September 30, 2022 • 38 mins
Ana’s art engaged with her identity as a Cuban female artist. She worked hard to be recognized in a world dominated by white men. After her death, Ana’s friends and family demand an investigation. Many of the most powerful members of the art world dismiss them as a “feminist cabal.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
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. I started
(00:33):
to leave the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute,
what if it's art? And I went an app and
it went ARC and I got so excited. It was
a revolutionary moment. This guy is now wooing her the
way he loves wooing, with champagne, expensive dinners. And this
is somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that
(00:53):
I used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
She was not fearful person, except interestingly when it came
to heights. The last person to talk to Anna before
(01:16):
she died other than Carl was her close friend Natalia Delgado.
She knew the marriage was not working. They were on
the phone. Anna was sure Carl was seeing another woman,
and she had a plan for how she was going
to prove it. She almost knew it was crazy. She said,
I think you and I should put on some wigs
and dressed like other people, and let's see if we can,
(01:38):
like take some pictures of it. You should do it,
because you won't recognize you, and I said, are you crazy.
I'm not going to do that. I mean, Carl was
in the apartment as the two women spoke, possibly within earshot.
Carl was in the background, and so I said, well,
maybe you should be speaking in Spanish. But still their
words that were the same, you know, like detective, divorce,
(02:01):
the same words, you know. So I think that he
probably could figure out what she was talking about. As
far as Natalia knew, Anna never hired a detective, but
she had talked to an attorney about how to file
for divorce on grounds of infidelity, and she had said
she was gathering evidence. She was making photocopies of all
(02:24):
of the receipts from his American Express card and his
phone bills. She's trying to reconstruct the events of the affairs,
and she wanted to use that for her divorce on
grounds of infidelity. I thought it was better to tell
him and say, look, this is what I've accumulated. I
(02:46):
want a divorce and I have evidence of this. Did
she ever say or sounds like she was afraid of him? Yes,
that night, but I had no idea because she said
he had a temper before. But I had no idea
how that he could get really violent, and she said, yeah,
he's going to blow up if I have this conversation
(03:08):
with him, He's really going to blow up. It was
late and Natalia said she had to go, so I
said I would call her the next day. She said,
waked me up. So I called her in the morning
and I got Carl. I said I need to speak
with Anna and he said she's not here and I said, well,
(03:29):
when will she be back. He said I don't know.
I said, well, please tell her. I called and he
said I will. This detail astounds me. Anna's best friend
calls the morning Anna died, and Carl doesn't tell her
what's happened, but agrees to pass on a message. Natalia
has been sitting with this for decades. You know, it's
(03:53):
something that's very painful for me, because I thought it
is better to tell him and say, look, this is
what I've accumulated. I want to divorce. It never occurred
to me that he would kill her. I'm your host,
Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
(04:16):
Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist. Episode three,
The Feminist Cabal. Even when the whole world was arranged
(04:41):
to keep her away from what she wanted. Anna was
invested in trying to change things. She wanted to go
home to Cuba, the home she hadn't seen since age twelve,
but icy Cold War relations between the US and the
island made travel between the two countries impossible. Exiles were
not allowed to return to Cuba. You leave, and it
(05:04):
was like you're a trader and that's it, it's over.
That's Coco Fusco, an artist and the author of Dangerous Moves,
performance and politics in Cuba, and this was deeply traumatic
for people who left family members there, left homes, left lives.
I grew up in a world in which, like all
(05:25):
my relatives were like crying about Cuba all the time.
So Anna pushed to change it. There were some groups
of younger Cuban exiles like Anna who had come as children,
who in the seventies organized politically to reopen the possibility
of family reunification. Flights, who was one of the Cubans
(05:49):
from the American side who sat down with people in
the Cuban government and tried to bring the two sides together.
That's pretty daring, and they succeeded, and in nineteen seventy nine,
those flights began. One hundred and fifty thousand Cubans went
in the first few years of this. In nineteen eighty,
(06:14):
Anna made her first trip back to Cuba, where she
was able to reunite with her grandparents and extended family.
