October 21, 2022 • 42 mins
Today, Carl Andre lives in the same apartment where Ana fell to her death. Helen investigates and grapples with what his not guilty verdict means and chips away at the silence the art world has used to protect both Andre and itself.
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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, Carl Andre
(00:32):
is an extremely private person that you can publicize his works,
but you can't talk about his private life with them.
He said, justice has been done. I said, I congratulation.
All of the case documents are unattainable, even their existence
will not be confirmed. Mocha Downtown has fired its chief curator,
(00:54):
Helen Molesworth. So you have an India I do. It's
a huge building. It's a good fifteen floors higher than
any other building. It's really high. It's really disturbing how
(01:16):
high it is. That's me and my producer Luisa, visiting
Carl Andre's building in Greenwich Village. I feel like I
should come clean. I did not think this was a
good idea. Luisa was trained as a journalist. Apparently, when
journalists hit brick walls with email and phone messages, they
(01:39):
do something called doorstepping, which is when you literally just
show up at someone's doorstep. Needless to say, they don't
teach this technique in art history class. It made me nervous.
As all get out, but there was no other option
when it came to talk into Carl, so here we were.
Carl still lives in the same apartment where Anna Mendieta
(02:02):
went out the window. Standing at street level, we had
to crane our necks to look all the way up
to the thirty fourth floor. The horror of Anna's last
moments really hit me. There was nothing abstract about it anymore.
I don't think we're going to be able to ring
a bell. No, I think we're going to have to
(02:22):
talk to the doorman. The doorman his job is to
keep us away. Yep. The lobby was all luxury, soaring atrium,
fancy light fixtures, plush sofas, and a doorman behind a
large desk right at the entrance. When we realized there
was no way to ring Carl's doorbell directly, I decided
(02:45):
to write him a note, a last ditch effort to
see if he'd talk. How are you feeling about going
in there? Not good? When I thought we were just
going to ring his bell, it kind of felt like
we were teenagers. But the place is fortified. There's a
security guard walking around in a doormat, and it feels
(03:06):
like I don't know rolling up on somebody, but I
think we have to do our due diligence. We need
to try to get a response to some of what
we're saying, right, and we've tried one way and now
we're going to try one other way. Right, let's do it.
It's not going to get any easier the more we wait.
All right, Hi, how are you? I'm going to help.
(03:32):
We are art historians trying to get in touch with
Carl Andre and we've emailed him a couple of times,
but we haven't gotten any answer back. And so we
were actually going to go old school and just ring
the bell, but obviously you control the bell. So I
have a little note for him, and I just don't
know what your protocols are. I don't know if you're
(03:52):
allowed to ring up and say we're here, or if
you want to take this. I can't hand that over.
If you'd be no problem of beautiful fall, we appreciate
that so much. Thank you. I handed over the note
and we went back out to the street. That was
in January. Carl never responded. I'm Helen Molesworth and from
(04:23):
Pushkin Industries something Else and Sony Music Entertainment This is
Death of an Artist, Episode six, The Reckoning. Maybe if
(04:47):
Carl had talked, if he had ever acknowledged changing his
story or straight up admitted that he just doesn't remember,
or even if he had publicly recognized the amount of
pain Anna's death caused him the art world, maybe then
all of this would feel different. But he didn't do
those things. So now I feel like I have to
(05:08):
answer the question I asked myself at the start of
this podcast. Can I still love Carl Andre's work? It's
a question that by now almost all of us have
faced in one form or another. So many of our
cultural icons have been accused of terrible things. In our
interviews for this series, the names Woody Allen, Michael Jackson,
(05:32):
Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby came up again and again.
Do we keep listening, watching reading the work of someone
accused of causing harm? And might it be that how
people answer these questions has a lot to do with
how much power they have, whether that's the power dynamic
of he said, she said, or the difference between being
(05:55):
a curator at a big museum versus being an everyday
working artist. I decided that in order to answer this question,
I needed to go see some of Andrea's work. I
hadn't seen any in years, and I was curious about
how I would feel when I walked on Andrea's metal plates.
Now after spending so much time thinking about Anna, Carl
(06:31):
is eighty seven years old and officially he has retired,
but in early twenty twenty two he had a show
at the Paula Cooper Gallery and the press release said
there was a new work. So Louisa and I walked
from Carl's apartment to the gallery and Chelsea. It's a
route I imagine Carl himself has probably taken a thousand times.
(06:56):
So I wrote the gallery and the gallery wrote me
back and said that they could not honor my request
to talk about it in the space. I know Paula,
and I really respect Paula, and I've felt bad all
along knowing this podcast isn't something she wants me to do.
So we're on the street, which feels really goofy, and
(07:21):
luckily for us, one of the works is installed in
this kind of show case shop window almost you know,
where there's just enough room for one work, and what
I'm looking at is a kind of classic Andre sculpture
made out of these large pieces of milled cedar, so
(07:43):
they've got that beautiful kind of light red orangey color
that cedar has. They're clearly just piled one on top
of the other, so basically we're looking at a staircase
or a pyramid. You're very aware, this is not random,
(08:05):
this is not chaos, this is order. The piece in
the window was from nineteen eighty Seeing it was like
seeing something from the past that was very familiar. So
far things felt pretty much the same. So we went inside,
we took in the show, and then we walked without talking,
(08:26):
to a nearby park and turned on the recording equipment.
It was cold and gray, the trees were bare, but
the birds were out in force. Well, what did you think?
You were very quiet in there. The show was very beautiful.
It had a kind of elegance to it. I was
(08:50):
also aware that I was a little bored. This show
had a new work in it, but the new work
didn't do anything. The new work was a milled cedar
piece arranged against a wall. And here is a guy
who made a sculpture in twenty twenty one that looked
just like the sculpture in the window from nineteen eighty
(09:14):
and I was really aware of this feeling of time stilled,
no forward movement. Looking at his new work, which looked
just like his old work, I realized that I still
thought all the things I used to think about his work,
but that the work didn't make me feel the way
(09:36):
it used to. And I know I lost that feeling
because of everything I understand about what happened on the
days before and after Anna died. I think there's birds
pooping on us. Did jujits get pooped on? Really? Oh?
I think I did too. Maybe the universe is trying
to tell us something. Maybe the universe was sending us
(10:09):
a sign that it was time to stop talking about
Carl too, as they say, cancel him. We hear so
much about cancel culture, the practice of radically shunning bad
actors that extends to a band on their work. Sometimes
I wish I could just cancel Carl and his work
and be done with it. And maybe that's the point
of canceling. It's an expedient way to deal with an
(10:33):
intractable problem. But the conventional wisdom of the art world
is to separate the art from the artist, So we
keep the Carl Andre who solves sculpture's relationship to the floor,
far away from the Carl who seemed to play a
role in his wife's death. And according to this logic,
(10:53):
I don't have to cancel him. According to this logic,
I should simply enjoy those Andre sculptures and leave the
mess of his personal life out of it. Is there
any moment for you where the art matters more than
its maker? Now? This is Roxanne Gay, a public thinker,
(11:15):
a feminist, and an opinion writer for The New York Times.
