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, Carl Andre
Speaker 1: is an extremely private person that you can publicize his works,
Speaker 1: but you can't talk about his private life with them.
Speaker 1: He said, justice has been done. I said, I congratulation.
Speaker 1: All of the case documents are unattainable, even their existence
Speaker 1: will not be confirmed. Mocha Downtown has fired its chief curator,
Speaker 1: Helen Molesworth. So you have an India I do. It's
Speaker 1: a huge building. It's a good fifteen floors higher than
Speaker 1: any other building. It's really high. It's really disturbing how
Speaker 1: high it is. That's me and my producer Luisa, visiting
Speaker 1: Carl Andre's building in Greenwich Village. I feel like I
Speaker 1: should come clean. I did not think this was a
Speaker 1: good idea. Luisa was trained as a journalist. Apparently, when
Speaker 1: journalists hit brick walls with email and phone messages, they
Speaker 1: do something called doorstepping, which is when you literally just
Speaker 1: show up at someone's doorstep. Needless to say, they don't
Speaker 1: teach this technique in art history class. It made me nervous.
Speaker 1: As all get out, but there was no other option
Speaker 1: when it came to talk into Carl, so here we were.
Speaker 1: Carl still lives in the same apartment where Anna Mendieta
Speaker 1: went out the window. Standing at street level, we had
Speaker 1: to crane our necks to look all the way up
Speaker 1: to the thirty fourth floor. The horror of Anna's last
Speaker 1: moments really hit me. There was nothing abstract about it anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't think we're going to be able to ring
Speaker 1: a bell. No, I think we're going to have to
Speaker 1: talk to the doorman. The doorman his job is to
Speaker 1: keep us away. Yep. The lobby was all luxury, soaring atrium,
Speaker 1: fancy light fixtures, plush sofas, and a doorman behind a
Speaker 1: large desk right at the entrance. When we realized there
Speaker 1: was no way to ring Carl's doorbell directly, I decided
Speaker 1: to write him a note, a last ditch effort to
Speaker 1: see if he'd talk. How are you feeling about going
Speaker 1: in there? Not good? When I thought we were just
Speaker 1: going to ring his bell, it kind of felt like
Speaker 1: we were teenagers. But the place is fortified. There's a
Speaker 1: security guard walking around in a doormat, and it feels
Speaker 1: like I don't know rolling up on somebody, but I
Speaker 1: think we have to do our due diligence. We need
Speaker 1: to try to get a response to some of what
Speaker 1: we're saying, right, and we've tried one way and now
Speaker 1: we're going to try one other way. Right, let's do it.
Speaker 1: It's not going to get any easier the more we wait.
Speaker 1: All right, Hi, how are you? I'm going to help.
Speaker 1: We are art historians trying to get in touch with
Speaker 1: Carl Andre and we've emailed him a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but we haven't gotten any answer back. And so we
Speaker 1: were actually going to go old school and just ring
Speaker 1: the bell, but obviously you control the bell. So I
Speaker 1: have a little note for him, and I just don't
Speaker 1: know what your protocols are. I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: allowed to ring up and say we're here, or if
Speaker 1: you want to take this. I can't hand that over.
Speaker 1: If you'd be no problem of beautiful fall, we appreciate
Speaker 1: that so much. Thank you. I handed over the note
Speaker 1: and we went back out to the street. That was
Speaker 1: in January. Carl never responded. I'm Helen Molesworth and from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries something Else and Sony Music Entertainment This is
Speaker 1: Death of an Artist, Episode six, The Reckoning. Maybe if
Speaker 1: Carl had talked, if he had ever acknowledged changing his
Speaker 1: story or straight up admitted that he just doesn't remember,
Speaker 1: or even if he had publicly recognized the amount of
Speaker 1: pain Anna's death caused him the art world, maybe then
Speaker 1: all of this would feel different. But he didn't do
Speaker 1: those things. So now I feel like I have to
Speaker 1: answer the question I asked myself at the start of
Speaker 1: this podcast. Can I still love Carl Andre's work? It's
Speaker 1: a question that by now almost all of us have
Speaker 1: faced in one form or another. So many of our
Speaker 1: cultural icons have been accused of terrible things. In our
Speaker 1: interviews for this series, the names Woody Allen, Michael Jackson,
Speaker 1: Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby came up again and again.
