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. Previously on Death of an Artist. I started
Speaker 1: to leave the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: what if it's art? And I went an app and
Speaker 1: it went ARC and I got so excited. It was
Speaker 1: a revolutionary moment. This guy is now wooing her the
Speaker 1: way he loves wooing, with champagne, expensive dinners. And this
Speaker 1: is somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that
Speaker 1: I used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
Speaker 1: She was not fearful person, except interestingly when it came
Speaker 1: to heights. The last person to talk to Anna before
Speaker 1: she died other than Carl was her close friend Natalia Delgado.
Speaker 1: She knew the marriage was not working. They were on
Speaker 1: the phone. Anna was sure Carl was seeing another woman,
Speaker 1: and she had a plan for how she was going
Speaker 1: to prove it. She almost knew it was crazy. She said,
Speaker 1: I think you and I should put on some wigs
Speaker 1: and dressed like other people, and let's see if we can,
Speaker 1: like take some pictures of it. You should do it,
Speaker 1: because you won't recognize you, and I said, are you crazy.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do that. I mean, Carl was
Speaker 1: in the apartment as the two women spoke, possibly within earshot.
Speaker 1: Carl was in the background, and so I said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe you should be speaking in Spanish. But still their
Speaker 1: words that were the same, you know, like detective, divorce,
Speaker 1: the same words, you know. So I think that he
Speaker 1: probably could figure out what she was talking about. As
Speaker 1: far as Natalia knew, Anna never hired a detective, but
Speaker 1: she had talked to an attorney about how to file
Speaker 1: for divorce on grounds of infidelity, and she had said
Speaker 1: she was gathering evidence. She was making photocopies of all
Speaker 1: of the receipts from his American Express card and his
Speaker 1: phone bills. She's trying to reconstruct the events of the affairs,
Speaker 1: and she wanted to use that for her divorce on
Speaker 1: grounds of infidelity. I thought it was better to tell
Speaker 1: him and say, look, this is what I've accumulated. I
Speaker 1: want a divorce and I have evidence of this. Did
Speaker 1: she ever say or sounds like she was afraid of him? Yes,
Speaker 1: that night, but I had no idea because she said
Speaker 1: he had a temper before. But I had no idea
Speaker 1: how that he could get really violent, and she said, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's going to blow up if I have this conversation
Speaker 1: with him, He's really going to blow up. It was
Speaker 1: late and Natalia said she had to go, so I
Speaker 1: said I would call her the next day. She said,
Speaker 1: waked me up. So I called her in the morning
Speaker 1: and I got Carl. I said I need to speak
Speaker 1: with Anna and he said she's not here and I said, well,
Speaker 1: when will she be back. He said I don't know.
Speaker 1: I said, well, please tell her. I called and he
Speaker 1: said I will. This detail astounds me. Anna's best friend
Speaker 1: calls the morning Anna died, and Carl doesn't tell her
Speaker 1: what's happened, but agrees to pass on a message. Natalia
Speaker 1: has been sitting with this for decades. You know, it's
Speaker 1: something that's very painful for me, because I thought it
Speaker 1: is better to tell him and say, look, this is
Speaker 1: what I've accumulated. I want to divorce. It never occurred
Speaker 1: to me that he would kill her. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
Speaker 1: Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist. Episode three,
Speaker 1: The Feminist Cabal. Even when the whole world was arranged
Speaker 1: to keep her away from what she wanted. Anna was
Speaker 1: invested in trying to change things. She wanted to go
Speaker 1: home to Cuba, the home she hadn't seen since age twelve,
Speaker 1: but icy Cold War relations between the US and the
Speaker 1: island made travel between the two countries impossible. Exiles were
Speaker 1: not allowed to return to Cuba. You leave, and it
Speaker 1: was like you're a trader and that's it, it's over.
Speaker 1: That's Coco Fusco, an artist and the author of Dangerous Moves,
Speaker 1: performance and politics in Cuba, and this was deeply traumatic
Speaker 1: for people who left family members there, left homes, left lives.
Speaker 1: I grew up in a world in which, like all
Speaker 1: my relatives were like crying about Cuba all the time.
