Speaker 1: Pushkin. This show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence.
Speaker 1: Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where
Speaker 1: to listen. It's May nineteen seventy three, Iowa City. There's
Speaker 1: a damp chill in the air. We are on a
Speaker 1: sort of shabby block in front of a brick apartment
Speaker 1: building with a white door in need of a paint job,
Speaker 1: and a storefront window with its blinds drawn shut. The
Speaker 1: sidewalk just in front of the door is covered in blood,
Speaker 1: and it looks like the blood might be seeping out
Speaker 1: from under the door jam. It's a busy week day,
Speaker 1: and as pedestrians pass the puddle of blood, they notice
Speaker 1: it and casually step around it. Eventually, a man in
Speaker 1: a green and black plaid jacket pauses and looks around
Speaker 1: as if looking for an explanation. When none comes, he
Speaker 1: walks away. Then a well dressed white woman uses her
Speaker 1: umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle, but after a
Speaker 1: moment or two of inspection, she also walks away. Finally,
Speaker 1: an older gentleman emerges from a nearby store front and
Speaker 1: silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence of whatever
Speaker 1: happened is suddenly gone. And with it disappears any account
Speaker 1: of whose blood was spilled and how. The whole scene
Speaker 1: is being captured by two young women in their twenties, sisters,
Speaker 1: who sit in an old car parked near by. One
Speaker 1: of them holds a super eight camera, the kind you'd
Speaker 1: make home movies with back them. The other snaps photos
Speaker 1: with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna and
Speaker 1: Reclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely place
Speaker 1: as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a first
Speaker 1: year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous,
Speaker 1: and had to take no prisoners vibe, and in the
Speaker 1: way of sisters, she had roped Reclean into helping her
Speaker 1: make a new piece, and like many works Anna made,
Speaker 1: it would come to seem tragically prophetic in the wake
Speaker 1: of her death. She basically staged what looked like the
Speaker 1: remnants of, you know, physical violence with what looked like
Speaker 1: blood in the doorway of a building, and I thought
Speaker 1: it was extremely powerful for a very young artist to
Speaker 1: be doing that, and to be doing it in a small,
Speaker 1: largely white town of Iowa City was fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: That's Connie Butler, one of the many curators who would
Speaker 1: come to admire and study Ana Mendietta's work in the
Speaker 1: decades that followed. The photos in film the Mendietta Sisters
Speaker 1: took that day would ultimately become a work of art
Speaker 1: called Moffett Building Piece. The fact that it still exists
Speaker 1: only in these little thirty five millimeter slides, which you know,
Speaker 1: you have to get very close to with a loop,
Speaker 1: and it's a very intimate way of viewing these things.
Speaker 1: You know, that implicates you as a viewer too, almost
Speaker 1: as if you are yourself looking at a crime scene.
Speaker 1: Anna's interest in blood wasn't only meant to shock. She
Speaker 1: was keenly aware of violence and injustice. When she made
Speaker 1: the Moffitt Building Piece, she was investigating her own community's
Speaker 1: reaction to a brutal crime, a rape and murder that
Speaker 1: had happened on campus a few months before. Here's how
Speaker 1: she explained her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped
Speaker 1: and killed at Iowa in one of the dorms, and
Speaker 1: it just really freaked me out. So I did sort
Speaker 1: of rape performances type things at that time, using my
Speaker 1: own body. I did something I believe in and that
Speaker 1: I felt I had to do. That's not actually Anna
Speaker 1: Mendietta's voice you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist
Speaker 1: from Cuba who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendietta's
Speaker 1: question was could you make art about something so awful?
Speaker 1: And she used blood, not paint. Blood is the most
Speaker 1: essential substance of life. Could it jolt people out of
Speaker 1: their daily routines? Could blood make people pay attention? She
Speaker 1: didn't know it yet, but the Moffett Building piece was
Speaker 1: about to be her first major artwork, and in a
Speaker 1: circular way, that's kind of terrifying. The question she asked
Speaker 1: about how we react when we encounter the residue of violence.