It was a return to her roots. Here's how Anna,
voiced here by the Cuban artist Tanya Brigera, explained it.
I find that my roots are Cuban. The branches might
be American, but the trunk of the tree is Cuban,
(06:35):
or the roots, you know. Anna started to travel to
Cuba often, and these visits opened up a whole new
world for her politically, socially, and artistically. On one of
those trips, she made what I personally considered to be
one of her most beautiful pieces, a striking group of
petroglyphs carved directly into cave walls located in a dense
(06:59):
patch of tropical jungle in Jaruco. More than three decades
after she made them, an artist and fan of Anna Mendieta's,
named Elise Resmussen, set out to find them. She recorded
a video of her journey through the overgrowth and into
the cave. Oh ship, we found one of the sculptures.
(07:22):
I don't know which one off hand, show us you
can see, can see the head. I really thought that
all of them would be destroyed, gone. There's others, he's times,
others founded. The wall reliefs Mendietta left behind are thickly
(07:48):
carved lines cut directly into the limestone walls. Then she
took luminous black and white photographs of them. The images
resemble a primordial female form from the Neolithic period. Clearly,
Cuba meant a great deal to Anna. It's no easy
task to carve into a stone wall, and no matter
(08:09):
how deep in the jungle this cave was, no matter
how hard the sculptures were to find, to leave a
mark like that says I was here, I'm from here,
and I plan to remain here. While in Cuba, Anna
also explored her interest in the Afro Cuban religion Santaria.
(08:31):
She was finding a way into the culture. That's Eltrano again,
one of Anna's Cuban friends in New York. You have
to understand that Afro Cuban culture permeated the entirety all
the classes in Cuba. Anna had grown up Catholic, with
all of those images of sacrifice in blood, and as
a little girl, she also liked to listen to the
(08:53):
maids in the kitchen talking about their religion Santaria, with
its images of blood and sacrifice. That interest was already
visible in her work. Her early grad school performances include
references to Santa Via rituals through her use of candles
and chicken sacrifice. But Elatreiano makes the distinction that Anna
(09:15):
was more student than practitioner. She was not a santeata,
she was not dressed in white. There is a very
big difference between a practitioner of Santia and somebody who
studies or uses it as a way of working with
the culture. In fact, there's been criticism of Anna that
she was working with a religion that she really didn't
(09:38):
know enough about. Anna was interested in excavating her Cuban identity,
but her trips weren't only about her. She regularly brought
American artists and critics to Havana, hoping to build a
cultural pipeline between her two worlds. This wasn't to everyone's liking,
(09:59):
and her attempt to ch lenge the status quo earned
her a visit from the FBI. For the first time
in my career as an art historian, I found myself
looking at copies of heavily redacted FBI files. In September
of nineteen eighty three, just before she left for Rome,
an agent arrived at Anna's little apartment to question her
(10:19):
about her trips. Her answers must have been satisfactory. The
agent recommended the matter be closed. But it wasn't just
the FBI who perceived her as a threat. She's threatening.
She is not like a pretty little girl, you know,
making pretty paintings. That's Sarah Thornton, a sociologist whose book
(10:43):
Seven Days in the Art World is an in depth
study of the network of galleries, art schools, and auction
houses that make up the art community. Her work is
a threat to patriarchy. She's playing with gender and the
body every single time, whether it's wearing beards and mustaches,
(11:06):
her use of blood. For me, she is experimenting with
the things done to women's bodies under patriarchy, and she's
revealing it. I agree with Sarah. Anna's work does feel
(11:28):
like a threat to patriarchy. Anna was not a well
behaved woman. She was literally playing with blood and fire.
She's hiking into a jungle to make a carving of
a vagina on a cave wall. Her studio equipment included
chainsaws and gunpowder. This is a major badass, and badasses
(11:49):
are enthralling, and when they are women, they also tend
to be threatening. When Anna left for Italy and nineteen
eighty three, she was thrilled to have the opportunity to
spend an entire year, all expenses paid, on the lush
grounds of the American Academy in Rome. This was Anna's
(12:12):
chance to live in a city literally filled with art. Sculptures, paintings,
and frescoes are everywhere on buildings, in churches and in parks.