Speaker 1: So Anna pushed to change it. There were some groups
Speaker 1: of younger Cuban exiles like Anna who had come as children,
Speaker 1: who in the seventies organized politically to reopen the possibility
Speaker 1: of family reunification. Flights, who was one of the Cubans
Speaker 1: from the American side who sat down with people in
Speaker 1: the Cuban government and tried to bring the two sides together.
Speaker 1: That's pretty daring, and they succeeded, and in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: those flights began. One hundred and fifty thousand Cubans went
Speaker 1: in the first few years of this. In nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: Anna made her first trip back to Cuba, where she
Speaker 1: was able to reunite with her grandparents and extended family.
Speaker 1: It was a return to her roots. Here's how Anna,
Speaker 1: voiced here by the Cuban artist Tanya Brigera, explained it.
Speaker 1: I find that my roots are Cuban. The branches might
Speaker 1: be American, but the trunk of the tree is Cuban,
Speaker 1: or the roots, you know. Anna started to travel to
Speaker 1: Cuba often, and these visits opened up a whole new
Speaker 1: world for her politically, socially, and artistically. On one of
Speaker 1: those trips, she made what I personally considered to be
Speaker 1: one of her most beautiful pieces, a striking group of
Speaker 1: petroglyphs carved directly into cave walls located in a dense
Speaker 1: patch of tropical jungle in Jaruco. More than three decades
Speaker 1: after she made them, an artist and fan of Anna Mendieta's,
Speaker 1: named Elise Resmussen, set out to find them. She recorded
Speaker 1: a video of her journey through the overgrowth and into
Speaker 1: the cave. Oh ship, we found one of the sculptures.
Speaker 1: I don't know which one off hand, show us you
Speaker 1: can see, can see the head. I really thought that
Speaker 1: all of them would be destroyed, gone. There's others, he's times,
Speaker 1: others founded. The wall reliefs Mendietta left behind are thickly
Speaker 1: carved lines cut directly into the limestone walls. Then she
Speaker 1: took luminous black and white photographs of them. The images
Speaker 1: resemble a primordial female form from the Neolithic period. Clearly,
Speaker 1: Cuba meant a great deal to Anna. It's no easy
Speaker 1: task to carve into a stone wall, and no matter
Speaker 1: how deep in the jungle this cave was, no matter
Speaker 1: how hard the sculptures were to find, to leave a
Speaker 1: mark like that says I was here, I'm from here,
Speaker 1: and I plan to remain here. While in Cuba, Anna
Speaker 1: also explored her interest in the Afro Cuban religion Santaria.
Speaker 1: She was finding a way into the culture. That's Eltrano again,
Speaker 1: one of Anna's Cuban friends in New York. You have
Speaker 1: to understand that Afro Cuban culture permeated the entirety all
Speaker 1: the classes in Cuba. Anna had grown up Catholic, with
Speaker 1: all of those images of sacrifice in blood, and as
Speaker 1: a little girl, she also liked to listen to the
Speaker 1: maids in the kitchen talking about their religion Santaria, with
Speaker 1: its images of blood and sacrifice. That interest was already
Speaker 1: visible in her work. Her early grad school performances include
Speaker 1: references to Santa Via rituals through her use of candles
Speaker 1: and chicken sacrifice. But Elatreiano makes the distinction that Anna
Speaker 1: was more student than practitioner. She was not a santeata,
Speaker 1: she was not dressed in white. There is a very
Speaker 1: big difference between a practitioner of Santia and somebody who
Speaker 1: studies or uses it as a way of working with
Speaker 1: the culture. In fact, there's been criticism of Anna that
Speaker 1: she was working with a religion that she really didn't
Speaker 1: know enough about. Anna was interested in excavating her Cuban identity,
Speaker 1: but her trips weren't only about her. She regularly brought
Speaker 1: American artists and critics to Havana, hoping to build a
Speaker 1: cultural pipeline between her two worlds. This wasn't to everyone's liking,
Speaker 1: and her attempt to ch lenge the status quo earned
Speaker 1: her a visit from the FBI. For the first time
Speaker 1: in my career as an art historian, I found myself
Speaker 1: looking at copies of heavily redacted FBI files. In September
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, just before she left for Rome,
Speaker 1: an agent arrived at Anna's little apartment to question her
Speaker 1: about her trips. Her answers must have been satisfactory. The
Speaker 1: agent recommended the matter be closed. But it wasn't just
Speaker 1: the FBI who perceived her as a threat. She's threatening.