Speaker 1: This question would haunt all of us after she died.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something
Speaker 1: Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist,
Speaker 1: Episode one. The Haunting Boom. For my entire professional life,
Speaker 1: I've been a member of something called the art world,
Speaker 1: an exclusive network of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and
Speaker 1: philanthropists for two decades. I was lucky enough to be
Speaker 1: a museum curator, making me one of a small group
Speaker 1: of cultural insiders who determine what art we see and
Speaker 1: how we talk about it. In the museum world and
Speaker 1: in art history, there are a lot of unspoken rules
Speaker 1: about what you can say publicly and what is supposed
Speaker 1: to stay private. It turns out I wasn't that good
Speaker 1: at sticking to the script, and I guess I'm still
Speaker 1: not good at it, because I'm going to tell you
Speaker 1: Anna Mendietta's whole story, all the way to its shocking
Speaker 1: and troubling end, and much to my surprise, I discovered
Speaker 1: it's a story many of my colleagues in the art
Speaker 1: world would prefer I didn't tell at first, blush. It
Speaker 1: seemed like people didn't want me to talk about it
Speaker 1: because of who else is part of that story. On
Speaker 1: his husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre. He is one
Speaker 1: of the so called fathers of minimalism, a cultural hero
Speaker 1: to many a revered artists with lots of connections, and
Speaker 1: he was a suspect in Anna's death. Even though Carl
Speaker 1: Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly visible art world couple,
Speaker 1: even though something terrible happened between them the night she died.
Speaker 1: You will not read about it on a museum wall label,
Speaker 1: or in most art history textbooks reviews of their exhibitions
Speaker 1: tend to take care of it. In a sentence or two,
Speaker 1: you would not know that Mendietta's death divided the art
Speaker 1: world in nineteen eighty five, and in many ways still does.
Speaker 1: I'm not the first person to try and tell this story.
Speaker 1: In fact, many of the voices you'll hear in this
Speaker 1: show are from interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz.
Speaker 1: He published a book in nineteen ninety that remains the
Speaker 1: most comprehensive look into this art world tragedy. He spoke
Speaker 1: with dozens of Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants,
Speaker 1: in parks, in busy offices, and you'll hear the voices
Speaker 1: of some art world insiders on these tapes who have
Speaker 1: since decided not to talk. Most folks don't want to
Speaker 1: discuss what happened that night. They don't want to talk
Speaker 1: about what the ramifications of that night were on the
Speaker 1: art world. They don't want to contemplate what it means
Speaker 1: when a community is torn apart by violence, and they
Speaker 1: don't want to discuss whether or not justice has been served.
Speaker 1: All these different folks not talking for all of their
Speaker 1: different reasons means that a veil of silence started to
Speaker 1: fall over this project. And I can't lie. The more
Speaker 1: silence we encountered, the more sad and frustrated I became,
Speaker 1: And the more silence we encountered, the more I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk. Both Anna Mendietta and Carl Andre were incredible artists.
Speaker 1: This could have been a story about a romance between
Speaker 1: two fascinating people, but their story ends in a nine
Speaker 1: one one call. Those who loved Anna Mendietta loved her fiercely.
Speaker 1: Anna was extremely good company, super interesting, super funny, super lively.
Speaker 1: She was always making plans, making schemes, getting you involved
Speaker 1: in something. She decided that the only way to get
Speaker 1: by in realme was to learn how to curse when
Speaker 1: you drove, and she would like keep her window. She
Speaker 1: told me, the left window down all the time so
Speaker 1: she could put her arm out and flare the finger
Speaker 1: and curse the people and they could hear her. Anna
Speaker 1: was a contradictory. You know, she was a vegetarian, but
Speaker 1: she loved to order stake tartar. She was funny, she
Speaker 1: was engaging, She was very vital. She was a kind
Speaker 1: of person you don't forget, like a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are unforgettable. Even though everybody remembered her, not everyone
Speaker 1: liked her. Her pensiant for pushing boundaries and not giving
Speaker 1: the fuck what anyone else thought, both compelled and sometimes
Speaker 1: irritated people. She was very magnetic. That's be Ruby Rich,
Speaker 1: a prominent film scholar and a good friend of Anna's.
Speaker 1: But she was also, as you may have heard, very
Speaker 1: very argumentative, and so often people would end up in
Speaker 1: a fight with her. But I found her very entertaining
Speaker 1: even then. Anna's art school classmates remembered her early days
Speaker 1: of art making is very experimental, sometimes a little gross,
Speaker 1: sometimes kind of fun. Anna would sneak into the copy
Speaker 1: center and xerox her breasts and her labia. She'd get
Speaker 1: buckets of blood from the butcher and carry them into
Speaker 1: the woods, where she'd strip down, hide parts of her
Speaker 1: body under leaves, and then she'd have her friends blatter
Speaker 1: blood around her and take photos. She got one of
Speaker 1: her friends to trim his beard, and then she glued
Speaker 1: the hair to her own face. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: art was starting to get radical, and Anna was at
Speaker 1: the forefront. The world was changing. The women's movement the
Speaker 1: anti war movement were in full effect, and those movements
Speaker 1: inspired artists to engage more directly with current events and
Speaker 1: the public. Many artists wanted their art to be outside
Speaker 1: the confines of a museum or a gallery, so they
Speaker 1: staged performances in public spaces and started using non art
Speaker 1: materials borrowed from everyday life. Back then, Manhattan was the
Speaker 1: undisputed center of the art world. It was where the
Speaker 1: action was. Like most young, ambitious artists of the time,
Speaker 1: after finishing her degree in Iowa, Anna made her way
Speaker 1: to New York. There she found a vibrant downtown scene
Speaker 1: dominated by radical artists challenging the status quo of art.