Speaker 1: Do we keep listening, watching reading the work of someone
Speaker 1: accused of causing harm? And might it be that how
Speaker 1: people answer these questions has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: how much power they have, whether that's the power dynamic
Speaker 1: of he said, she said, or the difference between being
Speaker 1: a curator at a big museum versus being an everyday
Speaker 1: working artist. I decided that in order to answer this question,
Speaker 1: I needed to go see some of Andrea's work. I
Speaker 1: hadn't seen any in years, and I was curious about
Speaker 1: how I would feel when I walked on Andrea's metal plates.
Speaker 1: Now after spending so much time thinking about Anna, Carl
Speaker 1: is eighty seven years old and officially he has retired,
Speaker 1: but in early twenty twenty two he had a show
Speaker 1: at the Paula Cooper Gallery and the press release said
Speaker 1: there was a new work. So Louisa and I walked
Speaker 1: from Carl's apartment to the gallery and Chelsea. It's a
Speaker 1: route I imagine Carl himself has probably taken a thousand times.
Speaker 1: So I wrote the gallery and the gallery wrote me
Speaker 1: back and said that they could not honor my request
Speaker 1: to talk about it in the space. I know Paula,
Speaker 1: and I really respect Paula, and I've felt bad all
Speaker 1: along knowing this podcast isn't something she wants me to do.
Speaker 1: So we're on the street, which feels really goofy, and
Speaker 1: luckily for us, one of the works is installed in
Speaker 1: this kind of show case shop window almost you know,
Speaker 1: where there's just enough room for one work, and what
Speaker 1: I'm looking at is a kind of classic Andre sculpture
Speaker 1: made out of these large pieces of milled cedar, so
Speaker 1: they've got that beautiful kind of light red orangey color
Speaker 1: that cedar has. They're clearly just piled one on top
Speaker 1: of the other, so basically we're looking at a staircase
Speaker 1: or a pyramid. You're very aware, this is not random,
Speaker 1: this is not chaos, this is order. The piece in
Speaker 1: the window was from nineteen eighty Seeing it was like
Speaker 1: seeing something from the past that was very familiar. So
Speaker 1: far things felt pretty much the same. So we went inside,
Speaker 1: we took in the show, and then we walked without talking,
Speaker 1: to a nearby park and turned on the recording equipment.
Speaker 1: It was cold and gray, the trees were bare, but
Speaker 1: the birds were out in force. Well, what did you think?
Speaker 1: You were very quiet in there. The show was very beautiful.
Speaker 1: It had a kind of elegance to it. I was
Speaker 1: also aware that I was a little bored. This show
Speaker 1: had a new work in it, but the new work
Speaker 1: didn't do anything. The new work was a milled cedar
Speaker 1: piece arranged against a wall. And here is a guy
Speaker 1: who made a sculpture in twenty twenty one that looked
Speaker 1: just like the sculpture in the window from nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: and I was really aware of this feeling of time stilled,
Speaker 1: no forward movement. Looking at his new work, which looked
Speaker 1: just like his old work, I realized that I still
Speaker 1: thought all the things I used to think about his work,
Speaker 1: but that the work didn't make me feel the way
Speaker 1: it used to. And I know I lost that feeling
Speaker 1: because of everything I understand about what happened on the
Speaker 1: days before and after Anna died. I think there's birds
Speaker 1: pooping on us. Did jujits get pooped on? Really? Oh?
Speaker 1: I think I did too. Maybe the universe is trying
Speaker 1: to tell us something. Maybe the universe was sending us
Speaker 1: a sign that it was time to stop talking about
Speaker 1: Carl too, as they say, cancel him. We hear so
Speaker 1: much about cancel culture, the practice of radically shunning bad
Speaker 1: actors that extends to a band on their work. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I wish I could just cancel Carl and his work
Speaker 1: and be done with it. And maybe that's the point
Speaker 1: of canceling. It's an expedient way to deal with an
Speaker 1: intractable problem. But the conventional wisdom of the art world
Speaker 1: is to separate the art from the artist, So we
Speaker 1: keep the Carl Andre who solves sculpture's relationship to the floor,
Speaker 1: far away from the Carl who seemed to play a
Speaker 1: role in his wife's death. And according to this logic,
Speaker 1: I don't have to cancel him. According to this logic,
Speaker 1: I should simply enjoy those Andre sculptures and leave the
Speaker 1: mess of his personal life out of it. Is there
Speaker 1: any moment for you where the art matters more than
Speaker 1: its maker? Now? This is Roxanne Gay, a public thinker,
Speaker 1: a feminist, and an opinion writer for The New York Times.