Speaker 1: She is not like a pretty little girl, you know,
Speaker 1: making pretty paintings. That's Sarah Thornton, a sociologist whose book
Speaker 1: Seven Days in the Art World is an in depth
Speaker 1: study of the network of galleries, art schools, and auction
Speaker 1: houses that make up the art community. Her work is
Speaker 1: a threat to patriarchy. She's playing with gender and the
Speaker 1: body every single time, whether it's wearing beards and mustaches,
Speaker 1: her use of blood. For me, she is experimenting with
Speaker 1: the things done to women's bodies under patriarchy, and she's
Speaker 1: revealing it. I agree with Sarah. Anna's work does feel
Speaker 1: like a threat to patriarchy. Anna was not a well
Speaker 1: behaved woman. She was literally playing with blood and fire.
Speaker 1: She's hiking into a jungle to make a carving of
Speaker 1: a vagina on a cave wall. Her studio equipment included
Speaker 1: chainsaws and gunpowder. This is a major badass, and badasses
Speaker 1: are enthralling, and when they are women, they also tend
Speaker 1: to be threatening. When Anna left for Italy and nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, she was thrilled to have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: spend an entire year, all expenses paid, on the lush
Speaker 1: grounds of the American Academy in Rome. This was Anna's
Speaker 1: chance to live in a city literally filled with art. Sculptures, paintings,
Speaker 1: and frescoes are everywhere on buildings, in churches and in parks.
Speaker 1: It was a dream. But not everything at the studio
Speaker 1: was to her liking. And as my grandmother would have said,
Speaker 1: she made a stink. She kind of mobilized a group
Speaker 1: of people to protest conditions at the Academy. She came
Speaker 1: in with a list of demands, and I don't think
Speaker 1: the challegy was really used to that. There were sort
Speaker 1: of used to people being docile. That's Chris Halbe, a
Speaker 1: painter who was at the Academy with Anna. He describes
Speaker 1: how she made a bad first impression, but then organized
Speaker 1: some of her peers and got the academy to make
Speaker 1: improvements that helped every one. Your really more impression was
Speaker 1: who was this fin in the alice? More appreciative and respectful,
Speaker 1: you know, and all of that. But I think by
Speaker 1: the end they realized there was something about her. She
Speaker 1: had the guys completely redoom or starlight, and I think
Speaker 1: it parlably led to a kind of reconstruction, the scarlights
Speaker 1: all around the building, just based on her complaints. There
Speaker 1: it is again Anna, the outspoken one, not afraid to
Speaker 1: nibble at the hand that's feeding her. Anna's time in
Speaker 1: Rome was her own for most of her fellowship. Carl
Speaker 1: was back home in New York or working in Germany,
Speaker 1: so he wasn't there. When Natalia Delgado came to visit
Speaker 1: Anna at the academy, I think with her a week
Speaker 1: and so she announces, I'm not here to babysit you,
Speaker 1: which of course I wasn't expecting, but she was like
Speaker 1: very clear. Anna gave Natalia a book of walking tours
Speaker 1: so Natalia could roam the city while Anna worked in
Speaker 1: the studio. She had started to experiment with freestanding sculptures
Speaker 1: made out of would that she was burning with a blowtorch.
Speaker 1: In the evenings, the two friends went to the movies.
Speaker 1: They saw Apocalypse Now and they also went dancing. But
Speaker 1: Natalia's visit wasn't only for fun. She came carrying news
Speaker 1: from New York. I told her about the rumors that
Speaker 1: Carl was having affairs. She basically called it off with
Speaker 1: Carl and said, you know, it's over for us, you know,
Speaker 1: and she was wanting to make a new life for herself.