Speaker 1: One of the most important players at the time was
Speaker 1: the already famous sculptor Carl Andre. This question is that art?
Speaker 1: That's always the American and felistine question. How can you
Speaker 1: call that art? And it's easy to call things arts,
Speaker 1: very easy, But the question is is it good or
Speaker 1: bad or useless? And that question is not generally As
Speaker 1: notorious for his genre busting work, Andre looked exactly how
Speaker 1: an artist was supposed to look. He was a stocky
Speaker 1: white man who sported a bohemian beard and more uniform
Speaker 1: of workers overalls. He was a fixture in the boozy
Speaker 1: Soho arts scene. He had a reputation for his intellect,
Speaker 1: his drinking, and his sharply worded opinions, and he helped
Speaker 1: to invent a movement, so much so that he is
Speaker 1: typically referred to as a founding father of minimalism. Andre
Speaker 1: played a central role in defining the visual vocabulary of
Speaker 1: minimalism and essentially redefine the very nature of sculpture itself.
Speaker 1: Minimalism completely dominated the art scene of the late nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies. Loosely speaking, it's a type of sculpture
Speaker 1: known for its rigorous abstraction and simplicity. Think cubes, rectangles,
Speaker 1: basic geometric forms, all of which were made using industrial
Speaker 1: materials like steel, plywood, and fluorescent tubes. The vibe was cool, intellectual,
Speaker 1: and severe. These minimalist guys, and they were predominantly guys,
Speaker 1: didn't think art was about emotions or pretty pictures. For them,
Speaker 1: art was a philosophical arena, a place to challenge outmoded
Speaker 1: ideas and develop new ones. Today we might call this disruption.
Speaker 1: Back then, it was called the avant garde. Andrea's major
Speaker 1: contribution was to remove sculpture from its pedicial and to
Speaker 1: examine its relation to the floor. There would be no
Speaker 1: more monuments, no heroic reaching for the sky, no guys
Speaker 1: on horseback. Instead, Andrea would make sculpture as close to
Speaker 1: the floor as he could, get, so close that you
Speaker 1: could even walk on them. Similar to Mendietta's use of blood,
Speaker 1: Andrea was playing with a huge taboo in the art world.
Speaker 1: He broke the fundamental rule of don't touch, and in
Speaker 1: doing so, paved the way for a new kind of art,
Speaker 1: and like Mendietta, he inspired strong reactions. Not everyone was
Speaker 1: a fan of either him or his work. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure where they are is in it? They just look
Speaker 1: like tiles. I found him insufferable. He always dressed up
Speaker 1: in his little worker's costume to show a badge of
Speaker 1: being a working class artist, his overalls, which was faintly
Speaker 1: ridiculous by then, as he lived in this luxury building
Speaker 1: with a doorman. I had had little dealings with Andre,
Speaker 1: except to be insulted by imperiodically. Yeah, the nicest personality
Speaker 1: in the world. House. He's always extremely competitive with that
Speaker 1: last voice is Carl LeWitt, wife of the equally famous
Speaker 1: conceptual artist Saul LeWitt, who Carl was friends with for decades.
Speaker 1: If you can't quite hear what she was saying, she
Speaker 1: noted how competitive Carl could be with Saul. Controversy came
Speaker 1: early to Carl Andre. He used everyday building materials such
Speaker 1: as bricks and metal plates, which he typically just placed
Speaker 1: on the floor. Because Andrea's work was not carved, bolted,
Speaker 1: or welded, and was always just simply arranged or placed,
Speaker 1: it inspired as much derision in the popular press as
Speaker 1: it did admiration in the art world when London's most
Speaker 1: important contemporary art museum bought a piece All Held Broke Loose.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, the Tate acquired a piece by
Speaker 1: Carl Andrea called Equivalent eight low lying piece on the
Speaker 1: ground of fire bricks that are arranged in a grid.
Speaker 1: That's art historian Julie Bryan Wilson, a professor who teaches
Speaker 1: her UC Berkeley students about both Carl Andrea and an Amendetta.
Speaker 1: It became a kind of press scandal how much the
Speaker 1: sculpture was purchased for and how you know it was
Speaker 1: one of these like my kid could do it kind
Speaker 1: of arguments. When an interviewer asked Carl Andrea about it later,
Speaker 1: he seemed amused by the controversy. Publicity is as good
Speaker 1: as good publicity. It's not whether it's nice. I mean,
Speaker 1: if they say it's nice and that's all, that's no good.