Speaker 1: She has written that cancel culture is a misnomer. She
Speaker 1: prefers to call it consequence culture. I don't think that
Speaker 1: we're preserving anything when we preserve the work of murderers.
Speaker 1: Because Carl was acquitted, I've been careful not to say
Speaker 1: he is a murderer, And by careful, what I really
Speaker 1: mean is compelled legally not to do so, because legally
Speaker 1: that word is not a fact. Legally, it's just an opinion.
Speaker 1: The world will be fine without Carl Andre, and his
Speaker 1: work is beautiful. His work is absolutely beautiful. It's a
Speaker 1: shame that someone with that much talent could not control himself.
Speaker 1: I don't know why we keep putting the onus on
Speaker 1: our cells, like why do you feel this way? Like no,
Speaker 1: he's the problem, Like go ask him why he had
Speaker 1: to be such a piece of shit. And the men
Speaker 1: are the ones who should have to answer for themselves.
Speaker 1: I can't lie. I had a brief moment listening to
Speaker 1: Roxanne when I felt the weight of this whole dilemma
Speaker 1: lift off my shoulders. Of course, the world will be
Speaker 1: fine without carl Andre's work. Of course men should control themselves.
Speaker 1: How is this my problem? But after the interview I
Speaker 1: had trouble with the my part. Was it really just
Speaker 1: up to me? When individuals stop supporting an artist's work,
Speaker 1: do we think this individual action has real life repercussions
Speaker 1: or consequences, as Roxanne Gay would say, And if that's
Speaker 1: the case, is cancel culture another way of replacing group
Speaker 1: responsibility with individual choice. As someone who worked in museums
Speaker 1: for most of my life, this highly individual response didn't
Speaker 1: seem quite right. One of the things that's interesting about
Speaker 1: museums is that they are the place where art gets
Speaker 1: to be public. And when that happens, then art is
Speaker 1: really about all of us. It's about society. It is
Speaker 1: a public record of what we think, feel and believe.
Speaker 1: So what's important was how as a society we were
Speaker 1: going to handle this kind of ethical dilemma. When I
Speaker 1: was a museum curator, I was what folks call a gatekeeper,
Speaker 1: meaning I was someone who determined what art the public
Speaker 1: got to see. This meant my so called personal decisions
Speaker 1: had public ramifications. I would feel comfortable with a Carl
Speaker 1: Andrea sculpture at the MET, for sure. That's Max Wholeline,
Speaker 1: director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the
Speaker 1: most important museums in the world. He said he'd be
Speaker 1: fine was showing a sculpture by Carl Andre at the MET.
Speaker 1: We're talking about museums as being the sort of the
Speaker 1: primary institution that creates the discourse publicly around art. I'm
Speaker 1: curious how you would respond to the Gorilla Girls. Their
Speaker 1: quote unquote solution to this quote unquote problem is a
Speaker 1: radical rewriting of museum wall label so that you couldn't
Speaker 1: put up a Carl Andre without informing your public of
Speaker 1: this kind of controversial, complex ethical conundrum. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: such wall labels at the Met? About those wall labels,
Speaker 1: the Gorilla Girl suggested a wall label that would go
Speaker 1: something like this, Carl Andre was accused of murdering his wife,
Speaker 1: the artist on a Mendieta. He was represented by a
Speaker 1: highly paid lawyer at a bench trial and was acquitted,
Speaker 1: and he made very few public states. It's about it thereafter,
Speaker 1: if the life of that human being is not exactly
Speaker 1: ingrained into the artistic work itself, then I think that
Speaker 1: there's still an issue with that. So if an artist
Speaker 1: in his life killed two people so drunk and driving,
Speaker 1: so is that then a relevant information that you need
Speaker 1: to provide the visitor of a museum to see a
Speaker 1: particular work that obviously has nothing to do with it
Speaker 1: with it Basically, Max says we should follow the lead
Speaker 1: of the artist. If their work isn't specifically related to
Speaker 1: a particular event in their life, then there's no need
Speaker 1: for the museum to bring it to the attention of
Speaker 1: the public. Do you think it's possible, Max, that you're
Speaker 1: lagging now this old idea about artists somehow being protected
Speaker 1: their bad behavior being protected because they're geniuses and they
Speaker 1: make these extraordinary objects. Are we behind here? I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously you're hinting at that. I think it's about the
Speaker 1: question of if you listen to music, if you read literature,
Speaker 1: if you see an artwork, if for you the most
Speaker 1: relevant thing is to first know the artistic biography, and
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Is there anyone you've given up?