Speaker 1: But Carl and Anna had been in a cycle of
Speaker 1: breaking up and getting back together for several years and
Speaker 1: it would continue. But then he decided to go out
Speaker 1: and court her. It was very sick. I thought, very
Speaker 1: very surprising to me that somebody breaks up with you
Speaker 1: because you're having relationships with other people. And what you
Speaker 1: do is the reaction is you go to see the
Speaker 1: person to try to get them back. And that's what
Speaker 1: he did, and that's when he proposed marriage to her,
Speaker 1: and Anna said, yes, she gave it a chance. You know,
Speaker 1: she wasn't going to find somebody outside of the art world.
Speaker 1: I didn't think, you know, somebody who would understand that vocation.
Speaker 1: You know, she had a vocation. I mean she never
Speaker 1: wanted to have children. I get it. Anna was independent driven.
Speaker 1: Her whole life revolved around and stemmed from her art practice.
Speaker 1: She needed to be with someone who would understand that.
Speaker 1: The two got married in Rome in January of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five. Their close friend Carol LeWitt was at the wedding.
Speaker 1: She was radiant. I'll never forget how she learned jobs.
Speaker 1: Absolutely beautiful. Do you remember? Yeah, she's wearing a gray
Speaker 1: knit dress and the girl I found her a great beautis.
Speaker 1: The newlywed started their next chapter with a honeymoon in
Speaker 1: each a place full of art that commemorates death. Anna
Speaker 1: had wanted to go for a while. Anna was so
Speaker 1: interested in death that she once said, I don't think
Speaker 1: you can separate death and life. And we can see
Speaker 1: how her meditations on death showed up in her art.
Speaker 1: For two works that I believe are on view by
Speaker 1: Anna Na Mendieta M E N d I E t A.
Speaker 1: They currently have art on display in gallery two O three.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I appreciate that, no problem. Thanks.
Speaker 1: My producer Luisa and I decided to go to a
Speaker 1: museum to see one of Anna's pieces and what we're
Speaker 1: looking at is a work from nineteen eighty four, so
Speaker 1: you know, Mendietta dies in eighty five, and what we're
Speaker 1: looking at is a four worm that looks like an outline,
Speaker 1: maybe like a silhouette of a mummy. It's called Nile
Speaker 1: Bourne and I l e. Bourne. Anna's interest in Egypt
Speaker 1: was so deep that she was even dreaming about it.
Speaker 1: She recounted a dream to a friend in which she
Speaker 1: and Karl were the king and Queen of Egypt at
Speaker 1: sale on a river, surrounded by thousands of snakes. So
Speaker 1: I wasn't surprised to see that her sculpture from this
Speaker 1: period resembled a sarcophagus. It looks like it's made out
Speaker 1: of dirt that's held together with some kind of binder.
Speaker 1: It's really thin. In the interior, there's a very extenuated
Speaker 1: tear drop form slightly raised in a roll. It intimates
Speaker 1: the interior of the body. It intimates legs that spread open,
Speaker 1: it intimates that, you know, the interior space of the vagina.
Speaker 1: Louisa noticed that it looked like an out line of
Speaker 1: a dead body or a coffin, and that is exactly
Speaker 1: one of the things that has made Anna's art so
Speaker 1: chilling in the aftermath of her death. She's in the
Speaker 1: space of death for sure, So I think you gleaning
Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense to me. Almost all art is
Speaker 1: connected to the problem of death, because one of the
Speaker 1: things art is seagory of objects that we have decided
Speaker 1: we are going to save. But being interested in or
Speaker 1: making art about death isn't the same as wanting to die.
