October 7, 2022 • 43 mins
Carl stands trial for the murder of Ana Mendieta. His defense ruthlessly attacks Ana, using her artwork against her, and rests heavily on his prestige in the art world. Helen reveals her personal connection to Carl Andre and his work, and how it changed her career.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Pushkin. This show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence.
Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where
to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist, she's making
(00:32):
photocopies and she wanted to use that for her divorce
on grounds of infidelity. I find that my roots are Cuban.
The branches might be American, but the trunk of the
tree is Cuban or the roots. You know, she was
not a santea. She was not dressed in white. There
is a very big difference between a practitioner of santea
(00:54):
and somebody who studies or uses it as a way
of working with culture. I want to take you back
to nineteen eighties Manhattan. In those days, you could actually
(01:14):
smoke in the hallways of the courtroom, and many a
jury weight took place in the hallways with people smoking
cigarettes and playing cards and things like that. It was gritty.
That's Ron Koubi, a long time New York City defense lawyer.
He's going to be our tour guide through the legal
dynamics of Carl's trial. The city had suffered a recession.
(01:41):
Crime was rampim. There had been a spate of high
profile horrors. I remember taking the subway to school and
reading the ominous headlines in the post or the daily news.
Fear was in the air, and much of it played
on white people's deep seated racism that equated crime with
people of color. The judges were almost exclusively white, the
(02:06):
defendants were almost exclusively people of color. And the almost
there is important because, oh, from nineteen eighty five through
eighty eight eighty nine, there was a plethora of defendants
in cases that I'll just call white boys behaving badly.
(02:27):
There was the Robert Chambers case. That's the so called
preppy murder case. Chambers claimed his friend Jennifer Levin accidentally
died during rough sex. This trial was actually happening just
down the hall from Carl Andre's trial and was getting
all the media attention. Paul Castellano, who was rubbed out
(02:47):
at the steakhouse in plain View on the street again
being a crime family mafio so killed in a hit
ordered by John Gotti. There was Bernard gets, the white
man who shot four young African American teenagers on the
subway in a highly dubious act of vigilante justice, and
of course less well known but still significant in the
(03:11):
art world, there was Carl Andre This was the backdrop
of Carl's trial, a swirl of high profile cases of
white men accused of murder. The new Assistant DA on
the case was Elizabeth Letterer, and by nineteen eighty eight
she was ready to go to trial. Several of Anna's
(03:31):
friends rallied and joined Anna's family in the courthouse to
witness the proceedings. One of the people who attended almost
every day was b Ruby Rich. She remembers a stark scene.
There's an aisle down the middle, and one side is
reserved for the defendants friends and family, and the other
(03:52):
sides reserved for the victim's friends and family. It's exactly
a bad wedding where one side of the family disapproves
of the marriage, as I think they did in fact
disapprove of the marriage. On his side was packed with
friends and family, while Carl's side remained empty. He had
apparently asked his friends and supporters not to come to
(04:13):
the courthouse. All of Carl's friends were telling people in
the art world not to go. Carl doesn't want you there,
and under the guise of sensitivity, you know you don't
want to see Carl like this was kind of the
implication of it. Under that guise, nobody knew what was
(04:34):
going on. They prevented people from actually hearing the testimony,
from actually hearing the evidence, from actually finding out what
had gone on. This would come to feel symbolic of
the whole affair. For honest people, it was a profoundly
public matter that demanded visibility, and for Carl's people, it
was a situation to be kept private. You can publicize
(04:57):
his works, but you can't talk about his private life
with That's Carl's defense lawyer Jack Hoffinger, Carl Andre is
an extremely private person. I mean he doesn't want a
photograph taken. Carl Andre has never talked publicly, and I
doubt that he's talked really privately about this case to anybody.
This image of Karl alone in the courtroom, no friends,
(05:22):
no family, is both tragic and chilling. We can see
a man bereft, a man on the brink of losing everything,
or we can see a man set apart from others
because of his intellect, his power to transform the history
of art, his genius. I'm your host. Helen Wallsworth from
(05:42):
Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music entertainment. This is
Death of an Artist, Episode four. The Genius Problem. Here's
the thing, and this is probably going to feel familiar.
(06:06):
When a super talented man, someone who's been called a genius,
gets accused of harming someone they're fans meaning us, Well,
it turns out we don't really want to believe it,
at least not at first and not for a long time.
Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen. So when
(06:28):
Carl was accused of honest murder, there was a sense
of shock on two levels. City Confidential, a cheesy true
crime TV show, described the art world's reaction. There was
shock on the Sheik Streets of Solo to the shock
was that Carl had murdered on it and you others.
(06:50):
It was a shock that anyone could possibly accused the
Great Carl Andre of something so heinous. But when Carl
finally stood trial, his defense team recognized that the folks
in the art world who thought he was a genius
were not going to be the ones deciding his fate.
(07:11):
A typical jury in Manhattan in the late nineteen eighties
would have largely been civil servants and retired veterans. They
probably weren't going to be impressed by an avant garde
art star. This is a guy who throws pieces of
metal on a floor, throws some bricks on top. You know,
he's sort of the classic definition of art about which
(07:36):
people say, I don't know much about art, but I
know shit when I see it. Okay, Carl wasn't throwing
pieces of metal or bricks on the floor. But it's
true that Carl made sculptures that challenge the very idea
of art, so I can forgive the folks who couldn't
(07:56):
see it as art. And it's also true that Carl
came to trial wearing his usual overalls and carrying a
tote bag filled with newspapers and books. He arrived early
every day, read the paper, and remained silent. But even
though he was wearing working class overalls, he lived in
a luxury high rise apartment, traveled to Europe for art exhibitions,
(08:20):
and sold his work for handsome prices. All of this
contradiction probably wasn't going to endear him to a jury.
Carl Andre is a remarkably and was a remarkably unsympathetic character.
First of all, there's his look. He's a big hulking guy.
(08:43):
He's affecting a working class attitude, but he's not. The
question the lawyers and Carl were faced with was how
in the world do you explain his art and his
lifestyle to the everyday folks who make up the jury
pool in Manhattan. But the judge, Alvin Schlessinger, was not
(09:07):
an everyday person. Schlessinger fancied himself as a more sophisticated person,
somebody who appreciated arts and culture and all of those
kinds of things, you know, theater and opera and art,
and so he would naturally be a more sympathetic audience
(09:28):
to Andre and his work than your average jury of
twelve plus alternates. Journalist Robert Katz was there when Carl's
defense team hit upon their fundamental strategy. He described the
moment in a radio interview after the trial. Jack Hoffinger
stood up and said, my client wishes to waive a jury.
(09:50):
And everybody looked around, and nobody really understood what he meant,
because no one could remember the last time anybody had
ever waived a jury and murder trial. It's a very
very rare event. That was truly an amazing surprise in
a decision that would have lasting implications. He opted for
a bench trial, which means the judge and only the judge,
(10:11):
decides the verdict. On the one hand, it makes sense
to me that Karl foregoes a jury trial. I can
totally see how he would have seemed very weird to people.
And it also makes sense to me that he didn't
choose a jury trial, because, let's face it, a genius
is going to have a hard time finding a jury
of their peers. Honest friends viewed the decision to waive
(10:36):
a jury as cynical. The art world's very special, very special.