Speaker 1: If they go on for hours and hours saying how
Speaker 1: terrible it is, that's good. It's one thing to have
Speaker 1: bravado about the bad press for your artwork. But this
Speaker 1: wouldn't be Andrea's worst brush with the tabloids. But we'll
Speaker 1: get to that later. For the moment, we're still squarely
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies, a high flying time for avant
Speaker 1: garde artists who made up a tight knit community that
Speaker 1: revolved around a handful of bars, restaurants, and galleries. Most
Speaker 1: artists were still relatively poor, taking day jobs to make
Speaker 1: ends meet, making art in the after hours, and when
Speaker 1: she first arrived in New York, Anna was one of
Speaker 1: those artists. But a handful of artists became wildly successful
Speaker 1: from the sale of their work, and Carl was one
Speaker 1: of those artists. It was in this heady mixture of
Speaker 1: ideas and art and Booze that Carl and Anna would
Speaker 1: meet in a packed gallery in November nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: But this is no romcom. It's a tragedy, and it
Speaker 1: involves two impressive, complex, flawed humans, two artistic powerhouses who
Speaker 1: changed how we think about art. Anna and Carl's fateful
Speaker 1: meeting would entangle their lives and reputations forever. They would
Speaker 1: become symbolic of so much more that was larger than
Speaker 1: just them as people. They came to represent insider versus outsider,
Speaker 1: male versus female, white versus Latin X, cool and intellectual
Speaker 1: versus bodily and emotional In a way, it's almost too overdetermined.
Speaker 1: But none of this symbolism changes the fact that Anna
Speaker 1: was trying to elbow her way to a seat at
Speaker 1: the table that had already been set for Carl. When
Speaker 1: Anna arrived in New York, she quickly fell in with
Speaker 1: a small coterie of other women artists trying to make
Speaker 1: their way in an incredibly white and male dominated art world.
Speaker 1: She joined a feminist gallery called Ai R, and after
Speaker 1: about a year and a half in Manhattan, Anna was
Speaker 1: ready for her first solo exhibition. She came out of
Speaker 1: the gate strong with a compelling body of work she
Speaker 1: called Silhouetta, the Spanish word for silhouette. The show was
Speaker 1: made up of a suite of photographs hung plainly on
Speaker 1: the wall, no fancy frames, nothing to distract from the image.
Speaker 1: The Silhouetta series had occupied Anna for years. Some of
Speaker 1: the photographs show her lying naked on the earth, covered
Speaker 1: with leaves, flowers, or grass. Others depict the outline of
Speaker 1: a human body pressed into the ground. Still others show
Speaker 1: a mild indentation, a shallow space where a body once lay.
Speaker 1: The press release for the show described her project as
Speaker 1: quote an ongoing dialog between the artist in nature. The
Speaker 1: works were part performance art, part earth art. In order
Speaker 1: to drama attendance on his friend and colleague, the artist
Speaker 1: Nancy Spiro, organized a panel discussion and invited the famous
Speaker 1: Carl Andre to speak. The title of the panel discussion
Speaker 1: was I Kid You Not? How has the women's art
Speaker 1: movement affected male art attitudes? Such was the state of
Speaker 1: feminism in the New York art world circa nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: But the idea worked and the panel drew the crowd
Speaker 1: they were seeking. And then during the talk, something strange
Speaker 1: started to happen to honest photographs. Nancy Spiro told the
Speaker 1: journalist Robert Katz about it, for pictures started popping off
Speaker 1: the wall. What happened was I think that maybe the
Speaker 1: heat of all people in there must have been some
Speaker 1: warping or expand was very bizarre and sold during receiving rate,
Speaker 1: they popped off the love. That was terrible. She was
Speaker 1: very upset about them. This old tape from the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties is hard to hear, but Nancy is saying that
Speaker 1: honest photographs fell off the wall in the middle of
Speaker 1: the event. After the panel discussion wrapped up, the almost
Speaker 1: always generous Carl took several people out to a Japanese
Speaker 1: restaurant next door, and I think Carl then invited Anna.
Speaker 1: He didn't even know who she was. This is very gracious.
Speaker 1: Nancy and Anna stayed behind to make sure Anna's photos
Speaker 1: were back on the wall, and when they finally joined
Speaker 1: the dinner, Carl paid Anna a lot of attention. Perhaps
Speaker 1: his left wing politics led him to be interested in
Speaker 1: an exile from Cuba. Perhaps he could sense an affinity
Speaker 1: between their art. Both were exploring the horizontal quality of
Speaker 1: the floor, the ground, and the earth as a space
Speaker 1: for sculpture. Perhaps it was just your typical heterosexual shenanigans,
Speaker 1: as Anna was undeniably charismatic and attractive, and Carl had
Speaker 1: the shine of art world, fame and stardom. Anna's friend
Speaker 1: Natalia Delgado thought it was a case of opposites attracting.
