does not seem to be aware of what is happening currently, or what has happened in the past few decades.
Like Medieta, Saville, uses her body like a prop, "It's like loaning my body to myself. So the flesh becomes like a material" (1 Elton). Saville was going to use the photos that she created with the glass, to make paintings. She claimed that, "When I saw the Polaroids they were just perfect as photographs, better than I could ever have transformed them with paint"(1 Elton). If she had painted the photos, they would have been one step removed from Medietas work.
merzbau
Piero Manzoni's