It was a dream. But not everything at the studio
was to her liking. And as my grandmother would have said,
she made a stink. She kind of mobilized a group
(12:36):
of people to protest conditions at the Academy. She came
in with a list of demands, and I don't think
the challegy was really used to that. There were sort
of used to people being docile. That's Chris Halbe, a
painter who was at the Academy with Anna. He describes
how she made a bad first impression, but then organized
(12:56):
some of her peers and got the academy to make
improvements that helped every one. Your really more impression was
who was this fin in the alice? More appreciative and respectful,
you know, and all of that. But I think by
the end they realized there was something about her. She
had the guys completely redoom or starlight, and I think
it parlably led to a kind of reconstruction, the scarlights
(13:17):
all around the building, just based on her complaints. There
it is again Anna, the outspoken one, not afraid to
nibble at the hand that's feeding her. Anna's time in
Rome was her own for most of her fellowship. Carl
was back home in New York or working in Germany,
so he wasn't there. When Natalia Delgado came to visit
(13:38):
Anna at the academy, I think with her a week
and so she announces, I'm not here to babysit you,
which of course I wasn't expecting, but she was like
very clear. Anna gave Natalia a book of walking tours
so Natalia could roam the city while Anna worked in
the studio. She had started to experiment with freestanding sculptures
(13:59):
made out of would that she was burning with a blowtorch.
In the evenings, the two friends went to the movies.
They saw Apocalypse Now and they also went dancing. But
Natalia's visit wasn't only for fun. She came carrying news
from New York. I told her about the rumors that
Carl was having affairs. She basically called it off with
(14:22):
Carl and said, you know, it's over for us, you know,
and she was wanting to make a new life for herself.
But Carl and Anna had been in a cycle of
breaking up and getting back together for several years and
it would continue. But then he decided to go out
and court her. It was very sick. I thought, very
(14:43):
very surprising to me that somebody breaks up with you
because you're having relationships with other people. And what you
do is the reaction is you go to see the
person to try to get them back. And that's what
he did, and that's when he proposed marriage to her,
and Anna said, yes, she gave it a chance. You know,
(15:05):
she wasn't going to find somebody outside of the art world.
I didn't think, you know, somebody who would understand that vocation.
You know, she had a vocation. I mean she never
wanted to have children. I get it. Anna was independent driven.
Her whole life revolved around and stemmed from her art practice.
(15:26):
She needed to be with someone who would understand that.
The two got married in Rome in January of nineteen
eighty five. Their close friend Carol LeWitt was at the wedding.
She was radiant. I'll never forget how she learned jobs.
Absolutely beautiful. Do you remember? Yeah, she's wearing a gray
(15:49):
knit dress and the girl I found her a great beautis.
The newlywed started their next chapter with a honeymoon in
each a place full of art that commemorates death. Anna
had wanted to go for a while. Anna was so
interested in death that she once said, I don't think
(16:10):
you can separate death and life. And we can see
how her meditations on death showed up in her art.
For two works that I believe are on view by
Anna Na Mendieta M E N d I E t A.
They currently have art on display in gallery two O three.
(16:35):
Thank you so much. I appreciate that, no problem. Thanks.
My producer Luisa and I decided to go to a
museum to see one of Anna's pieces and what we're
looking at is a work from nineteen eighty four, so
you know, Mendietta dies in eighty five, and what we're
(16:56):
looking at is a four worm that looks like an outline,
maybe like a silhouette of a mummy. It's called Nile
Bourne and I l e. Bourne. Anna's interest in Egypt
was so deep that she was even dreaming about it.
She recounted a dream to a friend in which she
(17:16):
and Karl were the king and Queen of Egypt at
sale on a river, surrounded by thousands of snakes. So
I wasn't surprised to see that her sculpture from this
period resembled a sarcophagus. It looks like it's made out
of dirt that's held together with some kind of binder.