Speaker 1: He had a call Mark's type of look, this long
Speaker 1: hair and then a big, full beard wearing overalls, and
Speaker 1: he was so tall and kind of heavy, and Anna,
Speaker 1: she looked very slight compared to him, to look like
Speaker 1: a bear. Here's how Anna's friend, Ella Troiano, a Cuban
Speaker 1: American filmmaker, described her. Anna was small, thin, very pretty,
Speaker 1: very vivacious. She was dark, what somebody would have called
Speaker 1: exotic looking, and she had that kind of look that
Speaker 1: wasn't easily classifiable. And thus began a tangled, on again,
Speaker 1: off again relationship between an older, already legendary and twice
Speaker 1: divorced man and the young, up and coming artist. But
Speaker 1: Natalia felt they made sense together. There was an intellectual
Speaker 1: attraction because of the interest in art, and that was
Speaker 1: a big part of their relationship. I think that she
Speaker 1: admired him because of his accomplishments as an artist, so
Speaker 1: I think that was part of the attraction for her,
Speaker 1: and he also gave her advice, and I think he
Speaker 1: did exposure to artists that were you know, they would
Speaker 1: go to Tuscany and go to have lunch with a
Speaker 1: soula wit and they would get together at a party
Speaker 1: with Frank Stella. Frank Stella was another hugely successful contemporary
Speaker 1: of Carl's. You know, it gave her an exposure to
Speaker 1: people that were really Carl's friends and really stayed as
Speaker 1: Carl's friends, but that she probably would not admit initially
Speaker 1: on her own. As is so often the case for women,
Speaker 1: Anna was frequently described as being ambitious in a way
Speaker 1: that was more accusation than accolade. Even some of her friends,
Speaker 1: like the conceptual artist Louise Camnetzer, made the subtle assumption
Speaker 1: that she got together with Carl for his connections and
Speaker 1: didn't forgive her for entering a marriage situation with somebody
Speaker 1: that was, according to her, very problematic. And I saw
Speaker 1: it as partially a career move, but she definitely was ambitious.
Speaker 1: It wanted to make it that Carl might have been
Speaker 1: equally attracted to her. Rising star energy did not seem
Speaker 1: to enter the equation for anyone, whatever the nuance of
Speaker 1: the attraction. They became an art world couple, taking their
Speaker 1: place in a social circle filled with the big names
Speaker 1: of the Soho art scene at the time. They socialized
Speaker 1: with other couples whose names you might know from the
Speaker 1: walls of Art Museum Saul and Carol LeWitt, Lawrence and
Speaker 1: Alice Weener, Nancy Spiro and Leon golub By all accounts,
Speaker 1: they were feisty, and as was the habit of the time,
Speaker 1: the booze flowed freely at art world openings and dinners,
Speaker 1: fueling the whole scene. Anna was known for mixing her
Speaker 1: wine with water, while Carl like champagne and good wine,
Speaker 1: and after copious amounts of drinking, things could get uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: So on one level we had good discussions, but then
Speaker 1: as they proceeded to get um drunker or things, it
Speaker 1: was just a kind of strange neuonic between them that
Speaker 1: you would witness. They were very loud, yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Carl would be very cutting, and then she would be
Speaker 1: more or less no retaliating the girl's way out to
Speaker 1: the point where I didn't like to be with dam
Speaker 1: you know, which is something that I don't didn't feel
Speaker 1: about either of them. Girl can be really quite quite
Speaker 1: nice and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he
Speaker 1: becomes doctor Jacklin. He would be a difficult to be
Speaker 1: a ring. Like I said, this isn't a rom com.
Speaker 1: Darkness is creeping in. One of Anna's friends could feel
Speaker 1: it coming. I didn't know what to do. How can
Speaker 1: you tell someone someone's going to kill you? That story?
Speaker 1: After the break, Anna would always take me out to
Speaker 1: dinner for my birthday. That's Howard Dina Pindell an artist,
Speaker 1: a co founder of ai R, and a former curator
Speaker 1: at the Museum of Modern Art. In nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: she was in a terrible car accident that left her
Speaker 1: with a head injury and memory issues, and it also
Speaker 1: left her with a high degree of emotional sensitivity. What
Speaker 1: I found was I was somewhat sensitive. I don't want
Speaker 1: to say psychic, but I was sensitive from the injury.
Speaker 1: We were at a restaurant which no longer exists, just
Speaker 1: the three of us, no one else was there. They
Speaker 1: both drank a lot near the end of the meal,
Speaker 1: and it literally just flashed across my mind. Literally, he's
Speaker 1: going to kill her with his hands, and I was stunned.