Speaker 1: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby? Have you had any more personal
Speaker 1: moment of reckoning around these issues? I used to love
Speaker 1: HP Lovecraft's ooks, which, on the other hand, when you
Speaker 1: go dig deeper into his own story and he's somewhat
Speaker 1: rooted in white supremacists thoughts, you then look at that
Speaker 1: work in a different way, and you see that in
Speaker 1: a kind of a different context. Max doesn't read HP
Speaker 1: Lovecraft anymore, and I sadly don't watch Woody Allen films anymore.
Speaker 1: And the more I talk to folks about what happened
Speaker 1: to Anna, the more I knew that if I still
Speaker 1: worked in a museum, there would be no way I
Speaker 1: could put a work by Carl Andrea on public view.
Speaker 1: Did that mean I had flipped into canceling him? I've
Speaker 1: always been willing to separate the personality of the artists
Speaker 1: from the work they produce. That's Amy Cappolazzo, a leading
Speaker 1: figure in the contemporary art market, well known for her
Speaker 1: stints at the two most powerful auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's,
Speaker 1: a number of the great artists of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: We're awful to the women in their lives that I
Speaker 1: know so many artists that didn't raise their children and
Speaker 1: were shitty to their kids. I mean, what's the beginning
Speaker 1: and end of all this? So I think I'm always
Speaker 1: concerned about when we conflate the personal with the professional.
Speaker 1: Amy is also a huge fan of Anamendietta's and is
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to live with several of her pieces. She
Speaker 1: was a very important artist in my life, personally and professionally.
Speaker 1: When I really could afford to buy a work of art,
Speaker 1: one of the first things I bought was Anamandetta suite
Speaker 1: of photograph four photographed silhouetta with clay from the Wahaka series,
Speaker 1: and I have self portrait with blood from nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: Did you ever buy a work by carl Andre for yourself?
Speaker 1: I never did know, but they were never They were
Speaker 1: always stratospherically more expensive. Do you think carl Andre killed
Speaker 1: on him Indietta. There's been moments where I think he
Speaker 1: probably did, and there's moments where I say I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be so judgmental because I really don't know. I guess
Speaker 1: because he was acquitted, right, because we believed in the
Speaker 1: legal system, and he was acquitted, whether you believed he
Speaker 1: deserved to be acquitted or not, we had to kind
Speaker 1: of accept that and live with that. I suggested to
Speaker 1: Amy that it seemed unfair that Carl still got to
Speaker 1: have his life and career because the art world acted
Speaker 1: like nothing had happened. But it turned out Amy's crossed
Speaker 1: paths with Carl professionally, and she had a different take.
Speaker 1: I believe Carl under has suffered tremendously as a net
Speaker 1: result of that episode, both personally and professionally. It felt
Speaker 1: ostracized and was forced into a certain kind of isolation.
Speaker 1: I think he lived in more fearful and smaller and
Speaker 1: more subdued life than he might have had this episode
Speaker 1: not happened. And while he was celebrated for his artistic contributions,
Speaker 1: which remain whether he killed or didn't kill her, not
Speaker 1: re enjoyed any of it. So that's the price. The
Speaker 1: punishment that was exacted is more personal in that way.
Speaker 1: It's true a quiet descended around Carl in the wake
Speaker 1: of Anna's death, even though he still showed and still sold.
Speaker 1: He didn't get the kind of accolades and special treatment
Speaker 1: that his fellow minimalists did until twenty fourteen, when the
Speaker 1: retrospective Adia and the accompanying press made it seem like
Speaker 1: he was going to be completely rehabilitated. This didn't seem
Speaker 1: to impact Amy's position. She was adamant that the life
Speaker 1: of the artist and the art object beheld apart. In
Speaker 1: my life and career, been able to talk about Ondietta's
Speaker 1: work and carl Andre's work without ever mentioning the episode
Speaker 1: that happened. And why do you make that choice? Oh?
Speaker 1: Because because if Anna Mendietta is reduced to that episode,
Speaker 1: you are negating everything she stood for as an artist.
Speaker 1: And this is the conversation I resent. Like the point
Speaker 1: of being an artist so your art outlives you, so
Speaker 1: that you tell a story in a narrative or it
Speaker 1: lasts forever. And if she is reduced to that episode,
Speaker 1: you have negated everything she worked hard to be as
Speaker 1: an artist. The work is separate from the individual. It
Speaker 1: has to be, that's the point of being an artist,
Speaker 1: just like Anna Mendieta's work is separate from her death.