Speaker 1: It seems clear that Anna had so much more work
Speaker 1: she wanted to do. This is like the moment when
Speaker 1: I actually find I get angry, because that's made in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four and she died in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: So we actually don't know whether or not she thought
Speaker 1: that was successful. Did she keep making them? What would
Speaker 1: she have done with that idea moving forward? This is
Speaker 1: the tragedy of the artist who days young. We simply
Speaker 1: don't know how their work would have matured, how it
Speaker 1: might have changed over time. Anna's work was very dynamic,
Speaker 1: and in her short career the work changed quite a bit,
Speaker 1: from her use of blood to her use of nature
Speaker 1: to the final freestanding sculptures in her studio. Her work
Speaker 1: was already changing and growing. All of that potential violently
Speaker 1: halted and my moment of anger in a museum in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. It gave me some small insight into
Speaker 1: how angry Anna's friends and family must have been when
Speaker 1: Carl showed up at her memorial. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: the morning of September eighth, nineteen eighty five, and to
Speaker 1: Natalia Delgado, just hours after Anna's death. Remember, Natalia called
Speaker 1: that morning and Carl had answered. She asked Carl to
Speaker 1: have Anna call her back, and he said he would,
Speaker 1: even though Anna was already dead. So I asked her,
Speaker 1: did you call a second time? Yeah, because she didn't
Speaker 1: call me back on her second call. The person who
Speaker 1: answered the phone was one of Carl's lawyers, Jerry Rosen.
Speaker 1: Carl was at the police station, but he had sent
Speaker 1: Jerry back to the apartment to collect some documents. Here
Speaker 1: he is in a nineteen eighty eight interview describing that
Speaker 1: phone call with Natalia falls ring and I pick it up,
Speaker 1: and she says Anna there and decided to tell her.
Speaker 1: I said, Anna's dead, all right, and that Carl is
Speaker 1: in jail charge. And that time, Karl's lawyer, I think
Speaker 1: he just sat Anna's dead, and I was like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, you know, I was in disbelief. Remember Natalia
Speaker 1: is a lawyer. She realized something was off. I just said,
Speaker 1: what are you doing in there? Isn't that apartment blocked
Speaker 1: off cordoned off? And he said, well, yes, but uh
Speaker 1: he was in there. He went in. Then I thought
Speaker 1: Karl must have killed her. When she learned that her
Speaker 1: friend was dead and that Carl's lawyer was in what
Speaker 1: was now possibly a crime scene, Natalia immediately got in
Speaker 1: touch with the NYPD. She told them about her last
Speaker 1: phone call with Anna, that Anna had been making copies
Speaker 1: of telephone and credit card bills to prove Carl was cheating,
Speaker 1: and that she was planning on filing for divorce. I
Speaker 1: was concerned about, particularly as I'd spoken to Jerry Rosen
Speaker 1: about what was in the apartment, that you know, that
Speaker 1: her evidence wouldn't disappear. We'll come back to this later,
Speaker 1: to the mysterious story of what happened to the xerox
Speaker 1: copies of telephone and credit card bills for now. In
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath of Anna's death, news of what happened
Speaker 1: was spreading quickly. Some of Anna's friends began planning a
Speaker 1: memorial service. Many were art stars, in their own right,
Speaker 1: heavyweights in the burgeoning feminist art movement. But it was complicated.
Speaker 1: Several of Anna's friends were also friends of Carl's. One
Speaker 1: of them, the extremely influential art critic Lucy Leppard, who
Speaker 1: played a major role in planning the service, had even
Speaker 1: been Carl's lover before he met Anna. The art world
Speaker 1: was small, and Anna's death was starting to divide it.
Speaker 1: There were those who believed Carl that she jumped, or
Speaker 1: that maybe it was a terrible accident. And there were those,
Speaker 1: including many who identified as feminists, who were convinced that
Speaker 1: he had a hand in her death. The memorial service
Speaker 1: brought these two opposing factions into one elegant room. The
Speaker 1: memorial was in a landmarked building on Park Avenue called
Speaker 1: the Salon Boulevard. It had the grandeur of a high
Speaker 1: society mansion. Imagine Roman columns and crystal chandeliers. One of
Speaker 1: the many artists in attendance was a woman named Anne Minich.
Speaker 1: She described the service to the journalist Robert Katz. The
Speaker 1: audio on this archival tape is a little hard to follow.
Speaker 1: They had music that Anna love, and they had flowers,
Speaker 1: and Anna of some of her Cuban friends brought a
Speaker 1: record player and the old fashioned Afro Cuban music that
Speaker 1: Anna loved to dance to. Anne said, tons of people
Speaker 1: showed up, including Carl, and it was in this huge
Speaker 1: room and there were sharedge amounts of people there, including
Speaker 1: Carl Andre who came. And of course he would have
Speaker 1: had to become because because his defense was that she
Speaker 1: committed suicide. It was an impossible predicament. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: Carl wasn't welcome, and on the other hand, not showing
Speaker 1: up would have been tantamount to an admission of guilt.