This is when people used to say, don't go above
fourteenth Street because all the Vulgarians are there. They don't
understand truth, they don't understand beauty, they don't understand meaning
nobody else could understand the full genius of a figure
(10:56):
like Carl andre Or. I think, frankly, nobody us could
understand that Anna's life didn't matter. For some people, Carl's
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work was too important to be tethered to the actions
of a flawed man. And for other people, whatever happened
that night was private. And because whatever happened that night
was private, it had no place in discussions of his work.
This kind of thinking is in the very dna of
how art history is taught. So imagine a pact room
(11:44):
in a library. That's the art historian Julia Brian Wilson.
She's taking us back to the late nineteen nineties when
she was a young grad student at UC Berkeley, the
heart of leftist intellectual life and renowned for its stars
studded art history department. A visiting scholar was in town
to give a lecture on Carl Andre, and the room
(12:06):
was packed. One of the folks in the room was Julia,
a punk rock kid from Houston, a far cry from
the girls with pearls back east who typically populated art
history departments. I think I might have still been wearing
like this lab coat that I sometimes wore as a
dress that I had stolen because I was quite a
(12:26):
little thief in my riot girl days, you know, not
the usual uniform of the art history graduate student. The
speaker talked in formal terms about Carl Andre, using the
buzzword of the nineties, horizontality. That's horizontality as opposed to verticality.
(12:47):
Instead of thinking about uplifting monuments or upward progress, folks
were interested in the horizontal as a metaphor for non
hierarchical thinking, think crabgrass versus a tree, sib and cousins
versus parent and child. But Julia was thinking about another
version of horizontality, mouth agape at the fact that forty
(13:10):
five to fifty minutes had gone by talking about this,
that the other, about Carl Andre and again that this
key term of horizontality, where in my mind, I'm thinking
Anna Mendietta, you know, died in the most brutal way.
And the fact that there is no mention of this,
I just can't believe it to intone horizontality with all
(13:31):
of its implications of the ground and of gravity, and
to leave out how Anna died. That felt like not
just an art history problem, but a history history problem.
Why was the story so incomplete? And I was just
boiling with rage in my seat in the lecture room.
People were asking questions that had to do with the
(13:53):
formal terms that the speaker was laying out, and no
one was engaging with what to me seemed like the
bigger moral aches of like why are you giving airtime
to this artist? So heart pounding, the young grad student
stood up and asked her question, what about Anna Mendieta.
Where does she fit into this discussion? She just dismissed it.
(14:15):
Me just feeling like I cannot believe what this discipline
permits and what it erases, and just my baptism, I
would say, by fire into art history, which was really like,
you are here to learn this cannon, and this cannon
is pretty fixed. I was just constantly at sea, always
just hating the discipline in a way while also trying
(14:35):
to ingratiate myself to it. I mean, I still feel
that way. I still very much feel that way. Julia
had just walked into one of art history's brick walls,
the wall that separates the artist and their life from
the artwork they make. I want to go back to
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Peter Sheldall, the fabulous art critic for The New Yorker,
the art who loved Carl Andre's work but disliked his personality.
See if all the minimalists were assholes, and you're walking
through the gauntlet to get to the strawberry shortcake at
the back of Max's, you had made some kind of
(15:19):
peace or understanding that you could like artwork made by
people who you didn't like personally. It sounds like Oh yeah,
I mean that just seemed to me a given a start.
We don't give a car of Aggio grief for being
a murderer, you know, which he absolutely was. The controversy
(15:41):
about Ezra Pound after a Second World War, it was
a kind of a watershed for me that, you know,
he had been a traitor and a Semitic propagandist agi
American during the war and then after where he was
given a hugely christ ticket bowling in a war, and
then he he copied an insanity plea and got, you know,
(16:05):
put in a metal hospital for a while. And there
was a big debate about it, and I said, no,
you know, gave him the bowling an award and put
him the fucking jail. So it's not that Peter Sheldall
or the professor who gave the talk at you see,
Berkeley necessarily thought Carl was innocent. It's that they thought
it didn't matter when you were looking at his work.
(16:28):
I never met her, but you know I knew of her,
and she was not going to throw herself out a window.
And you know he has scrat from our fantics face
they were fighting. Did its squalidness ever make you not
want to go and see his show. No no, I
kept going for you to shows, so shell Doll, like
(16:50):
so many in the art world, like me, for instance,
kept going to his shows because whatever Carl Andre did
or did not do in his personal life, his work
was and would remain fill in the blank canonical great
genius historical. The art world doesn't have the statistics that
(17:13):
govern the world of sports, but it does have its
own version of being a goat, and that's genius, and
it is the art world's highest praise. The word typically
refers to someone who did something no one had ever
done before. So Picasso is a genius because he invented cubism.
Warhole is a genius because he bridged the gap between
(17:34):
art and popular culture. Carl Andrea is a genius because
he solved the problem of sculpture's relationship to the floor.
By the time of Anna's death, though, feminists were starting
to scrutinize the whole idea of artistic genius, because while
genius seems like a good thing, it was hard to
overlook the fact that what the term seemed to describe
(17:56):
was male genius, which really meant white male genie. Some
of the loudest and funniest feminist voices in the art
world are an anonymous group of women called the Gorilla Girls.
That's gorilla spelled like rebel fighter, not the primate. The
(18:16):
Gorilla Girls are all anonymous and use the names of
famous dead women artists. We talked to the Gorilla Girl
free to CALLO. We decided from the very beginning that
we had to be anonymous because we really didn't want
to bite the hand that we hoped would feed us.
It would be very damaging to one's career to complain
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in public like that because the art world is, you know,
is such a kind of self congratulatory place at that time.
They didn't want to hear anything negative. The way they
protect their identity out in public is by wearing gorilla
masks this time spelled like the primate. The gorilla girls
we spoke to would not tell us their real names
(19:01):
or turn on their cameras during the interviews, and the
secrecy works to this day. I still don't know who
is and is not a gorilla girl. We wanted to
confound stereotypes. Gorillas are not the vicious, violent animal or
culture casts on them. They're vegetarian, peaceful animals that live
(19:24):
in large groups of females and the hilarious masks. In
a way, it's become our hallmark, and to be honest,
I think it allows us to say things that we
might not be able to say through our own identities.
And the visuals of it is absolutely crazy picture. It
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a bunch of women in miniskirts and gorilla masks using
humor to poke fun at the absurdities of the white,
male dominated art world. Their primary form of attack were
posters that combine jokes with found images. Basically, they memes,
and instead of posting them on Instagram, they put them
up all around New York City. In nineteen eighty five,
(20:08):
we put up a poster saying, you know, these galleries
show fewer than ten percent women artists, are none at all?
Was it really just a mistake or some kind of
terrible oversight that there were almost no women geniuses in
art history books and so few women represented in galleries
and museums. Part of the genius myth is that the
(20:30):
genius is a solitary figure. He is a lone wolf.
He is not hemmed in by conventional thinking or the
rules and rags of everyday life. A genius does not
do the dishes, or shop for dinner, or raise children.
It's a hard category for women to be a part of.
One of the Guerrilla girls most famous posters is called
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The Advantages of being a Woman Artist. It has a
list of perks that include working without the pressure of success,
knowing that your career might pick up after your eighty
and not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called
a genius. The other thing about genius is it always
trump's bad behavior. There was this crazy thing called artistic license,
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which meant that artists get excused because whatever it is
that they produce is so much more important than whatever
damage they could do to people in their lives. Even
though Anna died in nineteen eighty five, it would be
a decade before the Guerrilla Girls would tackle the problem
of Carl Andrea and Anna Mendieta head on. They weren't alone.