Speaker 1: I completely agree with Amy. One of the things that
Speaker 1: makes are great is that it outlives us. I understand
Speaker 1: wanting to untether Anna's work from her untimely death. I
Speaker 1: understand wanting to be able to talk about her work
Speaker 1: without having to take into account the tragedy that she
Speaker 1: had no idea was coming. But both Max and Amy
Speaker 1: can tolerate these pockets of silence, And it turns out
Speaker 1: I've been troubled by silence the whole time. Maybe I'm
Speaker 1: upset by the silence because as a gay person, I
Speaker 1: have to be public about my most private self in
Speaker 1: order to be fully human. The conversations we had about
Speaker 1: Anna and Carl showed me how much I believe in
Speaker 1: the power of talking about difficult things. And these conversations
Speaker 1: changed how I feel about Carl's work, and they also
Speaker 1: shifted my sense of what should and should not be
Speaker 1: shared with the public. Spending all this time with Anna
Speaker 1: and Carl helped me realize that I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a member of a community that discusses grave and difficult things.
Speaker 1: It's clear that our geniuses can do horrible things. It's
Speaker 1: clear that talent and violence can exist in the same person.
Speaker 1: But I've come to see cancel culture solution as another
Speaker 1: form of silence. What if instead of silence upon silence,
Speaker 1: the gatekeepers told the whole story, the whole, messy, complicated, infuriating,
Speaker 1: sad and complex story. When Anna died, the rights to
Speaker 1: her art automatically defaulted to Carl, but shortly after her death,
Speaker 1: Carl turned those rights over to her family, and for
Speaker 1: the last two decades her estate has been managed by
Speaker 1: a prominent New York gallery, and her legacy has grown
Speaker 1: a lot. By the time the two thousands rolled around,
Speaker 1: things really started to pick up. She had a major
Speaker 1: touring retrospective exhibition. Her work is owned by many of
Speaker 1: the most important museums in the country, and she was
Speaker 1: included not once but twice in Mamma's most recent reinstallation
Speaker 1: of their collection. And in twenty and eighteen, she showed
Speaker 1: up in the New York Times series Overlooked No More,
Speaker 1: the newspaper's attempt to redress the hundreds of people, primarily
Speaker 1: women and people of color, who did not garner an
Speaker 1: obituary in The New York Times as whiter and mailer days.
Speaker 1: They called her unapologetically feminist, which made me laugh because
Speaker 1: I hadn't realized feminism required an apology. It's twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: and if Annaware alive, she'd be seventy three seventy three now.
Speaker 1: Her work means a lot to a lot of people,
Speaker 1: especially to women, and especially to women artists. Similar to
Speaker 1: free to calla Anna is symbolic for people, she stands
Speaker 1: for something more than just her artwork. Her life and
Speaker 1: her death matter a great deal, and for some of
Speaker 1: her fans, reverence is accompanied by rage. These are the
Speaker 1: folks who started the where is Anna Mendietta hashtag, the
Speaker 1: folks who show up to protest when Carl Andre's work
Speaker 1: is on view. To be honest, Without these women, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure anyone would have thought to revisit this story.
Speaker 1: So I want to introduce you to two people who
Speaker 1: broke the art world's habitual silence. My name is Kristin Clifford,
Speaker 1: and I'm an artist. I'm fifty years old. My work
Speaker 1: is about bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, feminist health. Kristin first
Speaker 1: encountered Anna Mendietta's work in the late nineteen eighties in
Speaker 1: a high school art class. The students were given a
Speaker 1: bunch of art magazines and told to make collages, and
Speaker 1: I actually cut out a picture of one of Anna
Speaker 1: Mendietta's Silhouettas I made a collage of all of these
Speaker 1: women's bodies in art by women artists, I felt like
Speaker 1: the only value that I had was my looks, my body,
Speaker 1: my sexuality. I had already been raped. I had no
Speaker 1: way to speak about that, no way to talk about it,
Speaker 1: no one to tell. And so when I saw these images,
Speaker 1: like when I saw the Sea Luetta of Anna Mendieta,
Speaker 1: when I saw Moffatt Street, I saw myself. I really
Speaker 1: felt and saw myself in this work. You might remember
Speaker 1: that we started this show with Anna's first major work,
Speaker 1: Moffett Building Piece, a film that shows anonymous pedestrian responses
Speaker 1: to Blood on the Street, a work made in response
Speaker 1: to a rape and murder on campus. Kristen told us
Speaker 1: the story of her assault, and it was hard to
Speaker 1: listen to it. Turns out, listening to women and can
Speaker 1: be devastating, which is maybe why our society has such
Speaker 1: a hard time doing it. When I was raped when
Speaker 1: I was fifteen, the friends of the boy who raped
Speaker 1: me made a tape of themselves talking about him assaulting name.
