Incremental Heart: Carolee Schneemann's Hand Heart for Ana Mendieta
The list of materials is enough to set me reeling.
Paint, blood, ashes, syrup and smothered patches of snow, the snow giving way under that red weight which is warm like a heart is harm.
The colour of the hand-hearts inhabits the white surface like a spoor. It conjures Mendieta’s Siluetas, but more broadly the influence of SanterÃa in her work, an Afro-Caribbean religion in which blood signifies not violence but life force.
Signifies something like Paul B. Preciado’s potentia guadendi: a body reaching its ultimate state, occupying itself in full.
Potentia guadendi’s central tenet: you cannot be forced to withhold your desire. Nor can you be forced into it.
Whatever the body is subjected to, desire goes where it goes.
Schneemann said
I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material.
And, oh—what is put on a body.
On an actual body.
This work, for instance. This red and melting work.
The work of following the trail of the red-hoofed deer that staggered through here, dying by degrees as its heart kept falling and returning, falling and returning to the wounded chest. Each time, a little more sundered.
A little less, a little less each time it re-entered the open breast.
Maybe the work is learning how to bear it: the incremental loss of a heart. The elation—brief and false—when it returns to its cavity just long enough for a single beat, a single pulse.
But, is that not the wish for any heart?
That it last just long enough?
Just long enough.
.