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Critics like Peter Sheldall and curators like me continued to
separate bad male behavior from good male art. Even Julia
Brian Wilson, who was so angry at that Berkeley lecture
about Carl Andre, found herself a few years later writing
a chapter of her dissertation about Carl's role in the
Artworkers Coalition and only mentioning an A. Mendietta's death in
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a footnote. I had to convince myself and be convinced
to grapple with his work in the book, because I
felt for myself, as a young feminist, that there was
something troubling to me about talking about his work divorced
from the fact of the marriage and Mendietta's death. And
I have a footnote. I mean, and you know, I
(22:23):
do acknowledge it that it was a fact. Julia had
to write to Carl to get his permission to access
some research materials, and that correspondence resulted in an invitation
to his apartment. When she recounted the story, it was
clear how uncomfortable it made her. I went to his
(22:44):
apartment and met him. I was really shocked when he
sent me his address and I saw that it was
the same building where he had lived with on A Mendietta.
And to me, I thought, gosh, you know, sort of,
no matter what happened with that death, I would not
want to stay in the same place where my partner
(23:05):
had died. She was in a deeply ambivalent place, somewhere
between grateful and spooked. If you're working on a living artist,
there is some feeling like it is part of the
research process that you make contact with them. I felt
like I was checking a box. Why was just spooked?
I mean the word really is spooked. By being there
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in that space where I knew that on A Mendietta
had died. She tried not to seem too nosy, didn't
look around the apartment much. Instead, she focused on the
faces of Carl and his fourth wife, Melissa. They talked briefly,
and then the three of them went to dinner at
a seafood restaurant. Yeah, it was deeply weird. Then we
marched down to this fish restaurant and there was really
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a prodigious amount of drinking, not mine. And just noticing
that and knowing that the story of Carl Andrean on
A Mendietta was very much also a story of alcohol,
it must have been weird. It's hard for me to
fathom even now that Carl's life is so unchanged, He's
still in the same apartment, still going out to dinner,
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and still drinking too much. I don't want to seem judge.
I used to drink very heavily back in the day.
Every art world event has an open bar. It's almost
like an occupational hazard. But I know I would have
watched Carl's alcohol consumption like a hawk too, especially given
the huge role Booze played in the story of Anna
(24:35):
and Carl's relationship. It's just one more thing in our
culture that we're not supposed to talk about. This culture
of discretion of what can and cannot be said would
get played out in the courtroom, especially since the strategy
for Carl's defense was to keep anyone from saying much
of anything. The trial began in Earnest on a January
(25:03):
morning in nineteen eighty eight. In some ways, a trial
is similar to a museum exhibition. Both are places where
a story is being told, and the truth of that
story matters. Experts get to decide how the story is told, lawyers, judges, curators,
(25:24):
and the rules about what evidence or artwork can be
used to tell those stories are not always straightforward, transparent,
or fair. When you walk into a museum, you only
see the artworks that were selected through a careful process
to tell a particular story. There are always other works
(25:44):
that are left out that would tell a different story.
For instance, artworks made by women of color. They are
rarely seen, no matter how wonderful they might be in
a courtroom. Evidence is also carefully selected before the big
show the trial, and even evidence that everyone agrees is
factual can still get left out deemed inadmissible for a
(26:08):
variety of reasons. When that happens, the judge or jury
are not allowed to consider those facts when they formed
their verdict. This was the case in Anna's trial. A
lot of evidence got left out, which means the story
wasn't complete. Natalia Delgado was the first witness called by
(26:32):
the prosecution. She had flown to New York from her
home in Chicago, bringing along her six week old child,
a little girl she'd named after Anna, and she was
ready to testify about the last phone call with Anna
just hours before her death, when Anna had told her
about her plan to expose Karl as a cheater and
file for divorce. But I couldn't talk about any of that.
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Any conversation about Anna's plans for divorce was deemed hearsay
and ruled inadmissible. I couldn't say that I had recommended
to her that night that she confronted Carl and tell
him that she'd collected evidence of his infidelity, that she'd
been photocopying records that would establish his being with these
(27:17):
other women. I could not say that she feared his anger,
that she said he would blow up when she said
this to him. I couldn't establish that she wanted to
get a divorce on the grounds of infidelity, and that's
why she was collected this information as she feared his reaction.
None of that. I could only say she was making
(27:38):
plans for the future. So what was on Anna's mind
the night of her death inadmissible. And remember how Natalia
was surprised that Carl's lawyer was in the apartment after
Carl had been taken to the police station. She was
concerned about what would happen to the secret copies of
phone and credit card bills that Anna had been collecting,
(28:01):
documents she thought proved Karl was being unfaithful. Well, those
documents went missing. Even though the apartment was a possible
crime scene. Even though Karl was at the station for questioning,
the cops let both Carl's lawyer and maybe one other
person into the apartment. In an interview after the trial,
(28:23):
Robert Katz explained what he thought happened to the documents
that Anna considered evidence of Carl's infidelity. While Carl Andre
was being questioned by the police before he was under arrest,
somebody entered the apartment and removed what she called evidence.
It turned out this would be one of several police
(28:45):
errors that would dramatically affect the evidence considered a trial.
But still there was other evidence that pointed to murder.
If Anna had jumped out of the window of her
own volition, or even if she had merely closed or
opened the window, there would have been footprints on the
window sill. Here's Robert Katz again. By the configuration of
(29:07):
the room would be almost impossible for her to have
committed suicide with asked somehow getting onto that ledge, the
window sill came up Brahma's breast level, and yet they
found no footprints on the window sill. But there was
a problem with this evidence too, another police mistake. The
police had forgotten to put taking a fingerprints in the
(29:31):
search wire, and so the police record showing that there
were no footprints on the window sill that was also
deemed inadmissible. The most convincing pieces of evidence of murder
had been to borrow a phrase curated out of the show.
Ona's desire for a divorce, Anna's evidence of Carl's infidelity,
(29:52):
and the proof that Anna had not stood on the
window sill. These were all things the judge was not
allowed to consider. And when the evidence that pointed to
murder was discussed at trial, then the defense worked to
sow the seeds of doubt. There was the doorman out
on a coffee run who heard a woman yell no, no, no,
(30:13):
just before Anna fl He was allowed to testify, but
they discredit hit him by saying he had had some
prior psychological issues, so he wasn't a good witness for
purposes of hearing her screams and hearing the thud. It
turned out he had been treated several years prior for
(30:35):
auditory hallucinations. His testimony was admissible, but questionable. And what
about those scratches, particularly the one on Carl's nose. The
scratch was either proof that Anna and Carl had a
physical altercation that night, or the scratch was just a coincidence.
(30:55):
Everything came down to when Carl got the scratch. Carl
said the terrace door had blown into his face about
a week or so before and scratched him, So the
question was, had anyone actually seen a scratch on Carl's
nose before the night Anna died. The prosecutor had fewer
(31:20):
witnesses in her corner than she had hoped for. Several
people who had seen Carl in the days leading up
to Anna's death initially said no, Carl had not had
any scratches, but one by one they started doubting their
own memories. The people who had dinner with him didn't
want to testify as to whether or not yet those
(31:42):
deep scratches on his face and arms. She's referring to
a couple who had dinner with Carl and Anna a
few days prior to Anna's death. They told the detective
they had not noticed any scratches on Karl's face, but
later said they couldn't remember. Another witness showed up to
take the stand, but then suddenly also couldn't remember. Prosecutor
(32:06):
Elizabeth Letterer was watching her witnesses fall away one by one.