Speaker 1: They were not boys they were over eighteen. I was
Speaker 1: in high school and they were college students, and they
Speaker 1: all recorded themselves laughing about me, how they should have
Speaker 1: wrapped me up and put me in the refrigerator and
Speaker 1: had leftovers in the morning, how it was sad that
Speaker 1: not all of them got to take a turn. And
Speaker 1: then they gave Christen the tape so she could listen
Speaker 1: to it. And that certainly had a huge part in
Speaker 1: my artistic career. And like wanting to be seen, needing
Speaker 1: to show my own version of events, wanting to see
Speaker 1: women telling their own version of their own lives, and
Speaker 1: feminist art is where I saw that. I didn't see
Speaker 1: it anyway, I didn't see it on TV. Fast forward
Speaker 1: almost three decades. It's twenty fourteen and the Carl Andre
Speaker 1: retrospective is about to start. Kristen teaches a college class
Speaker 1: on rape culture and makes feminist art. She's raising two kids,
Speaker 1: and one night she puts her kids to bed, makes
Speaker 1: a cup of tea, and picks up the latest art
Speaker 1: magazine to find an article about Carl. So I just
Speaker 1: made a Facebook event and started tweeting like there will
Speaker 1: be blood. I was just really angry. I just was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to fucking throw blood in front of DIA.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows who I am, Nobody cares. It's not like
Speaker 1: i have some art career to protect. I'm never going
Speaker 1: to show a DIA. I'm never going to show it
Speaker 1: a museum. Who gives a shit. I'm struck by Kristen
Speaker 1: sense that her ability to speak comes from her simlet
Speaker 1: eyed assessment of where she sits in the art world
Speaker 1: pecking order. In my experience, the more powerful one is,
Speaker 1: the more one tends to tow the party line. Lord knows,
Speaker 1: I have been incredibly anxious about doing this podcast. All
Speaker 1: kinds of folks have let me know they didn't think
Speaker 1: this was such a good idea. More than one person
Speaker 1: said upon hearing about it, Oh that's brave, as in,
Speaker 1: oh that's crazy. So Kristen and about fifteen to twenty
Speaker 1: other people, all in white jumpsuits, showed up in front
Speaker 1: of the DIA Foundation office, not the actual museum, but
Speaker 1: their offices in Manhattan, and they began to chant I
Speaker 1: wish I was still alive. And then Kristin took out
Speaker 1: a plastic bag of chicken blood she'd gotten from the
Speaker 1: butcher and dumped it on the sidewalk while others kept chanting,
Speaker 1: and there was a real moment there of sorrow for
Speaker 1: her death. The police came and asked the protesters to leave,
Speaker 1: which they did. To me, it was just to let
Speaker 1: Dia as a whole no that we were pissed off
Speaker 1: that they were part of this rehabilitation of carl Andre's
Speaker 1: reputation that to me was just so wrong. That small
Speaker 1: protest sparked the next one. I reached out to Kristin
Speaker 1: Clifford and I told her what I was thinking about
Speaker 1: doing and whether she would want to join us. My
Speaker 1: name is Jennie Fittamaijo. I am a poet, performer, an essayist.
Speaker 1: I tend to write books and performan says that center
Speaker 1: around the rescripting and reimagining of undocumented migrants in the US.
Speaker 1: Like Kristen, Jennifer has deeply personal reasons for loving on A.
Speaker 1: Mendietta's work. I was born in Wiska Territory which is
Speaker 1: currently known as Bogota, Columbia. My family left after a
Speaker 1: lot of the violence of the eighties when I was
Speaker 1: five years old, and my mother and I crossed the
Speaker 1: border without documents. I think that sense of displacement, the
Speaker 1: sense of longing, that desire for the land, desire for
Speaker 1: home is definitely I think one of the connections. Jennifer
Speaker 1: was in art school when she first encountered a photo
Speaker 1: from Mendietta Silhouetta series on a visit to a museum.