Speaker 1: And I heard that or felt that thought or whatever.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what to do. How can you tell
Speaker 1: someone someone's going to kill you? And why trust a voice,
Speaker 1: you know, or a thought? So I'm assuming that you
Speaker 1: didn't tell Anna that. There's no way I would have
Speaker 1: told her. I mean, you know you don't you know
Speaker 1: you discount I mean, how can I prove it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So no, I just felt I couldn't say anything. I
Speaker 1: kind of pushed it into the back of my mind.
Speaker 1: Things have started to get a little woo woo. First
Speaker 1: the photos fall off the wall, and then there's Anna's
Speaker 1: friend Howardina carrying around this awful, terrible vision that Anna's
Speaker 1: life will end in violence. Perhaps Howardina was picking up
Speaker 1: on the energy between Anna and Carl. After all, the
Speaker 1: record shows they had plenty of tension, and one of
Speaker 1: their perennial problems was how they compared professionally. One of
Speaker 1: Anna's closest friends, Natalia Delgado, remembers going to an exhibit
Speaker 1: of one of the most famous art couples of all time,
Speaker 1: Diego Rivera and Frieda Callo. I went to the show
Speaker 1: with Anna and she showed me this painting. There's a
Speaker 1: painting by Frieda Callo of Diego and herself, and Diego's big,
Speaker 1: and Frieda's next to him, and she's quite small by comparison.
Speaker 1: And he said to Anna, this is us, this is us.
Speaker 1: We are Diegoon Frieda. The Calo painting from nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: one is a classic. In it, Frieda paints Diego standing
Speaker 1: ramrod straight, enormous as a redwood, his feet the scale
Speaker 1: of hamhocks, planted solidly on the ground. His gaze, smug
Speaker 1: and confident, engages the viewer directly, and in one hand
Speaker 1: he holds a painter's palette and several brushes. It's a
Speaker 1: consummate image of the great artist, the grand old mass Her. Frieda,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is birdlike. Her feet are so
Speaker 1: tiny that she almost looks like a doll. Her right
Speaker 1: hand gently touches Diego, while her left hand gathers her
Speaker 1: shawl around her Torso, even though she is the artist
Speaker 1: who painted this picture, she offers herself as wife, companion,
Speaker 1: and accessory to his main event. What did Anna think
Speaker 1: of that comparison? She thought he had a big ego,
Speaker 1: that he was comparing himself to Dior, Riera. That's what
Speaker 1: she said, what an ego? Do you think she felt
Speaker 1: he was rivalrous or threatened? Yes, by her rise? Oh yes.
Speaker 1: And I think that the whole description of he was
Speaker 1: Diego and she was freed to Callo. In a way,
Speaker 1: they looked very much, you know, he looked like Diego
Speaker 1: is big and hefty and she was small and petite.
Speaker 1: Was a way of kind of saying, look, I'm more
Speaker 1: important than you. Diego was still more the more prominent artist.
Speaker 1: And I do think that's how he how he Carl
Speaker 1: wanted it to be. And I do think that was
Speaker 1: an issue for them. And she would say and she'd say, well, Carl,
Speaker 1: you know, my career is on the rise right now.
Speaker 1: And I think that really really rubbed him the wrong way.
Speaker 1: He found that very threatening. It was a prescient comparison.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, Diego was the hero and Frieda
Speaker 1: was still just a footnote in art history. Diego, like Carl,
Speaker 1: was known for his Marxist politics and his history of
Speaker 1: thumbing his nose at capitalism. Carl had been active in
Speaker 1: the anti war movement and adopted the posture that the
Speaker 1: artist was similar to a day laborer. Diego was the
Speaker 1: muralist who painted the workers rather than the factory owners.
Speaker 1: Both Frieda and Anna in their lifetimes were the lesser
Speaker 1: than partners to their male genius companions. What neither Frieda
Speaker 1: nor Anna could have known was how the tides would
Speaker 1: change and how they would each become the bigger star
Speaker 1: in their own right. But again that's more rushing ahead.
Speaker 1: It's late summer nineteen eighty five. Carl and Anna had
Speaker 1: gotten married in January. They'd been spending most of their
Speaker 1: time in Europe. Then we're just now back in New
Speaker 1: York getting ready to set a house together. Anna was
Speaker 1: going to give up her small apartment in Little Italy
Speaker 1: and move into Carl's place. She asked her friend Marcia
Speaker 1: Pelle's to help her with the move. She told me,
Speaker 1: and we were going to move her stuff. We're gonna
Speaker 1: go out and have a drink and dinner. So you
Speaker 1: were going to move her books on Sunday to Car's aparbum.
Speaker 1: But then she called the album Thursday night. She was
Speaker 1: very upset and she said, I can't talk to you now.