She has written that cancel culture is a misnomer. She
prefers to call it consequence culture. I don't think that
we're preserving anything when we preserve the work of murderers.
Because Carl was acquitted, I've been careful not to say
he is a murderer, And by careful, what I really
(11:37):
mean is compelled legally not to do so, because legally
that word is not a fact. Legally, it's just an opinion.
The world will be fine without Carl Andre, and his
work is beautiful. His work is absolutely beautiful. It's a
shame that someone with that much talent could not control himself.
(11:57):
I don't know why we keep putting the onus on
our cells, like why do you feel this way? Like no,
he's the problem, Like go ask him why he had
to be such a piece of shit. And the men
are the ones who should have to answer for themselves.
I can't lie. I had a brief moment listening to
Roxanne when I felt the weight of this whole dilemma
lift off my shoulders. Of course, the world will be
(12:18):
fine without carl Andre's work. Of course men should control themselves.
How is this my problem? But after the interview I
had trouble with the my part. Was it really just
up to me? When individuals stop supporting an artist's work,
do we think this individual action has real life repercussions
(12:39):
or consequences, as Roxanne Gay would say, And if that's
the case, is cancel culture another way of replacing group
responsibility with individual choice. As someone who worked in museums
for most of my life, this highly individual response didn't
(13:01):
seem quite right. One of the things that's interesting about
museums is that they are the place where art gets
to be public. And when that happens, then art is
really about all of us. It's about society. It is
a public record of what we think, feel and believe.
So what's important was how as a society we were
(13:23):
going to handle this kind of ethical dilemma. When I
was a museum curator, I was what folks call a gatekeeper,
meaning I was someone who determined what art the public
got to see. This meant my so called personal decisions
had public ramifications. I would feel comfortable with a Carl
(13:47):
Andrea sculpture at the MET, for sure. That's Max Wholeline,
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the
most important museums in the world. He said he'd be
fine was showing a sculpture by Carl Andre at the MET.
We're talking about museums as being the sort of the
primary institution that creates the discourse publicly around art. I'm
(14:13):
curious how you would respond to the Gorilla Girls. Their
quote unquote solution to this quote unquote problem is a
radical rewriting of museum wall label so that you couldn't
put up a Carl Andre without informing your public of
this kind of controversial, complex ethical conundrum. Can you imagine
(14:40):
such wall labels at the Met? About those wall labels,
the Gorilla Girl suggested a wall label that would go
something like this, Carl Andre was accused of murdering his wife,
the artist on a Mendieta. He was represented by a
highly paid lawyer at a bench trial and was acquitted,
and he made very few public states. It's about it thereafter,
(15:02):
if the life of that human being is not exactly
ingrained into the artistic work itself, then I think that
there's still an issue with that. So if an artist
in his life killed two people so drunk and driving,
so is that then a relevant information that you need
to provide the visitor of a museum to see a
(15:25):
particular work that obviously has nothing to do with it
with it Basically, Max says we should follow the lead
of the artist. If their work isn't specifically related to
a particular event in their life, then there's no need
for the museum to bring it to the attention of
the public. Do you think it's possible, Max, that you're
(15:46):
lagging now this old idea about artists somehow being protected
their bad behavior being protected because they're geniuses and they
make these extraordinary objects. Are we behind here? I mean,
obviously you're hinting at that. I think it's about the
question of if you listen to music, if you read literature,
(16:08):
if you see an artwork, if for you the most
relevant thing is to first know the artistic biography, and
I don't think so. Is there anyone you've given up?
Woody Allen, Bill Cosby? Have you had any more personal
moment of reckoning around these issues? I used to love
(16:32):
HP Lovecraft's ooks, which, on the other hand, when you
go dig deeper into his own story and he's somewhat
rooted in white supremacists thoughts, you then look at that
work in a different way, and you see that in
a kind of a different context. Max doesn't read HP
Lovecraft anymore, and I sadly don't watch Woody Allen films anymore.
(16:55):
And the more I talk to folks about what happened
to Anna, the more I knew that if I still
worked in a museum, there would be no way I
could put a work by Carl Andrea on public view.
Did that mean I had flipped into canceling him? I've
always been willing to separate the personality of the artists
from the work they produce. That's Amy Cappolazzo, a leading
(17:18):
figure in the contemporary art market, well known for her
stints at the two most powerful auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's,
a number of the great artists of the twentieth century.
We're awful to the women in their lives that I
know so many artists that didn't raise their children and
were shitty to their kids. I mean, what's the beginning
and end of all this? So I think I'm always
(17:38):
concerned about when we conflate the personal with the professional.
Amy is also a huge fan of Anamendietta's and is
fortunate enough to live with several of her pieces. She
was a very important artist in my life, personally and professionally.
When I really could afford to buy a work of art,
one of the first things I bought was Anamandetta suite
(17:58):
of photograph four photographed silhouetta with clay from the Wahaka series,
and I have self portrait with blood from nineteen seventy four.
Did you ever buy a work by carl Andre for yourself?
I never did know, but they were never They were
always stratospherically more expensive. Do you think carl Andre killed
on him Indietta. There's been moments where I think he
(18:20):
probably did, and there's moments where I say I shouldn't
be so judgmental because I really don't know. I guess
because he was acquitted, right, because we believed in the
legal system, and he was acquitted, whether you believed he
deserved to be acquitted or not, we had to kind
of accept that and live with that. I suggested to
Amy that it seemed unfair that Carl still got to
have his life and career because the art world acted
(18:41):
like nothing had happened. But it turned out Amy's crossed
paths with Carl professionally, and she had a different take.
I believe Carl under has suffered tremendously as a net
result of that episode, both personally and professionally. It felt
ostracized and was forced into a certain kind of isolation.
I think he lived in more fearful and smaller and
(19:01):
more subdued life than he might have had this episode
not happened. And while he was celebrated for his artistic contributions,
which remain whether he killed or didn't kill her, not
re enjoyed any of it. So that's the price. The
punishment that was exacted is more personal in that way.
It's true a quiet descended around Carl in the wake
(19:23):
of Anna's death, even though he still showed and still sold.
He didn't get the kind of accolades and special treatment
that his fellow minimalists did until twenty fourteen, when the
retrospective Adia and the accompanying press made it seem like
he was going to be completely rehabilitated. This didn't seem
(19:44):
to impact Amy's position. She was adamant that the life
of the artist and the art object beheld apart. In
my life and career, been able to talk about Ondietta's
work and carl Andre's work without ever mentioning the episode
that happened. And why do you make that choice? Oh?
Because because if Anna Mendietta is reduced to that episode,
(20:07):
you are negating everything she stood for as an artist.