Nancy Spirow, a witness who was waiting for her turn
to testify, remembered the prosecutor growing frustrated as she tried
to keep her witnesses on the same page. Here's what
Nancy said, she was really a little impatient with saying
that you know that you had told me. I mean,
(32:30):
I gathered that she had said she hadn't seen it,
and now she changed her story. In the end, Letterer
would only call Nancy Spirow to testify about the scratch.
Nancy sat uncomfortably in the witness chair as her friend
Carl looked on. She was emphatic there was no scratch,
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the implication being that it must have been Anna who
scratched him on the night of her death. Well, I
was trying to count trade and to be as honest
as I could, and I was so rattled as it was.
It must have been so hard. She and her husband
had been friends with both Carl and Anna. Carl sat
(33:15):
quietly listening to his friend Nancy Sparrow testify against him. Well,
he certainly didn't look at each other directly, but I
was aware of his presidency. Meanwhile, there were two witnesses
that said the scratch had been there all along. Carl's
good friend Laurence Wiener, who had gone to Rikers to
bail him out, and a woman who worked at Carl's gallery.
(33:38):
Both took the stand to say that they'd seen Carl
shortly before Anna's death, and that he did indeed have
something on his face, maybe a scratch, maybe a pimple.
Not only did these two witnesses not agree on what
the mark was, they also didn't agree on where that
mark was. Was it his nose or the side of
(34:00):
his face. Either way, the defense addressed the evidence by
planting seeds of doubt about it. For better or worse,
the rule of law is designed to work in favor
of the accused, but this case wasn't only playing out
in a courtroom. This case was being discussed in every
corner of the art world, because layered on top of
(34:22):
the police gaffs, the suppressed evidence, and the seeds of doubt,
there was a mixture of betrayal and disbelief that Carl Andre,
the metaphorical father of minimalism, the ethical Marxist, the intellectual,
the supporter of women's causes, could do something so monstrous.
Even though Nancy Spirow was willing to testify against Carl,
(34:45):
you can hear how ambivalent and confused her husband, artistly
On Galabi, is at the idea that someone like Carl
could do something so horrible. He told Robert Katz, there
might be other things at stake than I'm in punishment.
You don't want to see such a person brought down,
(35:06):
because if that person who's brought down the whole range
of you're what you have thought conceived, the alot is tainted.
So the best way to protect him was to respect
as a wish for rural silence, and also to take
him at his word. Right, How could Carl, who represents
(35:29):
the purity of the desart, how could he have done
such an act like them? Carol represents something. I can't
tell you how important he was symbolically, and that may
be why Elizabeth Lederer had such difficulty getting people to talk.
B Ruby Rich remembers how surprised she was about all
of it. The assistant DA who was trying the case,
(35:52):
said to me that in her career she had never
encountered a wall of silence like this one, except in
mafia cases. So I think that the art world was
a closed world. I certainly agree that the art world
is a closed world. We are a social formation structured
(36:14):
by deep friendships that mix business with pleasure, love with money,
and perhaps because the lines between personal and public are
so thin, it's a world in which discretion is paramount.
But when does discretion become silence? And what happens when
people get fed up with that silence. We'll come back
(36:50):
to the trial, but first I'm going fast forward up
to the almost present, to a time when so many
women were about to take aim at the walls of
silence around them. The me Too movement was about to explode,
and the air seemed filled with the tension that comes
from being fed up. Now, when carl Andrea's work went
(37:11):
on view, a generation of artists who revered Ana Mendieta
was vocal about their displeasure, and they showed up to protest.
They painted their hands red, linked arms and blocked the
entrance of a museum in Germany. Cannavanieta was a woman
(37:33):
of color, a refugee, an evidence following her death points
towards the domestic violence there was ensu They dramatically cried
inside the galleries where Andrea's sculptures were displayed. All of
this was happening as plans were being made to bring
(37:54):
carl Andrea's retrospective to the museum in Los Angeles, where
I had landed my dream job of chief curator. But
as the exhibition made its way to LA instead of
thinking about Carl, I found myself thinking a lot more
about Anna, And the more I thought about Anna and
her work, the more uncomfortable I became thinking about Carl
(38:16):
and his work. I'd had a serious change of heart.
Like the protesters, I also didn't think we should be
celebrating someone who had been accused of murder. But the
reality was the ship had sailed. There was no turning back. Still,
I felt like I had to do something. But what?
(38:39):
A few months before the show, I invited a group
of women I admired, artists, professors, curators to talk it out.
One of them was an artist named Andrea Bowers. The
thing I remember about that meeting is one of the
(38:59):
participation and saying that there would be protests, and then
another participant saying there will be blood. I do remember
that because right because there had been this previous protest
where animal blood had been thrown. Yeah. I really felt
(39:23):
in a certain way it would require you and others
in your position, as well as other artists, to speak
out publicly against it. But I also felt like you
(39:44):
felt like you would not have your job if you
did that. You were looking for a creative solution. I
didn't have the guts to step down at that point.
I also did not realize the intensity of like institutional
kind of submission, Like how can it be that there
can be so many curators in these institutions and one
(40:07):
curator can't say I'm uncomfortable with that show. I really
believe there should be public internal discourse. I mean that's
a democracy, right, Yeah, this is a pretty common misconception.
An art museum is definitely not a democracy. In fact,
(40:30):
they are the opposite of democracy. Like most workplaces, they
are a very highly evolved hierarchy. The reality was the
show was going to go on, which meant, pragmatically speaking,
all that could be done was some light window dressing.
We hosted a talk by a feminist art historian, one
of the very few who was willing to discuss the
(40:50):
accusations against Carl, the very same person who had also
been invited to talk at DIA, But that was it.
On opening night, felt vaguely nauseous. I couldn't tell what
I feared more that the protesters would show up or
that they wouldn't. They showed A group of women had
(41:13):
lit candles and were handing out small xeroxes with honest
picture on them. My wife brought one home and propped
it up on our kitchen counter. I avoided their somber
picket line. That night was the one and only time
I visited the Carl Andrea exhibition. It was a really
sad night for me, and the next morning, when I
(41:35):
had my coffee and looked it on his picture, I
just couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't down with
business as usual anymore. Next time, on Death of an
Artist it was totally blamed the victim, but with an
extra twist. They were trying to establish that she killed herself,
(41:56):
like this was some sort of culminating art piece. Judges
tend to be more meticulous about what a reasonable doubt is.
This is press play. I'm Malone brand. Let's talk now
about some bad news that's hit a couple of local museums.
Death of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries,
Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. Written and hosted by
(42:19):
me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kinig, Lietamlad,
Jacob Weisberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker,
editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith.
Associate producers are pood Ru and Eloise Linton. Additional production
helped by Tally Abacassas. Anamandieta's quotes were read by Tanya
(42:41):
burgera special thanks to the New York Public Radio Archive,
engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you of
this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus to listen early,
(43:03):
add free and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the
Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
Find more great podcasts from Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot
com Backslash Podcasts
Pushkin. This show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence.
Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where
to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist, she's making
(00:32):
photocopies and she wanted to use that for her divorce
on grounds of infidelity. I find that my roots are Cuban.
The branches might be American, but the trunk of the
tree is Cuban or the roots. You know, she was
not a santea. She was not dressed in white. There
is a very big difference between a practitioner of santea
(00:54):
and somebody who studies or uses it as a way
of working with culture. I want to take you back
to nineteen eighties Manhattan. In those days, you could actually
(01:14):
smoke in the hallways of the courtroom, and many a
jury weight took place in the hallways with people smoking
cigarettes and playing cards and things like that. It was gritty.
That's Ron Koubi, a long time New York City defense lawyer.
He's going to be our tour guide through the legal
dynamics of Carl's trial. The city had suffered a recession.
(01:41):
Crime was rampim. There had been a spate of high
profile horrors. I remember taking the subway to school and
reading the ominous headlines in the post or the daily news.
Fear was in the air, and much of it played
on white people's deep seated racism that equated crime with
people of color. The judges were almost exclusively white, the
(02:06):
defendants were almost exclusively people of color. And the almost
there is important because, oh, from nineteen eighty five through
eighty eight eighty nine, there was a plethora of defendants
in cases that I'll just call white boys behaving badly.
(02:27):
There was the Robert Chambers case. That's the so called
preppy murder case. Chambers claimed his friend Jennifer Levin accidentally
died during rough sex. This trial was actually happening just
down the hall from Carl Andre's trial and was getting
all the media attention. Paul Castellano, who was rubbed out
(02:47):
at the steakhouse in plain View on the street again
being a crime family mafio so killed in a hit
ordered by John Gotti. There was Bernard gets, the white
man who shot four young African American teenagers on the
subway in a highly dubious act of vigilante justice, and
of course less well known but still significant in the
(03:11):
art world, there was Carl Andre This was the backdrop
of Carl's trial, a swirl of high profile cases of
white men accused of murder. The new Assistant DA on
the case was Elizabeth Letterer, and by nineteen eighty eight
she was ready to go to trial. Several of Anna's
(03:31):
friends rallied and joined Anna's family in the courthouse to
witness the proceedings. One of the people who attended almost
every day was b Ruby Rich. She remembers a stark scene.
There's an aisle down the middle, and one side is
reserved for the defendants friends and family, and the other
(03:52):
sides reserved for the victim's friends and family. It's exactly
a bad wedding where one side of the family disapproves
of the marriage, as I think they did in fact
disapprove of the marriage. On his side was packed with
friends and family, while Carl's side remained empty. He had
apparently asked his friends and supporters not to come to
(04:13):
the courthouse. All of Carl's friends were telling people in
the art world not to go. Carl doesn't want you there,
and under the guise of sensitivity, you know you don't
want to see Carl like this was kind of the
implication of it. Under that guise, nobody knew what was
(04:34):
going on. They prevented people from actually hearing the testimony,
from actually hearing the evidence, from actually finding out what
had gone on. This would come to feel symbolic of
the whole affair. For honest people, it was a profoundly
public matter that demanded visibility, and for Carl's people, it
was a situation to be kept private. You can publicize
(04:57):
his works, but you can't talk about his private life
with That's Carl's defense lawyer Jack Hoffinger, Carl Andre is
an extremely private person. I mean he doesn't want a
photograph taken. Carl Andre has never talked publicly, and I
doubt that he's talked really privately about this case to anybody.
This image of Karl alone in the courtroom, no friends,
(05:22):
no family, is both tragic and chilling. We can see
a man bereft, a man on the brink of losing everything,
or we can see a man set apart from others
because of his intellect, his power to transform the history
of art, his genius. I'm your host. Helen Wallsworth from
(05:42):
Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music entertainment. This is
Death of an Artist, Episode four. The Genius Problem. Here's
the thing, and this is probably going to feel familiar.
(06:06):
When a super talented man, someone who's been called a genius,
gets accused of harming someone they're fans meaning us, Well,
it turns out we don't really want to believe it,
at least not at first and not for a long time.
Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen. So when
(06:28):
Carl was accused of honest murder, there was a sense
of shock on two levels. City Confidential, a cheesy true
crime TV show, described the art world's reaction. There was
shock on the Sheik Streets of Solo to the shock
was that Carl had murdered on it and you others.
(06:50):
It was a shock that anyone could possibly accused the
Great Carl Andre of something so heinous. But when Carl
finally stood trial, his defense team recognized that the folks
in the art world who thought he was a genius
were not going to be the ones deciding his fate.
(07:11):
A typical jury in Manhattan in the late nineteen eighties
would have largely been civil servants and retired veterans. They
probably weren't going to be impressed by an avant garde
art star. This is a guy who throws pieces of
metal on a floor, throws some bricks on top. You know,
he's sort of the classic definition of art about which
(07:36):
people say, I don't know much about art, but I
know shit when I see it. Okay, Carl wasn't throwing
pieces of metal or bricks on the floor. But it's
true that Carl made sculptures that challenge the very idea
of art, so I can forgive the folks who couldn't
(07:56):
see it as art. And it's also true that Carl
came to trial wearing his usual overalls and carrying a
tote bag filled with newspapers and books. He arrived early
every day, read the paper, and remained silent. But even
though he was wearing working class overalls, he lived in
a luxury high rise apartment, traveled to Europe for art exhibitions,
(08:20):
and sold his work for handsome prices. All of this
contradiction probably wasn't going to endear him to a jury.
Carl Andre is a remarkably and was a remarkably unsympathetic character.
First of all, there's his look. He's a big hulking guy.
(08:43):
He's affecting a working class attitude, but he's not. The
question the lawyers and Carl were faced with was how
in the world do you explain his art and his
lifestyle to the everyday folks who make up the jury
pool in Manhattan. But the judge, Alvin Schlessinger, was not
(09:07):
an everyday person. Schlessinger fancied himself as a more sophisticated person,
somebody who appreciated arts and culture and all of those
kinds of things, you know, theater and opera and art,
and so he would naturally be a more sympathetic audience
(09:28):
to Andre and his work than your average jury of
twelve plus alternates. Journalist Robert Katz was there when Carl's
defense team hit upon their fundamental strategy. He described the
moment in a radio interview after the trial. Jack Hoffinger
stood up and said, my client wishes to waive a jury.
(09:50):
And everybody looked around, and nobody really understood what he meant,
because no one could remember the last time anybody had
ever waived a jury and murder trial. It's a very
very rare event. That was truly an amazing surprise in
a decision that would have lasting implications. He opted for
a bench trial, which means the judge and only the judge,
(10:11):
decides the verdict. On the one hand, it makes sense
to me that Karl foregoes a jury trial. I can
totally see how he would have seemed very weird to people.
And it also makes sense to me that he didn't
choose a jury trial, because, let's face it, a genius
is going to have a hard time finding a jury
of their peers. Honest friends viewed the decision to waive
(10:36):
a jury as cynical. The art world's very special, very special.
This is when people used to say, don't go above
fourteenth Street because all the Vulgarians are there. They don't
understand truth, they don't understand beauty, they don't understand meaning
nobody else could understand the full genius of a figure
(10:56):
like Carl andre Or. I think, frankly, nobody us could
understand that Anna's life didn't matter. For some people, Carl's
(11:21):
work was too important to be tethered to the actions
of a flawed man. And for other people, whatever happened
that night was private. And because whatever happened that night
was private, it had no place in discussions of his work.