It's really thin. In the interior, there's a very extenuated
(17:42):
tear drop form slightly raised in a roll. It intimates
the interior of the body. It intimates legs that spread open,
it intimates that, you know, the interior space of the vagina.
Louisa noticed that it looked like an out line of
a dead body or a coffin, and that is exactly
(18:04):
one of the things that has made Anna's art so
chilling in the aftermath of her death. She's in the
space of death for sure, So I think you gleaning
That makes perfect sense to me. Almost all art is
connected to the problem of death, because one of the
(18:24):
things art is seagory of objects that we have decided
we are going to save. But being interested in or
making art about death isn't the same as wanting to die.
It seems clear that Anna had so much more work
she wanted to do. This is like the moment when
(18:45):
I actually find I get angry, because that's made in
nineteen eighty four and she died in nineteen eighty five,
So we actually don't know whether or not she thought
that was successful. Did she keep making them? What would
she have done with that idea moving forward? This is
(19:06):
the tragedy of the artist who days young. We simply
don't know how their work would have matured, how it
might have changed over time. Anna's work was very dynamic,
and in her short career the work changed quite a bit,
from her use of blood to her use of nature
to the final freestanding sculptures in her studio. Her work
(19:27):
was already changing and growing. All of that potential violently
halted and my moment of anger in a museum in
twenty twenty two. It gave me some small insight into
how angry Anna's friends and family must have been when
Carl showed up at her memorial. Let's go back to
(20:10):
the morning of September eighth, nineteen eighty five, and to
Natalia Delgado, just hours after Anna's death. Remember, Natalia called
that morning and Carl had answered. She asked Carl to
have Anna call her back, and he said he would,
even though Anna was already dead. So I asked her,
(20:32):
did you call a second time? Yeah, because she didn't
call me back on her second call. The person who
answered the phone was one of Carl's lawyers, Jerry Rosen.
Carl was at the police station, but he had sent
Jerry back to the apartment to collect some documents. Here
he is in a nineteen eighty eight interview describing that
(20:52):
phone call with Natalia falls ring and I pick it up,
and she says Anna there and decided to tell her.
I said, Anna's dead, all right, and that Carl is
in jail charge. And that time, Karl's lawyer, I think
(21:17):
he just sat Anna's dead, and I was like, oh
my god, you know, I was in disbelief. Remember Natalia
is a lawyer. She realized something was off. I just said,
what are you doing in there? Isn't that apartment blocked
off cordoned off? And he said, well, yes, but uh
(21:39):
he was in there. He went in. Then I thought
Karl must have killed her. When she learned that her
friend was dead and that Carl's lawyer was in what
was now possibly a crime scene, Natalia immediately got in
touch with the NYPD. She told them about her last
phone call with Anna, that Anna had been making copies
(22:00):
of telephone and credit card bills to prove Carl was cheating,
and that she was planning on filing for divorce. I
was concerned about, particularly as I'd spoken to Jerry Rosen
about what was in the apartment, that you know, that
her evidence wouldn't disappear. We'll come back to this later,
to the mysterious story of what happened to the xerox
(22:23):
copies of telephone and credit card bills for now. In
the immediate aftermath of Anna's death, news of what happened
was spreading quickly. Some of Anna's friends began planning a
memorial service. Many were art stars, in their own right,
heavyweights in the burgeoning feminist art movement. But it was complicated.
(22:46):
Several of Anna's friends were also friends of Carl's. One
of them, the extremely influential art critic Lucy Leppard, who
played a major role in planning the service, had even
been Carl's lover before he met Anna. The art world
was small, and Anna's death was starting to divide it.
(23:07):
There were those who believed Carl that she jumped, or
that maybe it was a terrible accident. And there were those,
including many who identified as feminists, who were convinced that
he had a hand in her death. The memorial service
brought these two opposing factions into one elegant room. The
(23:30):
memorial was in a landmarked building on Park Avenue called
the Salon Boulevard. It had the grandeur of a high
society mansion. Imagine Roman columns and crystal chandeliers. One of
the many artists in attendance was a woman named Anne Minich.