And this is the conversation I resent. Like the point
of being an artist so your art outlives you, so
that you tell a story in a narrative or it
lasts forever. And if she is reduced to that episode,
you have negated everything she worked hard to be as
an artist. The work is separate from the individual. It
has to be, that's the point of being an artist,
(20:27):
just like Anna Mendieta's work is separate from her death.
I completely agree with Amy. One of the things that
makes are great is that it outlives us. I understand
wanting to untether Anna's work from her untimely death. I
understand wanting to be able to talk about her work
(20:50):
without having to take into account the tragedy that she
had no idea was coming. But both Max and Amy
can tolerate these pockets of silence, And it turns out
I've been troubled by silence the whole time. Maybe I'm
upset by the silence because as a gay person, I
have to be public about my most private self in
(21:13):
order to be fully human. The conversations we had about
Anna and Carl showed me how much I believe in
the power of talking about difficult things. And these conversations
changed how I feel about Carl's work, and they also
shifted my sense of what should and should not be
shared with the public. Spending all this time with Anna
(21:36):
and Carl helped me realize that I wanted to be
a member of a community that discusses grave and difficult things.
It's clear that our geniuses can do horrible things. It's
clear that talent and violence can exist in the same person.
But I've come to see cancel culture solution as another
form of silence. What if instead of silence upon silence,
(22:01):
the gatekeepers told the whole story, the whole, messy, complicated, infuriating,
sad and complex story. When Anna died, the rights to
(22:29):
her art automatically defaulted to Carl, but shortly after her death,
Carl turned those rights over to her family, and for
the last two decades her estate has been managed by
a prominent New York gallery, and her legacy has grown
a lot. By the time the two thousands rolled around,
things really started to pick up. She had a major
(22:51):
touring retrospective exhibition. Her work is owned by many of
the most important museums in the country, and she was
included not once but twice in Mamma's most recent reinstallation
of their collection. And in twenty and eighteen, she showed
up in the New York Times series Overlooked No More,
the newspaper's attempt to redress the hundreds of people, primarily
(23:14):
women and people of color, who did not garner an
obituary in The New York Times as whiter and mailer days.
They called her unapologetically feminist, which made me laugh because
I hadn't realized feminism required an apology. It's twenty twenty two,
(23:36):
and if Annaware alive, she'd be seventy three seventy three now.
Her work means a lot to a lot of people,
especially to women, and especially to women artists. Similar to
free to calla Anna is symbolic for people, she stands
for something more than just her artwork. Her life and
(23:57):
her death matter a great deal, and for some of
her fans, reverence is accompanied by rage. These are the
folks who started the where is Anna Mendietta hashtag, the
folks who show up to protest when Carl Andre's work
is on view. To be honest, Without these women, I'm
not sure anyone would have thought to revisit this story.
(24:19):
So I want to introduce you to two people who
broke the art world's habitual silence. My name is Kristin Clifford,
and I'm an artist. I'm fifty years old. My work
is about bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, feminist health. Kristin first
encountered Anna Mendietta's work in the late nineteen eighties in
(24:42):
a high school art class. The students were given a
bunch of art magazines and told to make collages, and
I actually cut out a picture of one of Anna
Mendietta's Silhouettas I made a collage of all of these
women's bodies in art by women artists, I felt like
(25:03):
the only value that I had was my looks, my body,
my sexuality. I had already been raped. I had no
way to speak about that, no way to talk about it,
no one to tell. And so when I saw these images,
like when I saw the Sea Luetta of Anna Mendieta,
(25:24):
when I saw Moffatt Street, I saw myself. I really
felt and saw myself in this work. You might remember
that we started this show with Anna's first major work,
Moffett Building Piece, a film that shows anonymous pedestrian responses
to Blood on the Street, a work made in response
(25:47):
to a rape and murder on campus. Kristen told us
the story of her assault, and it was hard to
listen to it. Turns out, listening to women and can
be devastating, which is maybe why our society has such
a hard time doing it. When I was raped when
(26:07):
I was fifteen, the friends of the boy who raped
me made a tape of themselves talking about him assaulting name.
They were not boys they were over eighteen. I was
in high school and they were college students, and they
all recorded themselves laughing about me, how they should have
(26:32):
wrapped me up and put me in the refrigerator and
had leftovers in the morning, how it was sad that
not all of them got to take a turn. And
then they gave Christen the tape so she could listen
to it. And that certainly had a huge part in
my artistic career. And like wanting to be seen, needing
(26:53):
to show my own version of events, wanting to see
women telling their own version of their own lives, and
feminist art is where I saw that. I didn't see
it anyway, I didn't see it on TV. Fast forward
almost three decades. It's twenty fourteen and the Carl Andre
(27:14):
retrospective is about to start. Kristen teaches a college class
on rape culture and makes feminist art. She's raising two kids,
and one night she puts her kids to bed, makes
a cup of tea, and picks up the latest art
magazine to find an article about Carl. So I just
(27:35):
made a Facebook event and started tweeting like there will
be blood. I was just really angry. I just was like,
I'm going to fucking throw blood in front of DIA.
Nobody knows who I am, Nobody cares. It's not like
i have some art career to protect. I'm never going
to show a DIA. I'm never going to show it
a museum. Who gives a shit. I'm struck by Kristen
(27:57):
sense that her ability to speak comes from her simlet
eyed assessment of where she sits in the art world
pecking order. In my experience, the more powerful one is,
the more one tends to tow the party line. Lord knows,
I have been incredibly anxious about doing this podcast. All
kinds of folks have let me know they didn't think
this was such a good idea. More than one person
(28:20):
said upon hearing about it, Oh that's brave, as in,
oh that's crazy. So Kristen and about fifteen to twenty
other people, all in white jumpsuits, showed up in front
of the DIA Foundation office, not the actual museum, but
their offices in Manhattan, and they began to chant I
(28:41):
wish I was still alive. And then Kristin took out
a plastic bag of chicken blood she'd gotten from the
butcher and dumped it on the sidewalk while others kept chanting,
(29:01):
and there was a real moment there of sorrow for
her death. The police came and asked the protesters to leave,
which they did. To me, it was just to let
Dia as a whole no that we were pissed off
(29:22):
that they were part of this rehabilitation of carl Andre's
reputation that to me was just so wrong. That small
protest sparked the next one. I reached out to Kristin
(29:42):
Clifford and I told her what I was thinking about
doing and whether she would want to join us. My
name is Jennie Fittamaijo. I am a poet, performer, an essayist.
I tend to write books and performan says that center
around the rescripting and reimagining of undocumented migrants in the US.
(30:07):
Like Kristen, Jennifer has deeply personal reasons for loving on A.
Mendietta's work. I was born in Wiska Territory which is
currently known as Bogota, Columbia. My family left after a
lot of the violence of the eighties when I was
five years old, and my mother and I crossed the
border without documents. I think that sense of displacement, the
(30:34):
sense of longing, that desire for the land, desire for
home is definitely I think one of the connections. Jennifer
was in art school when she first encountered a photo
from Mendietta Silhouetta series on a visit to a museum.