Speaker 1: The plans had changed, but I'm going to be moving
Speaker 1: things from Karl's to my Carl. Anna had changed her plans.
Speaker 1: Instead of moving more of her stuff into Karl's apartment,
Speaker 1: she wanted to move everything out of Carl's apartment. They
Speaker 1: had some kind of fight who are the last by her?
Speaker 1: And she decided that she was been not moving and
Speaker 1: move with samside. We've arrived at the threshold of our
Speaker 1: terrible story. Sunday, September eighth, nineteen eighty five, a mere
Speaker 1: nine months after their wedding. There's a lot we don't
Speaker 1: know about that evening. Here are a few things we
Speaker 1: know for certain. We know that Anna never moved her
Speaker 1: things as she had planned to. We know that the
Speaker 1: unhappy couple spent the evening at Carl's place, an apartment
Speaker 1: on the thirty fourth floor of a relatively new lug
Speaker 1: Jury high rise in Greenwich Village. That night, like New
Speaker 1: Yorkers everywhere, they ordered Chinese food and watched TV. Then,
Speaker 1: sometime after five am, a passer by on the street
Speaker 1: below heard a woman's scream, no, no, no. A moment later,
Speaker 1: there was a sound like an explosion on the roof
Speaker 1: of the deli below Carl's apartment. Anna had fallen from above.
Speaker 1: Carl called nine five twenty nine am. We don't have
Speaker 1: the tape of that call. After the verdict, the whole
Speaker 1: trial record, including the call, was sealed, but a reporter
Speaker 1: who heard it played at trial said Carl Andre's voice
Speaker 1: was distressed that he wailed, and thus his explanation was
Speaker 1: interrupted with cries and moans. You've asked voice actors to
Speaker 1: read parts of the transcript of the nine one one call. Again,
Speaker 1: my wife has committed suicide. Carl gives the address his
Speaker 1: phone number and says they're on the thirty fourth floor.
Speaker 1: The operator asks what happened exactly? Yeah, what happened was
Speaker 1: we had a My wife is an artist and I'm
Speaker 1: an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact
Speaker 1: that I was more exposed to the public than she
Speaker 1: wasn't She went to the bedroom and I went after her,
Speaker 1: and she went out of the window. So she jumped
Speaker 1: out of the window. How long ago did this happen? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know it was I don't I don't know. They
Speaker 1: talked for several more seconds. Did it happen recently? Did
Speaker 1: it happen just now? Oh, it happened just now. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't I can't tell you about way the building
Speaker 1: and yeah, I don't know it's it. I can, I can,
Speaker 1: I can help. In September of nineteen eighty five, I
Speaker 1: was a sophomore in college in Albany, New York. I
Speaker 1: had already walked on top of one of carl Andre's sculptures.
Speaker 1: They were installed in nearly every museum in the country.
Speaker 1: I'd be lying if I didn't tell you how much
Speaker 1: I love them. I was completely turned on by their
Speaker 1: taboo breaking fuck you energy. The severity of his metal
Speaker 1: plates lying on the floor in a simple checkerboard pattern
Speaker 1: almost struck me as punk in my younger Brasher years.
Speaker 1: I didn't learn about Anna Mendietta until years after her death,
Speaker 1: when I was well into graduate school, and even then
Speaker 1: I learned about her from a fellow student, not through
Speaker 1: any of my professors. I was trained by art historians
Speaker 1: who believe the prime directive was to separate the life
Speaker 1: of the artist from their work. This meant no one
Speaker 1: ever said that Carl Andre was married to Anna Mendietta,
Speaker 1: much less that he was accused of murdering her. Top
Speaker 1: that off with the fact that Anna Mendietta was a
Speaker 1: Cuban immigrant showing at a feminist gallery, working with blood,
Speaker 1: making work that summoned the idea of the Earth goddess.
Speaker 1: Nothing could have been less cool in my philosophically inclined
Speaker 1: education that privileged theory over feeling. But during the first
Speaker 1: two decades of the twenty first century, the world changed
Speaker 1: a lot and fast, and I think I did too.
Speaker 1: You know, if I had a Sonny looked like Trebon
Speaker 1: at this moment, and where we are right now is
Speaker 1: a resurgence from where the civil rights movement left off.
Speaker 1: President Trump is defending a temporary travel band for seven
Speaker 1: Muslim majority countries as a monument of Thousands of women
Speaker 1: are using two words on social media to identify themselves
Speaker 1: as survivors of sexual harassment and assault. Today it's hashtag
Speaker 1: me too. I found myself thinking about Anna because she
Speaker 1: did go on to become a free to call a
Speaker 1: like figure, more powerful after her death than before, larger
Speaker 1: than life. Revered. Scores of artists, mostly women, studied her,
Speaker 1: reenacted her performances, paid homage to her with their own work.