Speaker 1: I remember feeling immediately connected to it and simultaneously really angry,
Speaker 1: as it felt like had I not seen this work before?
Speaker 1: How had I not encountered these images before? And so
Speaker 1: a few months into the DA show, Jennifer and a
Speaker 1: small group of other folks arrived to protest, and this
Speaker 1: time they didn't want to stay outside. They planned to
Speaker 1: go into the gallery space and cry. I wanted a
Speaker 1: gesture that would focus not so much Andrea himself, but
Speaker 1: in the people in the room who gathered to grief.
Speaker 1: The trope of the crying woman who has been either
Speaker 1: jilted or left behind or whatever, you know, all those
Speaker 1: things are going to crying felt so appropriate, and it's
Speaker 1: also linked to, you know, ideas of like an overly
Speaker 1: emotional woman, feminine excess. All of those things. They spread
Speaker 1: out and sat on the floor next to or on
Speaker 1: top of Carl Andres sculptures. The space was suddenly transformed
Speaker 1: in the having people just sit on the floor, and
Speaker 1: so suddenly it was like, oh no, we're the thing
Speaker 1: cutting through the space. You know, a lot of Andrea's
Speaker 1: work is about cutting through the space with materials and
Speaker 1: rearranging space. Suddenly, our bodies, predominantly, you know, women's bodies
Speaker 1: were now cutting through the space of the gallery by
Speaker 1: sitting or laying in front of pieces in this you know,
Speaker 1: very sort of like bright, cool room. And then they
Speaker 1: began to cry. The sounds of it were so echoy
Speaker 1: and intense because of the space is so large, and
Speaker 1: I remember being like, I'll sit here and cry forever.
Speaker 1: In the moment of the tears, inside of the gallery
Speaker 1: saw liquid tears against rigid structures and forms. It was
Speaker 1: the way of remembering her, and it was a way
Speaker 1: of bringing her to life and reminding Anna that we
Speaker 1: haven't forgotten her. It wasn't to send a message to institutions,
Speaker 1: because I don't really believe that they want to listen necessarily.
Speaker 1: It's mostly about a kind of mutual care for each
Speaker 1: other inside of the space that very much doesn't really care.
Speaker 1: When I hear these stories, they make me question who
Speaker 1: we think art is for Is it for experts like
Speaker 1: me and Amy Coppolazzo and Max Holine. Is it all
Speaker 1: about the pleasures of insider baseball? Or is it for
Speaker 1: the fifteen year old girl who got raped or the
Speaker 1: young woman who crossed the border with her mother. Obviously
Speaker 1: it's for all of those people and then some. But
Speaker 1: I think those of us who are experts and gatekeepers
Speaker 1: have a responsibility to share our knowledge with the public.
Speaker 1: Let's face it, all the experts know the story of
Speaker 1: Carl and Anna. It strikes me that we, the gate keepers,
Speaker 1: are being terribly paternalizing when we decide the public doesn't
Speaker 1: need to know facts that we all know. I think
Speaker 1: we have to think about that young teenage girl in
Speaker 1: the gallery. What version of my expertise do I owe her?
Speaker 1: Is withholding how Anna died? Protecting her or any viewer
Speaker 1: for that matter. Perhaps the better thing to do is
Speaker 1: reframe the question. When we are silent, who is being
Speaker 1: protected by that silence? Carl's silence and the silence of
Speaker 1: art World insiders ends up feeling like an omission of
Speaker 1: the truth, a lapse that seems to suggest that Anna
Speaker 1: could be erased from Carl's story, or that his legacy
Speaker 1: could be sanitized to make it more palatable, more polite.
Speaker 1: After the Carl Andrea retrospective, some of the me too
Speaker 1: energy online spilled over to Karl. The where is Anna
Speaker 1: Mendietta hashtag followed him around, appearing on social media any
Speaker 1: time his name popped up in art world news. That
Speaker 1: swell of anger prompted one more story about Karl to emerge,
Speaker 1: this time from the actress Ellen Barkham. In January twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: she tweeted about an incident from the nineteen seventies. I
Speaker 1: was a twenty two year old waitress working a party
Speaker 1: for painter Karl Andrea. Andrea got angry over his service,
Speaker 1: shoving me against a wall, his hands around my neck,
Speaker 1: pulling me up till my feet left the floor. Three
Speaker 1: men got him off me. It was retweeted almost five
Speaker 1: thousand times. As a feminist, I don't think I should
Speaker 1: look away from the controversy over how Anna Mendietta died.