I remember feeling immediately connected to it and simultaneously really angry,
(31:00):
as it felt like had I not seen this work before?
How had I not encountered these images before? And so
a few months into the DA show, Jennifer and a
small group of other folks arrived to protest, and this
time they didn't want to stay outside. They planned to
go into the gallery space and cry. I wanted a
(31:23):
gesture that would focus not so much Andrea himself, but
in the people in the room who gathered to grief.
The trope of the crying woman who has been either
jilted or left behind or whatever, you know, all those
things are going to crying felt so appropriate, and it's
(31:43):
also linked to, you know, ideas of like an overly
emotional woman, feminine excess. All of those things. They spread
out and sat on the floor next to or on
top of Carl Andres sculptures. The space was suddenly transformed
in the having people just sit on the floor, and
so suddenly it was like, oh no, we're the thing
(32:05):
cutting through the space. You know, a lot of Andrea's
work is about cutting through the space with materials and
rearranging space. Suddenly, our bodies, predominantly, you know, women's bodies
were now cutting through the space of the gallery by
sitting or laying in front of pieces in this you know,
very sort of like bright, cool room. And then they
(32:31):
began to cry. The sounds of it were so echoy
and intense because of the space is so large, and
I remember being like, I'll sit here and cry forever.
(32:53):
In the moment of the tears, inside of the gallery
saw liquid tears against rigid structures and forms. It was
the way of remembering her, and it was a way
of bringing her to life and reminding Anna that we
(33:14):
haven't forgotten her. It wasn't to send a message to institutions,
because I don't really believe that they want to listen necessarily.
It's mostly about a kind of mutual care for each
other inside of the space that very much doesn't really care.
When I hear these stories, they make me question who
(33:35):
we think art is for Is it for experts like
me and Amy Coppolazzo and Max Holine. Is it all
about the pleasures of insider baseball? Or is it for
the fifteen year old girl who got raped or the
young woman who crossed the border with her mother. Obviously
it's for all of those people and then some. But
(33:56):
I think those of us who are experts and gatekeepers
have a responsibility to share our knowledge with the public.
Let's face it, all the experts know the story of
Carl and Anna. It strikes me that we, the gate keepers,
are being terribly paternalizing when we decide the public doesn't
need to know facts that we all know. I think
(34:19):
we have to think about that young teenage girl in
the gallery. What version of my expertise do I owe her?
Is withholding how Anna died? Protecting her or any viewer
for that matter. Perhaps the better thing to do is
reframe the question. When we are silent, who is being
protected by that silence? Carl's silence and the silence of
(34:45):
art World insiders ends up feeling like an omission of
the truth, a lapse that seems to suggest that Anna
could be erased from Carl's story, or that his legacy
could be sanitized to make it more palatable, more polite.
After the Carl Andrea retrospective, some of the me too
energy online spilled over to Karl. The where is Anna
(35:07):
Mendietta hashtag followed him around, appearing on social media any
time his name popped up in art world news. That
swell of anger prompted one more story about Karl to emerge,
this time from the actress Ellen Barkham. In January twenty twenty,
she tweeted about an incident from the nineteen seventies. I
(35:29):
was a twenty two year old waitress working a party
for painter Karl Andrea. Andrea got angry over his service,
shoving me against a wall, his hands around my neck,
pulling me up till my feet left the floor. Three
men got him off me. It was retweeted almost five
thousand times. As a feminist, I don't think I should
(35:56):
look away from the controversy over how Anna Mendietta died.
As an art historian, I can't write Carl Andrea out
of the story. I don't want to erase anything from
the history books. I'd prefer to add I'm interested in
what happens when the silence is lifted, like what happens
(36:16):
when I have to think about my adolescent zeal for
walking on carl Andre's work. Knowing everything I know now
was part of the thrill that I could break a
rule in public, and that I knew I could break it,
and that other visitors might not know. So part of
the thrill was kind of daring someone to say something
to me about it because I knew something other people
(36:39):
didn't know, and that energy, well, that's asshole energy, and
that's why it feels good. And now, knowing what I know,
I'm a little more wary about that kind of energy.
I even feel a little embarrassed on behalf of my
younger self, especially as I think about my role might
(37:00):
be as a bystander to violence, which was Anna's question
from the very beginning. The upshot of all of this
is the thinking about the art and the life simultaneously
means we can think new things, both ethically and esthetically,
and while this might be hard to do, in the
(37:23):
end it gets us a much more complex story. And
it's in the name of complexity that I wonder what
would happen if when we lift the silence, we do
so with compassion, Compassion for those who have been hurt,
Compassion for those for whom silence is a form of violence,
(37:45):
Compassion even for those who have done the harm. It
turns out what I want is more talking. I want
a discourse that accounts for public and private art and life.
I want an open field of end, not a closed
field where some things can be said and others cannot.
(38:08):
I want to be part of a culture that can
handle the messiness, the not knowing, the complexity. I want
us to have as many public conversations as it takes
to understand why men are allowed to hurt those who
have less power than them. I want silence to be
(38:28):
replaced with talking, because I think it's the only way
we might be able to forge some kind of path
toward repair. I have to end this story with no end,
so it seems like the only thing to do is
end with a work by Annamandietta. In a short video
(38:53):
she made called Oshon, we see two sinuous lines of
mud in the middle of a tidal river. The handmade
walls of dirt look like two snakes or two halves
of the outline of a body, but the water is
doing its thing without a care in the world it flows,
and it's clear that eventually it will slowly erode these
(39:15):
two forms. Anna made this work in Key Biscayne, Florida.
She made it in the warm waters of the Atlantic,
waters that make a mockery of national borders as they
flow between a place we call the United States, in
an island we call Cuba. In Santaria, Oshun is the
(39:36):
goddess of rivers and love. She came in the boats
that carried the Yoruba people who were stolen and sold,
and the descendants of those people worship her to this day.
They say you can never step in the same river twice.
They say love is forever. They say art is long
(39:56):
and life is short. I hear all of these things
in my head when I look at honest work. I
hear her work admonishing us to pay more attention every
day to the world around us, to see how the
land is changing. And I hear her whispering, asking us
how are we going to change along with it. Death
(40:50):
of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries,
Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment, written and hosted by
me Helen Mouldsworth. Exact producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kanegg,
lital Malad, Jacob Weisberg, and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria
Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is
(41:12):
Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton.
Additional production helped by Tali Abacassas, Pira Acibe Bansu, Rahima
Nasa and Harrison VJ Choi. Engineered by Sam Bear, fact
checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our production coordinator is ek Eggbatola.
(41:34):
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to
Corolla Hoppt, Natalia Delgado, Mia LaBelle, and the Robert Katz Family.