Speaker 1: They make pilgrimages to the important sites of her life Havana,
Speaker 1: Iowa City, Rome, Greenwich Village and over the years, I
Speaker 1: came to love Anna Mendieta's art because it felt so urgent,
Speaker 1: so relevant, because politics did start to feel personal and
Speaker 1: identity does matter. But could I love Mendieta's work well
Speaker 1: also still being a fan of Carl Andres sculptures? Or
Speaker 1: did I have to choose sides? It felt like the
Speaker 1: only way to answer that question was by asking another
Speaker 1: what really happened the night Anna died? I wondered what
Speaker 1: we might be able to learn if we returned to
Speaker 1: her story. When we first started making this podcast, I
Speaker 1: assumed folks would want to talk about what happened between
Speaker 1: Anna and Carl Man. Was I wrong? I don't want
Speaker 1: to like badger you. You know what I mean? Right right?
Speaker 1: May I ask you what you think the harm would
Speaker 1: be a lot of my calls went like that. I
Speaker 1: obviously wish we saw eye to eye on this one.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Okay, bye.
Speaker 1: Silence was starting to feel like a main character in
Speaker 1: this story. Perhaps some art world insiders just want to
Speaker 1: protect their own professional relationships with Carl Andre or with
Speaker 1: the art dealers he's tight with. But it's not just
Speaker 1: those who are loyal to Carl who remain quiet. Many
Speaker 1: of Anna's friends also no longer want to talk. Quite
Speaker 1: a few folks turned us down, citing reasons ranging from
Speaker 1: busy schedules to not wanting to revisit the pain, to
Speaker 1: not wanting to discuss Carl and Anna's relationship. We also
Speaker 1: tried to talk to the estate of Annamandietta, even though
Speaker 1: it's well known that they don't participate in conversations that
Speaker 1: include Carl Andre. They prefer the focus to be solely
Speaker 1: on Annamandietta's artwork. The more I thought about all the
Speaker 1: different reasons people have for not wanting to talk, the
Speaker 1: more I felt that the silence wasn't only protecting Carl Andre.
Speaker 1: There were so many other ideas at stake. I was
Speaker 1: in a community at odds with itself, unresolved about gendered
Speaker 1: power dynamics, unsure of the boundaries between private and public,
Speaker 1: and ultimately divided on whether it wanted institutional stability or
Speaker 1: cultural change. As frustrating as it was to get turned
Speaker 1: away over and over, honestly, it kind of lit a
Speaker 1: fire in me. The more silence we encountered, the more
Speaker 1: I felt like there was something important to say about
Speaker 1: that silence. I keep coming back to Anna Mendieta's work.
Speaker 1: The Moffett Building piece was just one in a series
Speaker 1: of pieces she made with blood where she invited people
Speaker 1: to look at the blood, to look at the violence.
Speaker 1: Some people say Anna was morbid, that maybe she had
Speaker 1: a death wish, But that's not what I see when
Speaker 1: I look at her work. The Moffatt Building piece, really
Speaker 1: all of her work with blood, It's not about her,
Speaker 1: It's about you. It's about us. Her work is asking
Speaker 1: us to stop and pay attention. It's asking us to
Speaker 1: bear witness, to look, to not walk by, to open
Speaker 1: the door. And that's what we're going to do. Coming
Speaker 1: up on death of an artist, the story of what
Speaker 1: happened after Carl's nine one one call. How could Carl,
Speaker 1: who represented the purity of the desire, how could he
Speaker 1: have done such an act like that? He had two
Speaker 1: different stories, and we confronted him on that. Carl's attorney
Speaker 1: basically based his analysis of why she might have committed
Speaker 1: suicide on Santia, on voodoo. There was a sense of
Speaker 1: someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant as Anna could
Speaker 1: be killed, then any of us could be killed. Well,
Speaker 1: sometimes people would scream at you on the street. It
Speaker 1: was quite a confrontational things and why it's still anger
Speaker 1: so many artists today. I just started tweeting like there
Speaker 1: will be blood. Death of an Artist is a co
Speaker 1: production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
Speaker 1: Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are
Speaker 1: Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinig Blee, Talmulaud, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner.
Speaker 1: Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our
Speaker 1: managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Poodrou and
Speaker 1: Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas, Voice acting
Speaker 1: by Nick Brain and David Glover. Anna Mendieta's quotes were
Speaker 1: read by Tanya Burgera, engineered by Sam Bear, fact checking
Speaker 1: by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is by Pooge Rue.
Speaker 1: If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus
Speaker 1: to listen early, add free and get exclusive bonus content.
Speaker 1: Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 1: at pushkin dot Fm. Find more great podcasts from Sony
Speaker 1: Music Entertainment. At sonymusic dot com. Backslash podcasts,