Speaker 1: On the day of the memorial, Lucy Lapard had a
Speaker 1: difficult task. She had to tell Anna's family that Carl
Speaker 1: would be in attendance. On a sister made it clear
Speaker 1: that the family did not want to see him. Lapard
Speaker 1: had already prepared for this by seating Carl in one
Speaker 1: area and reserving seats for the family in another, such
Speaker 1: that they couldn't see each other. Here's Anne minuture. He
Speaker 1: sat over in the corner, and a lot of people,
Speaker 1: he's a very powerful man, went over and they felt
Speaker 1: very bad for him, and blah blah blah. It was,
Speaker 1: you know, there's probably hard to take for some people
Speaker 1: that he was being comforted as much as he was
Speaker 1: because and Minis doesn't finish her sentence there, But it's
Speaker 1: not hard to fill in the blanks. For the folks
Speaker 1: who thought he killed her, his appearance must have been galling.
Speaker 1: They had this set up, this slide show that was
Speaker 1: continuous of the work, slide the documentation of her work
Speaker 1: since from the time she was in Iowa. And then
Speaker 1: after a while they asked people to start giving testimonials
Speaker 1: the way Anne remembered it. Nobody sugarcoated their memories of Anna.
Speaker 1: They described her as she was. It came out that
Speaker 1: Anna was a difficult person. It gave the thing a reality.
Speaker 1: In other words, this was we're not memorializing a saint
Speaker 1: who was being assumed into heaven. It was a very
Speaker 1: impressive service. The most distasteful thing about the whole thing
Speaker 1: was carl Andre being there with these girlfriends. Well, I
Speaker 1: understood that that was his girlfriend. And she would walk
Speaker 1: across the room and she would go get coffee or
Speaker 1: whatever they were serving, and she would bring him back
Speaker 1: to He sat like a bump in this place, and
Speaker 1: he was like a specter. It was a strange thing
Speaker 1: to see he con at or what happened. This has
Speaker 1: got to be a terrible thing for him. How you
Speaker 1: saw Carl sitting in the corner depended entirely on whether
Speaker 1: you thought he bore any responsibility for Anna's death. But
Speaker 1: however uncomfortable his presence was, Anna's presence loomed larger. Oh,
Speaker 1: I know that the memorial service was completely impression was
Speaker 1: very well done. It was we got a real sense
Speaker 1: of how these women were willing to pull behind her.
Speaker 1: Anna's memorial was the first gathering where it was clear
Speaker 1: just how ruthlessly this small community had been torn apart.
Speaker 1: That night divided the Soho art world, and the tale
Speaker 1: of the two Carls began. There was guilty Carl, an
Speaker 1: innocent Carl. There was Carl the person and Carl the artist.
Speaker 1: There were those who loved Anna and wanted to see
Speaker 1: him convicted, and others who loved Carl and wanted to
Speaker 1: protect him. And when these two groups of people would
Speaker 1: meet in a gallery on the street at a bar
Speaker 1: or restaurant, which inevitably happened, things could get dramatic. Honest
Speaker 1: friend Eletroyano remembered an encounter with Carl. He was at
Speaker 1: a diner and at some point I used jilled at
Speaker 1: him that he was a murderer. But you know, he
Speaker 1: didn't do anything. He wasn't going to be confrontational. His
Speaker 1: thing is manipulation and silence. Here's Carl's friend and fellow artist,
Speaker 1: Laurence Weener. Well, sometimes people would scream at you on
Speaker 1: the street. I would usually just ignore it, just stare
Speaker 1: at them. The majority of people who had something to
Speaker 1: say were quite provincial people. There was quite a confrontational thing.
Speaker 1: People saw this as the demarking of a feminist issue.
Speaker 1: The feminist issue, as Laurence Wiener called it, began when
Speaker 1: it became clear that Anna's friends were pushing for the investigation.
Speaker 1: The women who knew Anna best knew the following things.