Thanks also to our legal team Louise Carrion, Lauren Pagoni,
Gen Womack, and the team at Clara's Law. If you
(42:04):
love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to listen early,
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, Carl Andre
(00:32):
is an extremely private person that you can publicize his works,
but you can't talk about his private life with them.
He said, justice has been done. I said, I congratulation.
All of the case documents are unattainable, even their existence
will not be confirmed. Mocha Downtown has fired its chief curator,
(00:54):
Helen Molesworth. So you have an India I do. It's
a huge building. It's a good fifteen floors higher than
any other building. It's really high. It's really disturbing how
(01:16):
high it is. That's me and my producer Luisa, visiting
Carl Andre's building in Greenwich Village. I feel like I
should come clean. I did not think this was a
good idea. Luisa was trained as a journalist. Apparently, when
journalists hit brick walls with email and phone messages, they
(01:39):
do something called doorstepping, which is when you literally just
show up at someone's doorstep. Needless to say, they don't
teach this technique in art history class. It made me nervous.
As all get out, but there was no other option
when it came to talk into Carl, so here we were.
Carl still lives in the same apartment where Anna Mendieta
(02:02):
went out the window. Standing at street level, we had
to crane our necks to look all the way up
to the thirty fourth floor. The horror of Anna's last
moments really hit me. There was nothing abstract about it anymore.
I don't think we're going to be able to ring
a bell. No, I think we're going to have to
(02:22):
talk to the doorman. The doorman his job is to
keep us away. Yep. The lobby was all luxury, soaring atrium,
fancy light fixtures, plush sofas, and a doorman behind a
large desk right at the entrance. When we realized there
was no way to ring Carl's doorbell directly, I decided
(02:45):
to write him a note, a last ditch effort to
see if he'd talk. How are you feeling about going
in there? Not good? When I thought we were just
going to ring his bell, it kind of felt like
we were teenagers. But the place is fortified. There's a
security guard walking around in a doormat, and it feels
(03:06):
like I don't know rolling up on somebody, but I
think we have to do our due diligence. We need
to try to get a response to some of what
we're saying, right, and we've tried one way and now
we're going to try one other way. Right, let's do it.
It's not going to get any easier the more we wait.
All right, Hi, how are you? I'm going to help.
(03:32):
We are art historians trying to get in touch with
Carl Andre and we've emailed him a couple of times,
but we haven't gotten any answer back. And so we
were actually going to go old school and just ring
the bell, but obviously you control the bell. So I
have a little note for him, and I just don't
know what your protocols are. I don't know if you're
(03:52):
allowed to ring up and say we're here, or if
you want to take this. I can't hand that over.
If you'd be no problem of beautiful fall, we appreciate
that so much. Thank you. I handed over the note
and we went back out to the street. That was
in January. Carl never responded. I'm Helen Molesworth and from
(04:23):
Pushkin Industries something Else and Sony Music Entertainment This is
Death of an Artist, Episode six, The Reckoning. Maybe if
(04:47):
Carl had talked, if he had ever acknowledged changing his
story or straight up admitted that he just doesn't remember,
or even if he had publicly recognized the amount of
pain Anna's death caused him the art world, maybe then
all of this would feel different. But he didn't do
those things. So now I feel like I have to
(05:08):
answer the question I asked myself at the start of
this podcast. Can I still love Carl Andre's work? It's
a question that by now almost all of us have
faced in one form or another. So many of our
cultural icons have been accused of terrible things. In our
interviews for this series, the names Woody Allen, Michael Jackson,
(05:32):
Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby came up again and again.
Do we keep listening, watching reading the work of someone
accused of causing harm? And might it be that how
people answer these questions has a lot to do with
how much power they have, whether that's the power dynamic
of he said, she said, or the difference between being
(05:55):
a curator at a big museum versus being an everyday
working artist. I decided that in order to answer this question,
I needed to go see some of Andrea's work. I
hadn't seen any in years, and I was curious about
how I would feel when I walked on Andrea's metal plates.
Now after spending so much time thinking about Anna, Carl
(06:31):
is eighty seven years old and officially he has retired,
but in early twenty twenty two he had a show
at the Paula Cooper Gallery and the press release said
there was a new work. So Louisa and I walked
from Carl's apartment to the gallery and Chelsea. It's a
route I imagine Carl himself has probably taken a thousand times.
(06:56):
So I wrote the gallery and the gallery wrote me
back and said that they could not honor my request
to talk about it in the space. I know Paula,
and I really respect Paula, and I've felt bad all
along knowing this podcast isn't something she wants me to do.
So we're on the street, which feels really goofy, and
(07:21):
luckily for us, one of the works is installed in
this kind of show case shop window almost you know,
where there's just enough room for one work, and what
I'm looking at is a kind of classic Andre sculpture
made out of these large pieces of milled cedar, so
(07:43):
they've got that beautiful kind of light red orangey color
that cedar has. They're clearly just piled one on top
of the other, so basically we're looking at a staircase
or a pyramid. You're very aware, this is not random,
(08:05):
this is not chaos, this is order. The piece in
the window was from nineteen eighty Seeing it was like
seeing something from the past that was very familiar. So
far things felt pretty much the same. So we went inside,
we took in the show, and then we walked without talking,
(08:26):
to a nearby park and turned on the recording equipment.
It was cold and gray, the trees were bare, but
the birds were out in force. Well, what did you think?
You were very quiet in there. The show was very beautiful.
It had a kind of elegance to it. I was
(08:50):
also aware that I was a little bored. This show
had a new work in it, but the new work
didn't do anything. The new work was a milled cedar
piece arranged against a wall. And here is a guy
who made a sculpture in twenty twenty one that looked
just like the sculpture in the window from nineteen eighty
(09:14):
and I was really aware of this feeling of time stilled,
no forward movement. Looking at his new work, which looked
just like his old work, I realized that I still
thought all the things I used to think about his work,
but that the work didn't make me feel the way
(09:36):
it used to. And I know I lost that feeling
because of everything I understand about what happened on the
days before and after Anna died. I think there's birds
pooping on us. Did jujits get pooped on? Really? Oh?
I think I did too. Maybe the universe is trying
to tell us something. Maybe the universe was sending us
(10:09):
a sign that it was time to stop talking about
Carl too, as they say, cancel him. We hear so
much about cancel culture, the practice of radically shunning bad
actors that extends to a band on their work. Sometimes
I wish I could just cancel Carl and his work
and be done with it. And maybe that's the point
of canceling. It's an expedient way to deal with an
(10:33):
intractable problem. But the conventional wisdom of the art world
is to separate the art from the artist, So we
keep the Carl Andre who solves sculpture's relationship to the floor,
far away from the Carl who seemed to play a
role in his wife's death. And according to this logic,
(10:53):
I don't have to cancel him. According to this logic,
I should simply enjoy those Andre sculptures and leave the
mess of his personal life out of it. Is there
any moment for you where the art matters more than
its maker? Now? This is Roxanne Gay, a public thinker,
(11:15):
a feminist, and an opinion writer for The New York Times.
