Jennifer Tamayo's Erasure of Carl Andre in the Shapes of Ana Mendieta

We are stunned and moved by Jennifer Tamayo at Fanzine! Tamayo has created some insistent erasures of Carl Andre texts from the 400-page book, CARL ANDRE: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010, published by Dia Art Foundation to accompany its current yearlong Andre retrospective (called out in May by activists who protested in front of the Chelsea branch by splaying chicken blood and guts on the sidewalk). Andre, of course, famously responded to the unsolved nature of the 1985 death of his wife, Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, by saying post-acquittal that she somehow "went out the window." Tamayo's work responds to this, and to Mendieta's invisibility in general, made sadly more evident by the Dia show. "I couldn’t find Ana Mendieta so I dug her up from a language that had worked hard to obscure her," she writes.

What follows the work at top (obviously a smart hacking reminiscent of Menedieta's famous "Sileutas Series"):

this erasure was created through the erotic while uttering to myself, out of seemingly nowhere, from some purposeful and well-lit depth, I WILL ERASE U FROM THIS EARTH.

tho, i don’t know who i am saying this to. who is the you here?

I’m saying it to Carl, I guess.

Carl’s legacy itself, which so delicately hinges upon our forgetting, and the institutional and well-orchestrated erasure of events that are, at best,——————– I don’t know.

and then later, as in now, as I’m revising, I consider that I’m likely uttering this to the thing inside myself a kin to Carl. the thing in me that has benefited from the structural powers of the sexism and racism. the safety of knowing how to act to be on top, to get away with murder. the palpable comfort of knowing how to subjugate.

whether I like it or not, the patriarchy has been my friend and I’m radically afraid of the person I would be without its easy guidance.

I WILL ERASE U FROM THIS EARTH.

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