She described the service to the journalist Robert Katz. The
(23:52):
audio on this archival tape is a little hard to follow.
They had music that Anna love, and they had flowers,
and Anna of some of her Cuban friends brought a
record player and the old fashioned Afro Cuban music that
Anna loved to dance to. Anne said, tons of people
showed up, including Carl, and it was in this huge
(24:13):
room and there were sharedge amounts of people there, including
Carl Andre who came. And of course he would have
had to become because because his defense was that she
committed suicide. It was an impossible predicament. On the one hand,
Carl wasn't welcome, and on the other hand, not showing
up would have been tantamount to an admission of guilt.
(24:35):
On the day of the memorial, Lucy Lapard had a
difficult task. She had to tell Anna's family that Carl
would be in attendance. On a sister made it clear
that the family did not want to see him. Lapard
had already prepared for this by seating Carl in one
area and reserving seats for the family in another, such
(24:56):
that they couldn't see each other. Here's Anne minuture. He
sat over in the corner, and a lot of people,
he's a very powerful man, went over and they felt
very bad for him, and blah blah blah. It was,
you know, there's probably hard to take for some people
that he was being comforted as much as he was
(25:17):
because and Minis doesn't finish her sentence there, But it's
not hard to fill in the blanks. For the folks
who thought he killed her, his appearance must have been galling.
They had this set up, this slide show that was
(25:37):
continuous of the work, slide the documentation of her work
since from the time she was in Iowa. And then
after a while they asked people to start giving testimonials
the way Anne remembered it. Nobody sugarcoated their memories of Anna.
They described her as she was. It came out that
(26:01):
Anna was a difficult person. It gave the thing a reality.
In other words, this was we're not memorializing a saint
who was being assumed into heaven. It was a very
impressive service. The most distasteful thing about the whole thing
was carl Andre being there with these girlfriends. Well, I
understood that that was his girlfriend. And she would walk
(26:24):
across the room and she would go get coffee or
whatever they were serving, and she would bring him back
to He sat like a bump in this place, and
he was like a specter. It was a strange thing
to see he con at or what happened. This has
got to be a terrible thing for him. How you
saw Carl sitting in the corner depended entirely on whether
(26:47):
you thought he bore any responsibility for Anna's death. But
however uncomfortable his presence was, Anna's presence loomed larger. Oh,
I know that the memorial service was completely impression was
very well done. It was we got a real sense
of how these women were willing to pull behind her.
(27:13):
Anna's memorial was the first gathering where it was clear
just how ruthlessly this small community had been torn apart.
That night divided the Soho art world, and the tale
of the two Carls began. There was guilty Carl, an
innocent Carl. There was Carl the person and Carl the artist.
There were those who loved Anna and wanted to see
(27:35):
him convicted, and others who loved Carl and wanted to
protect him. And when these two groups of people would
meet in a gallery on the street at a bar
or restaurant, which inevitably happened, things could get dramatic. Honest
friend Eletroyano remembered an encounter with Carl. He was at
a diner and at some point I used jilled at
(27:58):
him that he was a murderer. But you know, he
didn't do anything. He wasn't going to be confrontational. His
thing is manipulation and silence. Here's Carl's friend and fellow artist,
Laurence Weener. Well, sometimes people would scream at you on
the street. I would usually just ignore it, just stare
(28:19):
at them. The majority of people who had something to
say were quite provincial people. There was quite a confrontational thing.
People saw this as the demarking of a feminist issue.
The feminist issue, as Laurence Wiener called it, began when
it became clear that Anna's friends were pushing for the investigation.
(28:40):
The women who knew Anna best knew the following things.
She was excited about her work and had plans for
the future. She was about to file for divorce. She
was afraid of heights, and they knew that if they
wanted justice, they'd have to fight like hell for it.