She has written that cancel culture is a misnomer. She
prefers to call it consequence culture. I don't think that
we're preserving anything when we preserve the work of murderers.
Because Carl was acquitted, I've been careful not to say
he is a murderer, And by careful, what I really
(11:37):
mean is compelled legally not to do so, because legally
that word is not a fact. Legally, it's just an opinion.
The world will be fine without Carl Andre, and his
work is beautiful. His work is absolutely beautiful. It's a
shame that someone with that much talent could not control himself.
(11:57):
I don't know why we keep putting the onus on
our cells, like why do you feel this way? Like no,
he's the problem, Like go ask him why he had
to be such a piece of shit. And the men
are the ones who should have to answer for themselves.
I can't lie. I had a brief moment listening to
Roxanne when I felt the weight of this whole dilemma
lift off my shoulders. Of course, the world will be
(12:18):
fine without carl Andre's work. Of course men should control themselves.
How is this my problem? But after the interview I
had trouble with the my part. Was it really just
up to me? When individuals stop supporting an artist's work,
do we think this individual action has real life repercussions
(12:39):
or consequences, as Roxanne Gay would say, And if that's
the case, is cancel culture another way of replacing group
responsibility with individual choice. As someone who worked in museums
for most of my life, this highly individual response didn't
(13:01):
seem quite right. One of the things that's interesting about
museums is that they are the place where art gets
to be public. And when that happens, then art is
really about all of us. It's about society. It is
a public record of what we think, feel and believe.
So what's important was how as a society we were
(13:23):
going to handle this kind of ethical dilemma. When I
was a museum curator, I was what folks call a gatekeeper,
meaning I was someone who determined what art the public
got to see. This meant my so called personal decisions
had public ramifications. I would feel comfortable with a Carl
(13:47):
Andrea sculpture at the MET, for sure. That's Max Wholeline,
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the
most important museums in the world. He said he'd be
fine was showing a sculpture by Carl Andre at the MET.
We're talking about museums as being the sort of the
primary institution that creates the discourse publicly around art. I'm
(14:13):
curious how you would respond to the Gorilla Girls. Their
quote unquote solution to this quote unquote problem is a
radical rewriting of museum wall label so that you couldn't
put up a Carl Andre without informing your public of
this kind of controversial, complex ethical conundrum. Can you imagine
(14:40):
such wall labels at the Met? About those wall labels,
the Gorilla Girl suggested a wall label that would go
something like this, Carl Andre was accused of murdering his wife,
the artist on a Mendieta. He was represented by a
highly paid lawyer at a bench trial and was acquitted,
and he made very few public states. It's about it thereafter,
(15:02):
if the life of that human being is not exactly
ingrained into the artistic work itself, then I think that
there's still an issue with that. So if an artist
in his life killed two people so drunk and driving,
so is that then a relevant information that you need
to provide the visitor of a museum to see a
(15:25):
particular work that obviously has nothing to do with it
with it Basically, Max says we should follow the lead
of the artist. If their work isn't specifically related to
a particular event in their life, then there's no need
for the museum to bring it to the attention of
the public. Do you think it's possible, Max, that you're
(15:46):
lagging now this old idea about artists somehow being protected
their bad behavior being protected because they're geniuses and they
make these extraordinary objects. Are we behind here? I mean,
obviously you're hinting at that. I think it's about the
question of if you listen to music, if you read literature,
(16:08):
if you see an artwork, if for you the most
relevant thing is to first know the artistic biography, and
I don't think so. Is there anyone you've given up?
Woody Allen, Bill Cosby? Have you had any more personal
moment of reckoning around these issues? I used to love
(16:32):
HP Lovecraft's ooks, which, on the other hand, when you
go dig deeper into his own story and he's somewhat
rooted in white supremacists thoughts, you then look at that
work in a different way, and you see that in
a kind of a different context. Max doesn't read HP
Lovecraft anymore, and I sadly don't watch Woody Allen films anymore.
(16:55):
And the more I talk to folks about what happened
to Anna, the more I knew that if I still
worked in a museum, there would be no way I
could put a work by Carl Andrea on public view.
Did that mean I had flipped into canceling him? I've
always been willing to separate the personality of the artists
from the work they produce. That's Amy Cappolazzo, a leading
(17:18):
figure in the contemporary art market, well known for her
stints at the two most powerful auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's,
a number of the great artists of the twentieth century.
We're awful to the women in their lives that I
know so many artists that didn't raise their children and
were shitty to their kids. I mean, what's the beginning
and end of all this? So I think I'm always
(17:38):
concerned about when we conflate the personal with the professional.
Amy is also a huge fan of Anamendietta's and is
fortunate enough to live with several of her pieces. She
was a very important artist in my life, personally and professionally.
When I really could afford to buy a work of art,
one of the first things I bought was Anamandetta suite
(17:58):
of photograph four photographed silhouetta with clay from the Wahaka series,
and I have self portrait with blood from nineteen seventy four.
Did you ever buy a work by carl Andre for yourself?
I never did know, but they were never They were
always stratospherically more expensive. Do you think carl Andre killed
on him Indietta. There's been moments where I think he
(18:20):
probably did, and there's moments where I say I shouldn't
be so judgmental because I really don't know. I guess
because he was acquitted, right, because we believed in the
legal system, and he was acquitted, whether you believed he
deserved to be acquitted or not, we had to kind
of accept that and live with that. I suggested to
Amy that it seemed unfair that Carl still got to
have his life and career because the art world acted
(18:41):
like nothing had happened. But it turned out Amy's crossed
paths with Carl professionally, and she had a different take.
I believe Carl under has suffered tremendously as a net
result of that episode, both personally and professionally. It felt
ostracized and was forced into a certain kind of isolation.
I think he lived in more fearful and smaller and
(19:01):
more subdued life than he might have had this episode
not happened. And while he was celebrated for his artistic contributions,
which remain whether he killed or didn't kill her, not
re enjoyed any of it. So that's the price. The
punishment that was exacted is more personal in that way.
It's true a quiet descended around Carl in the wake
(19:23):
of Anna's death, even though he still showed and still sold.
He didn't get the kind of accolades and special treatment
that his fellow minimalists did until twenty fourteen, when the
retrospective Adia and the accompanying press made it seem like
he was going to be completely rehabilitated. This didn't seem
(19:44):
to impact Amy's position. She was adamant that the life
of the artist and the art object beheld apart. In
my life and career, been able to talk about Ondietta's
work and carl Andre's work without ever mentioning the episode
that happened. And why do you make that choice? Oh?
Because because if Anna Mendietta is reduced to that episode,
(20:07):
you are negating everything she stood for as an artist.