Speaker 1: She was excited about her work and had plans for
Speaker 1: the future. She was about to file for divorce. She
Speaker 1: was afraid of heights, and they knew that if they
Speaker 1: wanted justice, they'd have to fight like hell for it.
Speaker 1: These women included Natalia del Go, who was herself a lawyer,
Speaker 1: be Ruby Rich, who was writing for the Village Voice
Speaker 1: and had the power of the pen, and Anna's devoted
Speaker 1: sister roc Lean and they were all talking to the
Speaker 1: young assistant Da Martha Bashford, who in her five years
Speaker 1: on the job had already seen plenty of cases of
Speaker 1: men assaulting their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces. These women
Speaker 1: were prepared to use whatever power and influence they had
Speaker 1: to convict Carl Andre and the pro Carl camp, the
Speaker 1: friends who bailed him out of jail and decided there
Speaker 1: was quote nothing more to say. They took note of
Speaker 1: this group of women, and that's how the journalist Robert
Speaker 1: Katz entered the picture. He had covered the art world.
Speaker 1: He understood that Carl Andre was already a canonical figure,
Speaker 1: and one of Carl's supporters told him quote the poor
Speaker 1: guy as being victimized by a feminist cabal. The folks
Speaker 1: who supported Carl simply assumed the cats would be on
Speaker 1: their side, which is of course why they asked him
Speaker 1: to look into the case. But that's not what happened.
Speaker 1: Here's a bit from his interview over dinner with Carol
Speaker 1: and Saul Lowit have you wudn't covered anything but shopping,
Speaker 1: the biggest shocking thing that lives and currents the strange
Speaker 1: kind of networking that went to protector if you talk
Speaker 1: to Pauloopfen. I have talked Polo s part of the networks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she was one of the people who wanted things to
Speaker 1: write about this, But really from from Kyle, from their
Speaker 1: point of view, that was that the sub exactly is
Speaker 1: the point of views that at one point it was
Speaker 1: what they believed was that feminist cabals sort of aout
Speaker 1: to get it with the district attorney. So they threw
Speaker 1: it as something, you know, like some evil force behind
Speaker 1: So when I got to look at that, I didn't
Speaker 1: agree with them. That's that it was some sort of blob.
Speaker 1: What is their scenario for the event? I would like
Speaker 1: to accept whatever he said, he said very little. What
Speaker 1: is the problem with his story was that he contradicted
Speaker 1: the self stuff for a time that first day and
Speaker 1: then it's lawyer's all to shut up, said, it's an
Speaker 1: episode of word after. I wish there was a feminist cabal.
Speaker 1: I don't think there was one, and I don't think
Speaker 1: there is one now. That's Connie Butler, chief curator at
Speaker 1: the Hammer Museum, who legendarily organized the most comprehensive exhibition
Speaker 1: of feminist art to date. Connie is one of the
Speaker 1: most respected curators in the art world. Cabal is just
Speaker 1: another word for in a way at which hunt you know.
Speaker 1: It's just it's generations, old stories and year of women
Speaker 1: and the power that they might have if they really
Speaker 1: were to organize. Just for fun, I looked up cabal
Speaker 1: in the dictionary. It means a secret political clique or faction.
Speaker 1: And it's true that b ruby Rich in, Natalia Delgado
Speaker 1: and a few other women had meetings with the assistant
Speaker 1: da It's true there was a letter writing campaign and
Speaker 1: a series of phone calls and meetings to see if
Speaker 1: any of Carl's x's would verify rumors that he had
Speaker 1: been violent. Nothing came of it, but it wasn't a secret.
Speaker 1: The folks agitating for Anna were highly vocal, and it
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't all the feminists banding together against Carl. Notably,
Speaker 1: both Lucy Lepard and Paula Cooper, two of the most
Speaker 1: powerful women in the art world, would not speak out
Speaker 1: against him. As b ruby Rich wrote in The Village Voice,
Speaker 1: the folks who supported Anna were quote the feminist artists,
Speaker 1: Latino artist, black writers, and unintimidated Cubans, all of whom had,
Speaker 1: as she would say, more passion than power, so not
Speaker 1: exactly a cabal. And what's underneath that, of course, is
Speaker 1: a long history and deeply rooted misogyny that gets thrown
Speaker 1: around too easily. In circumstances like this, it's easy to
Speaker 1: blame the feminist cabal. Yep, Blaming feminism definitely has a history.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't only Carl's protectors back then who use
Speaker 1: this kind of language in which they imagine a coordinated
Speaker 1: plot in which they are the victims rather than the
Speaker 1: women who they've harmed. We still hear this kind of
Speaker 1: thinking from our entertainers, politicians, and even Supreme Court justices.