This kind of thinking is in the very dna of
how art history is taught. So imagine a pact room
(11:44):
in a library. That's the art historian Julia Brian Wilson.
She's taking us back to the late nineteen nineties when
she was a young grad student at UC Berkeley, the
heart of leftist intellectual life and renowned for its stars
studded art history department. A visiting scholar was in town
to give a lecture on Carl Andre, and the room
(12:06):
was packed. One of the folks in the room was Julia,
a punk rock kid from Houston, a far cry from
the girls with pearls back east who typically populated art
history departments. I think I might have still been wearing
like this lab coat that I sometimes wore as a
dress that I had stolen because I was quite a
(12:26):
little thief in my riot girl days, you know, not
the usual uniform of the art history graduate student. The
speaker talked in formal terms about Carl Andre, using the
buzzword of the nineties, horizontality. That's horizontality as opposed to verticality.
(12:47):
Instead of thinking about uplifting monuments or upward progress, folks
were interested in the horizontal as a metaphor for non
hierarchical thinking, think crabgrass versus a tree, sib and cousins
versus parent and child. But Julia was thinking about another
version of horizontality, mouth agape at the fact that forty
(13:10):
five to fifty minutes had gone by talking about this,
that the other, about Carl Andre and again that this
key term of horizontality, where in my mind, I'm thinking
Anna Mendietta, you know, died in the most brutal way.
And the fact that there is no mention of this,
I just can't believe it to intone horizontality with all
(13:31):
of its implications of the ground and of gravity, and
to leave out how Anna died. That felt like not
just an art history problem, but a history history problem.
Why was the story so incomplete? And I was just
boiling with rage in my seat in the lecture room.
People were asking questions that had to do with the
(13:53):
formal terms that the speaker was laying out, and no
one was engaging with what to me seemed like the
bigger moral aches of like why are you giving airtime
to this artist? So heart pounding, the young grad student
stood up and asked her question, what about Anna Mendieta.
Where does she fit into this discussion? She just dismissed it.
(14:15):
Me just feeling like I cannot believe what this discipline
permits and what it erases, and just my baptism, I
would say, by fire into art history, which was really like,
you are here to learn this cannon, and this cannon
is pretty fixed. I was just constantly at sea, always
just hating the discipline in a way while also trying
(14:35):
to ingratiate myself to it. I mean, I still feel
that way. I still very much feel that way. Julia
had just walked into one of art history's brick walls,
the wall that separates the artist and their life from
the artwork they make. I want to go back to
(14:56):
Peter Sheldall, the fabulous art critic for The New Yorker,
the art who loved Carl Andre's work but disliked his personality.
See if all the minimalists were assholes, and you're walking
through the gauntlet to get to the strawberry shortcake at
the back of Max's, you had made some kind of
(15:19):
peace or understanding that you could like artwork made by
people who you didn't like personally. It sounds like Oh yeah,
I mean that just seemed to me a given a start.
We don't give a car of Aggio grief for being
a murderer, you know, which he absolutely was. The controversy
(15:41):
about Ezra Pound after a Second World War, it was
a kind of a watershed for me that, you know,
he had been a traitor and a Semitic propagandist agi
American during the war and then after where he was
given a hugely christ ticket bowling in a war, and
then he he copied an insanity plea and got, you know,
(16:05):
put in a metal hospital for a while. And there
was a big debate about it, and I said, no,
you know, gave him the bowling an award and put
him the fucking jail. So it's not that Peter Sheldall
or the professor who gave the talk at you see,
Berkeley necessarily thought Carl was innocent. It's that they thought
it didn't matter when you were looking at his work.
(16:28):
I never met her, but you know I knew of her,
and she was not going to throw herself out a window.
And you know he has scrat from our fantics face
they were fighting. Did its squalidness ever make you not
want to go and see his show. No no, I
kept going for you to shows, so shell Doll, like
(16:50):
so many in the art world, like me, for instance,
kept going to his shows because whatever Carl Andre did
or did not do in his personal life, his work
was and would remain fill in the blank canonical great
genius historical. The art world doesn't have the statistics that
(17:13):
govern the world of sports, but it does have its
own version of being a goat, and that's genius, and
it is the art world's highest praise. The word typically
refers to someone who did something no one had ever
done before. So Picasso is a genius because he invented cubism.
Warhole is a genius because he bridged the gap between
(17:34):
art and popular culture. Carl Andrea is a genius because
he solved the problem of sculpture's relationship to the floor.
By the time of Anna's death, though, feminists were starting
to scrutinize the whole idea of artistic genius, because while
genius seems like a good thing, it was hard to
overlook the fact that what the term seemed to describe
(17:56):
was male genius, which really meant white male genie. Some
of the loudest and funniest feminist voices in the art
world are an anonymous group of women called the Gorilla Girls.
That's gorilla spelled like rebel fighter, not the primate. The
(18:16):
Gorilla Girls are all anonymous and use the names of
famous dead women artists. We talked to the Gorilla Girl
free to CALLO. We decided from the very beginning that
we had to be anonymous because we really didn't want
to bite the hand that we hoped would feed us.
It would be very damaging to one's career to complain
(18:39):
in public like that because the art world is, you know,
is such a kind of self congratulatory place at that time.
They didn't want to hear anything negative. The way they
protect their identity out in public is by wearing gorilla
masks this time spelled like the primate. The gorilla girls
we spoke to would not tell us their real names
(19:01):
or turn on their cameras during the interviews, and the
secrecy works to this day. I still don't know who
is and is not a gorilla girl. We wanted to
confound stereotypes. Gorillas are not the vicious, violent animal or
culture casts on them. They're vegetarian, peaceful animals that live
(19:24):
in large groups of females and the hilarious masks. In
a way, it's become our hallmark, and to be honest,
I think it allows us to say things that we
might not be able to say through our own identities.
And the visuals of it is absolutely crazy picture. It
(19:44):
a bunch of women in miniskirts and gorilla masks using
humor to poke fun at the absurdities of the white,
male dominated art world. Their primary form of attack were
posters that combine jokes with found images. Basically, they memes,
and instead of posting them on Instagram, they put them
up all around New York City. In nineteen eighty five,
(20:08):
we put up a poster saying, you know, these galleries
show fewer than ten percent women artists, are none at all?
Was it really just a mistake or some kind of
terrible oversight that there were almost no women geniuses in
art history books and so few women represented in galleries
and museums. Part of the genius myth is that the
(20:30):
genius is a solitary figure. He is a lone wolf.
He is not hemmed in by conventional thinking or the
rules and rags of everyday life. A genius does not
do the dishes, or shop for dinner, or raise children.
It's a hard category for women to be a part of.
One of the Guerrilla girls most famous posters is called
(20:51):
The Advantages of being a Woman Artist. It has a
list of perks that include working without the pressure of success,
knowing that your career might pick up after your eighty
and not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called
a genius. The other thing about genius is it always
trump's bad behavior. There was this crazy thing called artistic license,
(21:16):
which meant that artists get excused because whatever it is
that they produce is so much more important than whatever
damage they could do to people in their lives. Even
though Anna died in nineteen eighty five, it would be
a decade before the Guerrilla Girls would tackle the problem
of Carl Andrea and Anna Mendieta head on. They weren't alone.