And this is the conversation I resent. Like the point
of being an artist so your art outlives you, so
that you tell a story in a narrative or it
lasts forever. And if she is reduced to that episode,
you have negated everything she worked hard to be as
an artist. The work is separate from the individual. It
has to be, that's the point of being an artist,
(20:27):
just like Anna Mendieta's work is separate from her death.
I completely agree with Amy. One of the things that
makes are great is that it outlives us. I understand
wanting to untether Anna's work from her untimely death. I
understand wanting to be able to talk about her work
(20:50):
without having to take into account the tragedy that she
had no idea was coming. But both Max and Amy
can tolerate these pockets of silence, And it turns out
I've been troubled by silence the whole time. Maybe I'm
upset by the silence because as a gay person, I
have to be public about my most private self in
(21:13):
order to be fully human. The conversations we had about
Anna and Carl showed me how much I believe in
the power of talking about difficult things. And these conversations
changed how I feel about Carl's work, and they also
shifted my sense of what should and should not be
shared with the public. Spending all this time with Anna
(21:36):
and Carl helped me realize that I wanted to be
a member of a community that discusses grave and difficult things.
It's clear that our geniuses can do horrible things. It's
clear that talent and violence can exist in the same person.
But I've come to see cancel culture solution as another
form of silence. What if instead of silence upon silence,
(22:01):
the gatekeepers told the whole story, the whole, messy, complicated, infuriating,
sad and complex story. When Anna died, the rights to
(22:29):
her art automatically defaulted to Carl, but shortly after her death,
Carl turned those rights over to her family, and for
the last two decades her estate has been managed by
a prominent New York gallery, and her legacy has grown
a lot. By the time the two thousands rolled around,
things really started to pick up. She had a major
(22:51):
touring retrospective exhibition. Her work is owned by many of
the most important museums in the country, and she was
included not once but twice in Mamma's most recent reinstallation
of their collection. And in twenty and eighteen, she showed
up in the New York Times series Overlooked No More,
the newspaper's attempt to redress the hundreds of people, primarily
(23:14):
women and people of color, who did not garner an
obituary in The New York Times as whiter and mailer days.
They called her unapologetically feminist, which made me laugh because
I hadn't realized feminism required an apology. It's twenty twenty two,
(23:36):
and if Annaware alive, she'd be seventy three seventy three now.
Her work means a lot to a lot of people,
especially to women, and especially to women artists. Similar to
free to calla Anna is symbolic for people, she stands
for something more than just her artwork. Her life and
(23:57):
her death matter a great deal, and for some of
her fans, reverence is accompanied by rage. These are the
folks who started the where is Anna Mendietta hashtag, the
folks who show up to protest when Carl Andre's work
is on view. To be honest, Without these women, I'm
not sure anyone would have thought to revisit this story.
(24:19):
So I want to introduce you to two people who
broke the art world's habitual silence. My name is Kristin Clifford,
and I'm an artist. I'm fifty years old. My work
is about bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, feminist health. Kristin first
encountered Anna Mendietta's work in the late nineteen eighties in
(24:42):
a high school art class. The students were given a
bunch of art magazines and told to make collages, and
I actually cut out a picture of one of Anna
Mendietta's Silhouettas I made a collage of all of these
women's bodies in art by women artists, I felt like
(25:03):
the only value that I had was my looks, my body,
my sexuality. I had already been raped. I had no
way to speak about that, no way to talk about it,
no one to tell. And so when I saw these images,
like when I saw the Sea Luetta of Anna Mendieta,
(25:24):
when I saw Moffatt Street, I saw myself. I really
felt and saw myself in this work. You might remember
that we started this show with Anna's first major work,
Moffett Building Piece, a film that shows anonymous pedestrian responses
to Blood on the Street, a work made in response
(25:47):
to a rape and murder on campus. Kristen told us
the story of her assault, and it was hard to
listen to it. Turns out, listening to women and can
be devastating, which is maybe why our society has such
a hard time doing it. When I was raped when
(26:07):
I was fifteen, the friends of the boy who raped
me made a tape of themselves talking about him assaulting name.
They were not boys they were over eighteen. I was
in high school and they were college students, and they
all recorded themselves laughing about me, how they should have
(26:32):
wrapped me up and put me in the refrigerator and
had leftovers in the morning, how it was sad that
not all of them got to take a turn. And
then they gave Christen the tape so she could listen
to it. And that certainly had a huge part in
my artistic career. And like wanting to be seen, needing
(26:53):
to show my own version of events, wanting to see
women telling their own version of their own lives, and
feminist art is where I saw that. I didn't see
it anyway, I didn't see it on TV. Fast forward
almost three decades. It's twenty fourteen and the Carl Andre
(27:14):
retrospective is about to start. Kristen teaches a college class
on rape culture and makes feminist art. She's raising two kids,
and one night she puts her kids to bed, makes
a cup of tea, and picks up the latest art
magazine to find an article about Carl. So I just
(27:35):
made a Facebook event and started tweeting like there will
be blood. I was just really angry. I just was like,
I'm going to fucking throw blood in front of DIA.
Nobody knows who I am, Nobody cares. It's not like
i have some art career to protect. I'm never going
to show a DIA. I'm never going to show it
a museum. Who gives a shit. I'm struck by Kristen
(27:57):
sense that her ability to speak comes from her simlet
eyed assessment of where she sits in the art world
pecking order. In my experience, the more powerful one is,
the more one tends to tow the party line. Lord knows,
I have been incredibly anxious about doing this podcast. All
kinds of folks have let me know they didn't think
this was such a good idea. More than one person
(28:20):
said upon hearing about it, Oh that's brave, as in,
oh that's crazy. So Kristen and about fifteen to twenty
other people, all in white jumpsuits, showed up in front
of the DIA Foundation office, not the actual museum, but
their offices in Manhattan, and they began to chant I
(28:41):
wish I was still alive. And then Kristin took out
a plastic bag of chicken blood she'd gotten from the
butcher and dumped it on the sidewalk while others kept chanting,
(29:01):
and there was a real moment there of sorrow for
her death. The police came and asked the protesters to leave,
which they did. To me, it was just to let
Dia as a whole no that we were pissed off
(29:22):
that they were part of this rehabilitation of carl Andre's
reputation that to me was just so wrong. That small
protest sparked the next one. I reached out to Kristin
(29:42):
Clifford and I told her what I was thinking about
doing and whether she would want to join us. My
name is Jennie Fittamaijo. I am a poet, performer, an essayist.
I tend to write books and performan says that center
around the rescripting and reimagining of undocumented migrants in the US.
(30:07):
Like Kristen, Jennifer has deeply personal reasons for loving on A.
Mendietta's work. I was born in Wiska Territory which is
currently known as Bogota, Columbia. My family left after a
lot of the violence of the eighties when I was
five years old, and my mother and I crossed the
border without documents. I think that sense of displacement, the
(30:34):
sense of longing, that desire for the land, desire for
home is definitely I think one of the connections. Jennifer
was in art school when she first encountered a photo
from Mendietta Silhouetta series on a visit to a museum.