Speaker 1: No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and
Speaker 1: well funded effort to destroy my good name and destroy
Speaker 1: my family. After Anna's memorial, the criminal justice system slowly
Speaker 1: turned its wheels. Martha Bashford, the assistant DA, made two
Speaker 1: attempts to indict Karl, and both times she succeeded in
Speaker 1: getting the grand jury to agree with her and indict
Speaker 1: him on murder charges, and both times those indictments were
Speaker 1: thrown out on technicalities. Even though the judge wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: it appears that there may still remain sufficient evidence to
Speaker 1: sustain the indictment. It was coming up on a year
Speaker 1: since her death, and Team Anna was starting to fear
Speaker 1: that the DA's office might drop the case completely, so
Speaker 1: b ruby Rich made a Hail Mary pass in the
Speaker 1: pages of the Village Voice. The reason I wrote the
Speaker 1: article on the first anniversary of her death was to
Speaker 1: try to raise the profile of the case again in
Speaker 1: public and make it too embarrassing for the district attorney
Speaker 1: to drop the case and let Karl off the hook.
Speaker 1: In that article, b ruby Rich wrote the follow A
Speaker 1: woman artist tells Anna's sister some damaging information about Andrea,
Speaker 1: then retracts it after consulting with her husband. A businessman
Speaker 1: tells an artist friend of mine a story about Andre
Speaker 1: ripping up a bar in the sixties, then denies it
Speaker 1: to a reporter. Another woman artist still remembers Andrea's verbal
Speaker 1: viciousness towards his first wife, but she won't go public either.
Speaker 1: I believed that this had killed feminism. I thought it
Speaker 1: was a sense of someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant,
Speaker 1: this passionate. As Anna could be killed, then any of
Speaker 1: us could be killed. If it could happen to her,
Speaker 1: then nobody stood a chance. B ruby Rich hoped her
Speaker 1: article would bring women forward, women who could verify the
Speaker 1: rumors circulating about Carl Sadly, nobody came forward as a
Speaker 1: result of that article. However, it did accomplish its main goal,
Speaker 1: which was to actually get the indictment and bring him
Speaker 1: to trial. And that last indictment stuck. And then when
Speaker 1: they assigned a new assistant DA and it went to trial,
Speaker 1: I felt, Wow, it really did work. Carl Andre was
Speaker 1: about to be tried for murder next time on Death
Speaker 1: of an Artist, Jack Hoffinger stood up and said, my
Speaker 1: client wishes to waive a jury. No one could remember
Speaker 1: the last time anybody had ever waived a jury and
Speaker 1: murder trial. It's a very very rare event. That was
Speaker 1: truly an amazing surprise. He was not going to throw
Speaker 1: her shout out a lingo. Did its squalidness ever make
Speaker 1: you not want to go and see his show? Now?
Speaker 1: I have nine key to show. There was this crazy
Speaker 1: thing called artistic license, which meant that artists get excused
Speaker 1: because whatever it is that they produced is so much
Speaker 1: more important than whatever damage they could do to people
Speaker 1: in our lives. 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 Leta Mulad, 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 Pooge Rue
Speaker 1: and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas. Anna
Speaker 1: Mendieta's quotes were read by Tanya Burgera engineered by Sam Baer,
Speaker 1: fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is
Speaker 1: by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to a Lise Resmussen. If
Speaker 1: you love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to
Speaker 1: listen early, ad free and get exclusive bonus content. Look
Speaker 1: for the pushkin plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
Speaker 1: pushkin dot Fm. Find more great podcasts from Sonymusic Entertainment
Speaker 1: at sonymusic dot com Backslash Podcasts