(21:39):
Critics like Peter Sheldall and curators like me continued to
separate bad male behavior from good male art. Even Julia
Brian Wilson, who was so angry at that Berkeley lecture
about Carl Andre, found herself a few years later writing
a chapter of her dissertation about Carl's role in the
Artworkers Coalition and only mentioning an A. Mendietta's death in
(22:03):
a footnote. I had to convince myself and be convinced
to grapple with his work in the book, because I
felt for myself, as a young feminist, that there was
something troubling to me about talking about his work divorced
from the fact of the marriage and Mendietta's death. And
I have a footnote. I mean, and you know, I
(22:23):
do acknowledge it that it was a fact. Julia had
to write to Carl to get his permission to access
some research materials, and that correspondence resulted in an invitation
to his apartment. When she recounted the story, it was
clear how uncomfortable it made her. I went to his
(22:44):
apartment and met him. I was really shocked when he
sent me his address and I saw that it was
the same building where he had lived with on A Mendietta.
And to me, I thought, gosh, you know, sort of,
no matter what happened with that death, I would not
want to stay in the same place where my partner
(23:05):
had died. She was in a deeply ambivalent place, somewhere
between grateful and spooked. If you're working on a living artist,
there is some feeling like it is part of the
research process that you make contact with them. I felt
like I was checking a box. Why was just spooked?
I mean the word really is spooked. By being there
(23:26):
in that space where I knew that on A Mendietta
had died. She tried not to seem too nosy, didn't
look around the apartment much. Instead, she focused on the
faces of Carl and his fourth wife, Melissa. They talked briefly,
and then the three of them went to dinner at
a seafood restaurant. Yeah, it was deeply weird. Then we
marched down to this fish restaurant and there was really
(23:50):
a prodigious amount of drinking, not mine. And just noticing
that and knowing that the story of Carl Andrean on
A Mendietta was very much also a story of alcohol,
it must have been weird. It's hard for me to
fathom even now that Carl's life is so unchanged, He's
still in the same apartment, still going out to dinner,
(24:13):
and still drinking too much. I don't want to seem judge.
I used to drink very heavily back in the day.
Every art world event has an open bar. It's almost
like an occupational hazard. But I know I would have
watched Carl's alcohol consumption like a hawk too, especially given
the huge role Booze played in the story of Anna
(24:35):
and Carl's relationship. It's just one more thing in our
culture that we're not supposed to talk about. This culture
of discretion of what can and cannot be said would
get played out in the courtroom, especially since the strategy
for Carl's defense was to keep anyone from saying much
of anything. The trial began in Earnest on a January
(25:03):
morning in nineteen eighty eight. In some ways, a trial
is similar to a museum exhibition. Both are places where
a story is being told, and the truth of that
story matters. Experts get to decide how the story is told, lawyers, judges, curators,
(25:24):
and the rules about what evidence or artwork can be
used to tell those stories are not always straightforward, transparent,
or fair. When you walk into a museum, you only
see the artworks that were selected through a careful process
to tell a particular story. There are always other works
(25:44):
that are left out that would tell a different story.
For instance, artworks made by women of color. They are
rarely seen, no matter how wonderful they might be in
a courtroom. Evidence is also carefully selected before the big
show the trial, and even evidence that everyone agrees is
factual can still get left out deemed inadmissible for a
(26:08):
variety of reasons. When that happens, the judge or jury
are not allowed to consider those facts when they formed
their verdict. This was the case in Anna's trial. A
lot of evidence got left out, which means the story
wasn't complete. Natalia Delgado was the first witness called by
(26:32):
the prosecution. She had flown to New York from her
home in Chicago, bringing along her six week old child,
a little girl she'd named after Anna, and she was
ready to testify about the last phone call with Anna
just hours before her death, when Anna had told her
about her plan to expose Karl as a cheater and
file for divorce. But I couldn't talk about any of that.
(26:55):
Any conversation about Anna's plans for divorce was deemed hearsay
and ruled inadmissible. I couldn't say that I had recommended
to her that night that she confronted Carl and tell
him that she'd collected evidence of his infidelity, that she'd
been photocopying records that would establish his being with these
(27:17):
other women. I could not say that she feared his anger,
that she said he would blow up when she said
this to him. I couldn't establish that she wanted to
get a divorce on the grounds of infidelity, and that's
why she was collected this information as she feared his reaction.
None of that. I could only say she was making
(27:38):
plans for the future. So what was on Anna's mind
the night of her death inadmissible. And remember how Natalia
was surprised that Carl's lawyer was in the apartment after
Carl had been taken to the police station. She was
concerned about what would happen to the secret copies of
phone and credit card bills that Anna had been collecting,
(28:01):
documents she thought proved Karl was being unfaithful. Well, those
documents went missing. Even though the apartment was a possible
crime scene. Even though Karl was at the station for questioning,
the cops let both Carl's lawyer and maybe one other
person into the apartment. In an interview after the trial,
(28:23):
Robert Katz explained what he thought happened to the documents
that Anna considered evidence of Carl's infidelity. While Carl Andre
was being questioned by the police before he was under arrest,
somebody entered the apartment and removed what she called evidence.
It turned out this would be one of several police
(28:45):
errors that would dramatically affect the evidence considered a trial.
But still there was other evidence that pointed to murder.
If Anna had jumped out of the window of her
own volition, or even if she had merely closed or
opened the window, there would have been footprints on the
window sill. Here's Robert Katz again. By the configuration of
(29:07):
the room would be almost impossible for her to have
committed suicide with asked somehow getting onto that ledge, the
window sill came up Brahma's breast level, and yet they
found no footprints on the window sill. But there was
a problem with this evidence too, another police mistake. The
police had forgotten to put taking a fingerprints in the
(29:31):
search wire, and so the police record showing that there
were no footprints on the window sill that was also
deemed inadmissible. The most convincing pieces of evidence of murder
had been to borrow a phrase curated out of the show.
Ona's desire for a divorce, Anna's evidence of Carl's infidelity,
(29:52):
and the proof that Anna had not stood on the
window sill. These were all things the judge was not
allowed to consider. And when the evidence that pointed to
murder was discussed at trial, then the defense worked to
sow the seeds of doubt. There was the doorman out
on a coffee run who heard a woman yell no, no, no,
(30:13):
just before Anna fl He was allowed to testify, but
they discredit hit him by saying he had had some
prior psychological issues, so he wasn't a good witness for
purposes of hearing her screams and hearing the thud. It
turned out he had been treated several years prior for
(30:35):
auditory hallucinations. His testimony was admissible, but questionable. And what
about those scratches, particularly the one on Carl's nose. The
scratch was either proof that Anna and Carl had a
physical altercation that night, or the scratch was just a coincidence.
(30:55):
Everything came down to when Carl got the scratch. Carl
said the terrace door had blown into his face about
a week or so before and scratched him, So the
question was, had anyone actually seen a scratch on Carl's
nose before the night Anna died. The prosecutor had fewer
(31:20):
witnesses in her corner than she had hoped for. Several
people who had seen Carl in the days leading up
to Anna's death initially said no, Carl had not had
any scratches, but one by one they started doubting their
own memories. The people who had dinner with him didn't
want to testify as to whether or not yet those
(31:42):
deep scratches on his face and arms. She's referring to
a couple who had dinner with Carl and Anna a
few days prior to Anna's death. They told the detective
they had not noticed any scratches on Karl's face, but
later said they couldn't remember. Another witness showed up to
take the stand, but then suddenly also couldn't remember. Prosecutor
(32:06):
Elizabeth Letterer was watching her witnesses fall away one by one.