I remember feeling immediately connected to it and simultaneously really angry,
(31:00):
as it felt like had I not seen this work before?
How had I not encountered these images before? And so
a few months into the DA show, Jennifer and a
small group of other folks arrived to protest, and this
time they didn't want to stay outside. They planned to
go into the gallery space and cry. I wanted a
(31:23):
gesture that would focus not so much Andrea himself, but
in the people in the room who gathered to grief.
The trope of the crying woman who has been either
jilted or left behind or whatever, you know, all those
things are going to crying felt so appropriate, and it's
(31:43):
also linked to, you know, ideas of like an overly
emotional woman, feminine excess. All of those things. They spread
out and sat on the floor next to or on
top of Carl Andres sculptures. The space was suddenly transformed
in the having people just sit on the floor, and
so suddenly it was like, oh no, we're the thing
(32:05):
cutting through the space. You know, a lot of Andrea's
work is about cutting through the space with materials and
rearranging space. Suddenly, our bodies, predominantly, you know, women's bodies
were now cutting through the space of the gallery by
sitting or laying in front of pieces in this you know,
very sort of like bright, cool room. And then they
(32:31):
began to cry. The sounds of it were so echoy
and intense because of the space is so large, and
I remember being like, I'll sit here and cry forever.
(32:53):
In the moment of the tears, inside of the gallery
saw liquid tears against rigid structures and forms. It was
the way of remembering her, and it was a way
of bringing her to life and reminding Anna that we
(33:14):
haven't forgotten her. It wasn't to send a message to institutions,
because I don't really believe that they want to listen necessarily.
It's mostly about a kind of mutual care for each
other inside of the space that very much doesn't really care.
When I hear these stories, they make me question who
(33:35):
we think art is for Is it for experts like
me and Amy Coppolazzo and Max Holine. Is it all
about the pleasures of insider baseball? Or is it for
the fifteen year old girl who got raped or the
young woman who crossed the border with her mother. Obviously
it's for all of those people and then some. But
(33:56):
I think those of us who are experts and gatekeepers
have a responsibility to share our knowledge with the public.
Let's face it, all the experts know the story of
Carl and Anna. It strikes me that we, the gate keepers,
are being terribly paternalizing when we decide the public doesn't
need to know facts that we all know. I think
(34:19):
we have to think about that young teenage girl in
the gallery. What version of my expertise do I owe her?
Is withholding how Anna died? Protecting her or any viewer
for that matter. Perhaps the better thing to do is
reframe the question. When we are silent, who is being
protected by that silence? Carl's silence and the silence of
(34:45):
art World insiders ends up feeling like an omission of
the truth, a lapse that seems to suggest that Anna
could be erased from Carl's story, or that his legacy
could be sanitized to make it more palatable, more polite.
After the Carl Andrea retrospective, some of the me too
energy online spilled over to Karl. The where is Anna
(35:07):
Mendietta hashtag followed him around, appearing on social media any
time his name popped up in art world news. That
swell of anger prompted one more story about Karl to emerge,
this time from the actress Ellen Barkham. In January twenty twenty,
she tweeted about an incident from the nineteen seventies. I
(35:29):
was a twenty two year old waitress working a party
for painter Karl Andrea. Andrea got angry over his service,
shoving me against a wall, his hands around my neck,
pulling me up till my feet left the floor. Three
men got him off me. It was retweeted almost five
thousand times. As a feminist, I don't think I should
(35:56):
look away from the controversy over how Anna Mendietta died.
As an art historian, I can't write Carl Andrea out
of the story. I don't want to erase anything from
the history books. I'd prefer to add I'm interested in
what happens when the silence is lifted, like what happens
(36:16):
when I have to think about my adolescent zeal for
walking on carl Andre's work. Knowing everything I know now
was part of the thrill that I could break a
rule in public, and that I knew I could break it,
and that other visitors might not know. So part of
the thrill was kind of daring someone to say something
to me about it because I knew something other people
(36:39):
didn't know, and that energy, well, that's asshole energy, and
that's why it feels good. And now, knowing what I know,
I'm a little more wary about that kind of energy.
I even feel a little embarrassed on behalf of my
younger self, especially as I think about my role might
(37:00):
be as a bystander to violence, which was Anna's question
from the very beginning. The upshot of all of this
is the thinking about the art and the life simultaneously
means we can think new things, both ethically and esthetically,
and while this might be hard to do, in the
(37:23):
end it gets us a much more complex story. And
it's in the name of complexity that I wonder what
would happen if when we lift the silence, we do
so with compassion, Compassion for those who have been hurt,
Compassion for those for whom silence is a form of violence,
(37:45):
Compassion even for those who have done the harm. It
turns out what I want is more talking. I want
a discourse that accounts for public and private art and life.
I want an open field of end, not a closed
field where some things can be said and others cannot.
(38:08):
I want to be part of a culture that can
handle the messiness, the not knowing, the complexity. I want
us to have as many public conversations as it takes
to understand why men are allowed to hurt those who
have less power than them. I want silence to be
(38:28):
replaced with talking, because I think it's the only way
we might be able to forge some kind of path
toward repair. I have to end this story with no end,
so it seems like the only thing to do is
end with a work by Annamandietta. In a short video
(38:53):
she made called Oshon, we see two sinuous lines of
mud in the middle of a tidal river. The handmade
walls of dirt look like two snakes or two halves
of the outline of a body, but the water is
doing its thing without a care in the world it flows,
and it's clear that eventually it will slowly erode these
(39:15):
two forms. Anna made this work in Key Biscayne, Florida.
She made it in the warm waters of the Atlantic,
waters that make a mockery of national borders as they
flow between a place we call the United States, in
an island we call Cuba. In Santaria, Oshun is the
(39:36):
goddess of rivers and love. She came in the boats
that carried the Yoruba people who were stolen and sold,
and the descendants of those people worship her to this day.
They say you can never step in the same river twice.
They say love is forever. They say art is long
(39:56):
and life is short. I hear all of these things
in my head when I look at honest work. I
hear her work admonishing us to pay more attention every
day to the world around us, to see how the
land is changing. And I hear her whispering, asking us
how are we going to change along with it. Death
(40:50):
of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries,
Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment, written and hosted by
me Helen Mouldsworth. Exact producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kanegg,
lital Malad, Jacob Weisberg, and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria
Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is
(41:12):
Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton.
Additional production helped by Tali Abacassas, Pira Acibe Bansu, Rahima
Nasa and Harrison VJ Choi. Engineered by Sam Bear, fact
checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our production coordinator is ek Eggbatola.
(41:34):
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to
Corolla Hoppt, Natalia Delgado, Mia LaBelle, and the Robert Katz Family.
Thanks also to our legal team Louise Carrion, Lauren Pagoni,
Gen Womack, and the team at Clara's Law. If you
(42:04):
love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to listen early,
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.
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