Speaker 1: As an art historian, I can't write Carl Andrea out
Speaker 1: of the story. I don't want to erase anything from
Speaker 1: the history books. I'd prefer to add I'm interested in
Speaker 1: what happens when the silence is lifted, like what happens
Speaker 1: when I have to think about my adolescent zeal for
Speaker 1: walking on carl Andre's work. Knowing everything I know now
Speaker 1: was part of the thrill that I could break a
Speaker 1: rule in public, and that I knew I could break it,
Speaker 1: and that other visitors might not know. So part of
Speaker 1: the thrill was kind of daring someone to say something
Speaker 1: to me about it because I knew something other people
Speaker 1: didn't know, and that energy, well, that's asshole energy, and
Speaker 1: that's why it feels good. And now, knowing what I know,
Speaker 1: I'm a little more wary about that kind of energy.
Speaker 1: I even feel a little embarrassed on behalf of my
Speaker 1: younger self, especially as I think about my role might
Speaker 1: be as a bystander to violence, which was Anna's question
Speaker 1: from the very beginning. The upshot of all of this
Speaker 1: is the thinking about the art and the life simultaneously
Speaker 1: means we can think new things, both ethically and esthetically,
Speaker 1: and while this might be hard to do, in the
Speaker 1: end it gets us a much more complex story. And
Speaker 1: it's in the name of complexity that I wonder what
Speaker 1: would happen if when we lift the silence, we do
Speaker 1: so with compassion, Compassion for those who have been hurt,
Speaker 1: Compassion for those for whom silence is a form of violence,
Speaker 1: Compassion even for those who have done the harm. It
Speaker 1: turns out what I want is more talking. I want
Speaker 1: a discourse that accounts for public and private art and life.
Speaker 1: I want an open field of end, not a closed
Speaker 1: field where some things can be said and others cannot.
Speaker 1: I want to be part of a culture that can
Speaker 1: handle the messiness, the not knowing, the complexity. I want
Speaker 1: us to have as many public conversations as it takes
Speaker 1: to understand why men are allowed to hurt those who
Speaker 1: have less power than them. I want silence to be
Speaker 1: replaced with talking, because I think it's the only way
Speaker 1: we might be able to forge some kind of path
Speaker 1: toward repair. I have to end this story with no end,
Speaker 1: so it seems like the only thing to do is
Speaker 1: end with a work by Annamandietta. In a short video
Speaker 1: she made called Oshon, we see two sinuous lines of
Speaker 1: mud in the middle of a tidal river. The handmade
Speaker 1: walls of dirt look like two snakes or two halves
Speaker 1: of the outline of a body, but the water is
Speaker 1: doing its thing without a care in the world it flows,
Speaker 1: and it's clear that eventually it will slowly erode these
Speaker 1: two forms. Anna made this work in Key Biscayne, Florida.
Speaker 1: She made it in the warm waters of the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: waters that make a mockery of national borders as they
Speaker 1: flow between a place we call the United States, in
Speaker 1: an island we call Cuba. In Santaria, Oshun is the
Speaker 1: goddess of rivers and love. She came in the boats
Speaker 1: that carried the Yoruba people who were stolen and sold,
Speaker 1: and the descendants of those people worship her to this day.
Speaker 1: They say you can never step in the same river twice.
Speaker 1: They say love is forever. They say art is long
Speaker 1: and life is short. I hear all of these things
Speaker 1: in my head when I look at honest work. I
Speaker 1: hear her work admonishing us to pay more attention every
Speaker 1: day to the world around us, to see how the
Speaker 1: land is changing. And I hear her whispering, asking us
Speaker 1: how are we going to change along with it. Death
Speaker 1: of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment, written and hosted by
Speaker 1: me Helen Mouldsworth. Exact producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kanegg,
Speaker 1: lital Malad, Jacob Weisberg, and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria
Speaker 1: Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton.
Speaker 1: Additional production helped by Tali Abacassas, Pira Acibe Bansu, Rahima
Speaker 1: Nasa and Harrison VJ Choi. Engineered by Sam Bear, fact
Speaker 1: checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our production coordinator is ek Eggbatola.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Corolla Hoppt, Natalia Delgado, Mia LaBelle, and the Robert Katz Family.
Speaker 1: Thanks also to our legal team Louise Carrion, Lauren Pagoni,
Speaker 1: Gen Womack, and the team at Clara's Law. If you
Speaker 1: love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to listen early,
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