Nancy Spirow, a witness who was waiting for her turn
to testify, remembered the prosecutor growing frustrated as she tried
to keep her witnesses on the same page. Here's what
Nancy said, she was really a little impatient with saying
that you know that you had told me. I mean,
(32:30):
I gathered that she had said she hadn't seen it,
and now she changed her story. In the end, Letterer
would only call Nancy Spirow to testify about the scratch.
Nancy sat uncomfortably in the witness chair as her friend
Carl looked on. She was emphatic there was no scratch,
(32:52):
the implication being that it must have been Anna who
scratched him on the night of her death. Well, I
was trying to count trade and to be as honest
as I could, and I was so rattled as it was.
It must have been so hard. She and her husband
had been friends with both Carl and Anna. Carl sat
(33:15):
quietly listening to his friend Nancy Sparrow testify against him. Well,
he certainly didn't look at each other directly, but I
was aware of his presidency. Meanwhile, there were two witnesses
that said the scratch had been there all along. Carl's
good friend Laurence Wiener, who had gone to Rikers to
bail him out, and a woman who worked at Carl's gallery.
(33:38):
Both took the stand to say that they'd seen Carl
shortly before Anna's death, and that he did indeed have
something on his face, maybe a scratch, maybe a pimple.
Not only did these two witnesses not agree on what
the mark was, they also didn't agree on where that
mark was. Was it his nose or the side of
(34:00):
his face. Either way, the defense addressed the evidence by
planting seeds of doubt about it. For better or worse,
the rule of law is designed to work in favor
of the accused, but this case wasn't only playing out
in a courtroom. This case was being discussed in every
corner of the art world, because layered on top of
(34:22):
the police gaffs, the suppressed evidence, and the seeds of doubt,
there was a mixture of betrayal and disbelief that Carl Andre,
the metaphorical father of minimalism, the ethical Marxist, the intellectual,
the supporter of women's causes, could do something so monstrous.
Even though Nancy Spirow was willing to testify against Carl,
(34:45):
you can hear how ambivalent and confused her husband, artistly
On Galabi, is at the idea that someone like Carl
could do something so horrible. He told Robert Katz, there
might be other things at stake than I'm in punishment.
You don't want to see such a person brought down,
(35:06):
because if that person who's brought down the whole range
of you're what you have thought conceived, the alot is tainted.
So the best way to protect him was to respect
as a wish for rural silence, and also to take
him at his word. Right, How could Carl, who represents
(35:29):
the purity of the desart, how could he have done
such an act like them? Carol represents something. I can't
tell you how important he was symbolically, and that may
be why Elizabeth Lederer had such difficulty getting people to talk.
B Ruby Rich remembers how surprised she was about all
of it. The assistant DA who was trying the case,
(35:52):
said to me that in her career she had never
encountered a wall of silence like this one, except in
mafia cases. So I think that the art world was
a closed world. I certainly agree that the art world
is a closed world. We are a social formation structured
(36:14):
by deep friendships that mix business with pleasure, love with money,
and perhaps because the lines between personal and public are
so thin, it's a world in which discretion is paramount.
But when does discretion become silence? And what happens when
people get fed up with that silence. We'll come back
(36:50):
to the trial, but first I'm going fast forward up
to the almost present, to a time when so many
women were about to take aim at the walls of
silence around them. The me Too movement was about to explode,
and the air seemed filled with the tension that comes
from being fed up. Now, when carl Andrea's work went
(37:11):
on view, a generation of artists who revered Ana Mendieta
was vocal about their displeasure, and they showed up to protest.
They painted their hands red, linked arms and blocked the
entrance of a museum in Germany. Cannavanieta was a woman
(37:33):
of color, a refugee, an evidence following her death points
towards the domestic violence there was ensu They dramatically cried
inside the galleries where Andrea's sculptures were displayed. All of
this was happening as plans were being made to bring
(37:54):
carl Andrea's retrospective to the museum in Los Angeles, where
I had landed my dream job of chief curator. But
as the exhibition made its way to LA instead of
thinking about Carl, I found myself thinking a lot more
about Anna, And the more I thought about Anna and
her work, the more uncomfortable I became thinking about Carl
(38:16):
and his work. I'd had a serious change of heart.
Like the protesters, I also didn't think we should be
celebrating someone who had been accused of murder. But the
reality was the ship had sailed. There was no turning back. Still,
I felt like I had to do something. But what?
(38:39):
A few months before the show, I invited a group
of women I admired, artists, professors, curators to talk it out.
One of them was an artist named Andrea Bowers. The
thing I remember about that meeting is one of the
(38:59):
participation and saying that there would be protests, and then
another participant saying there will be blood. I do remember
that because right because there had been this previous protest
where animal blood had been thrown. Yeah. I really felt
(39:23):
in a certain way it would require you and others
in your position, as well as other artists, to speak
out publicly against it. But I also felt like you
(39:44):
felt like you would not have your job if you
did that. You were looking for a creative solution. I
didn't have the guts to step down at that point.
I also did not realize the intensity of like institutional
kind of submission, Like how can it be that there
can be so many curators in these institutions and one
(40:07):
curator can't say I'm uncomfortable with that show. I really
believe there should be public internal discourse. I mean that's
a democracy, right, Yeah, this is a pretty common misconception.
An art museum is definitely not a democracy. In fact,
(40:30):
they are the opposite of democracy. Like most workplaces, they
are a very highly evolved hierarchy. The reality was the
show was going to go on, which meant, pragmatically speaking,
all that could be done was some light window dressing.
We hosted a talk by a feminist art historian, one
of the very few who was willing to discuss the
(40:50):
accusations against Carl, the very same person who had also
been invited to talk at DIA, But that was it.
On opening night, felt vaguely nauseous. I couldn't tell what
I feared more that the protesters would show up or
that they wouldn't. They showed A group of women had
(41:13):
lit candles and were handing out small xeroxes with honest
picture on them. My wife brought one home and propped
it up on our kitchen counter. I avoided their somber
picket line. That night was the one and only time
I visited the Carl Andrea exhibition. It was a really
sad night for me, and the next morning, when I
(41:35):
had my coffee and looked it on his picture, I
just couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't down with
business as usual anymore. Next time, on Death of an
Artist it was totally blamed the victim, but with an
extra twist. They were trying to establish that she killed herself,
(41:56):
like this was some sort of culminating art piece. Judges
tend to be more meticulous about what a reasonable doubt is.
This is press play. I'm Malone brand. Let's talk now
about some bad news that's hit a couple of local museums.
Death of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries,
Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. Written and hosted by
(42:19):
me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kinig, Lietamlad,
Jacob Weisberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker,
editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith.
Associate producers are pood Ru and Eloise Linton. Additional production
helped by Tally Abacassas. Anamandieta's quotes were read by Tanya
(42:41):
burgera special thanks to the New York Public Radio Archive,
engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you of
this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus to listen early,
(43:03):
add free and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the
Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
Find more great podcasts from Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot
com Backslash Podcasts
Host
Helen Molesworth
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