These women included Natalia del Go, who was herself a lawyer,
(29:02):
be Ruby Rich, who was writing for the Village Voice
and had the power of the pen, and Anna's devoted
sister roc Lean and they were all talking to the
young assistant Da Martha Bashford, who in her five years
on the job had already seen plenty of cases of
men assaulting their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces. These women
(29:24):
were prepared to use whatever power and influence they had
to convict Carl Andre and the pro Carl camp, the
friends who bailed him out of jail and decided there
was quote nothing more to say. They took note of
this group of women, and that's how the journalist Robert
Katz entered the picture. He had covered the art world.
(29:45):
He understood that Carl Andre was already a canonical figure,
and one of Carl's supporters told him quote the poor
guy as being victimized by a feminist cabal. The folks
who supported Carl simply assumed the cats would be on
their side, which is of course why they asked him
(30:05):
to look into the case. But that's not what happened.
Here's a bit from his interview over dinner with Carol
and Saul Lowit have you wudn't covered anything but shopping,
the biggest shocking thing that lives and currents the strange
kind of networking that went to protector if you talk
(30:29):
to Pauloopfen. I have talked Polo s part of the networks. Yeah,
she was one of the people who wanted things to
write about this, But really from from Kyle, from their
point of view, that was that the sub exactly is
the point of views that at one point it was
(30:50):
what they believed was that feminist cabals sort of aout
to get it with the district attorney. So they threw
it as something, you know, like some evil force behind
So when I got to look at that, I didn't
agree with them. That's that it was some sort of blob.
(31:10):
What is their scenario for the event? I would like
to accept whatever he said, he said very little. What
is the problem with his story was that he contradicted
the self stuff for a time that first day and
then it's lawyer's all to shut up, said, it's an
episode of word after. I wish there was a feminist cabal.
(31:33):
I don't think there was one, and I don't think
there is one now. That's Connie Butler, chief curator at
the Hammer Museum, who legendarily organized the most comprehensive exhibition
of feminist art to date. Connie is one of the
most respected curators in the art world. Cabal is just
another word for in a way at which hunt you know.
(31:55):
It's just it's generations, old stories and year of women
and the power that they might have if they really
were to organize. Just for fun, I looked up cabal
in the dictionary. It means a secret political clique or faction.
And it's true that b ruby Rich in, Natalia Delgado
(32:17):
and a few other women had meetings with the assistant
da It's true there was a letter writing campaign and
a series of phone calls and meetings to see if
any of Carl's x's would verify rumors that he had
been violent. Nothing came of it, but it wasn't a secret.
The folks agitating for Anna were highly vocal, and it
(32:38):
certainly wasn't all the feminists banding together against Carl. Notably,
both Lucy Lepard and Paula Cooper, two of the most
powerful women in the art world, would not speak out
against him. As b ruby Rich wrote in The Village Voice,
the folks who supported Anna were quote the feminist artists,
(32:58):
Latino artist, black writers, and unintimidated Cubans, all of whom had,
as she would say, more passion than power, so not
exactly a cabal. And what's underneath that, of course, is
a long history and deeply rooted misogyny that gets thrown
around too easily. In circumstances like this, it's easy to
(33:20):
blame the feminist cabal. Yep, Blaming feminism definitely has a history.
And it wasn't only Carl's protectors back then who use
this kind of language in which they imagine a coordinated
plot in which they are the victims rather than the
women who they've harmed. We still hear this kind of
thinking from our entertainers, politicians, and even Supreme Court justices.
(33:44):
No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and
well funded effort to destroy my good name and destroy
my family. After Anna's memorial, the criminal justice system slowly
turned its wheels. Martha Bashford, the assistant DA, made two
attempts to indict Karl, and both times she succeeded in
(34:04):
getting the grand jury to agree with her and indict
him on murder charges, and both times those indictments were
thrown out on technicalities. Even though the judge wrote, quote,
it appears that there may still remain sufficient evidence to
sustain the indictment. It was coming up on a year
(34:25):
since her death, and Team Anna was starting to fear
that the DA's office might drop the case completely, so
b ruby Rich made a Hail Mary pass in the
pages of the Village Voice. The reason I wrote the
article on the first anniversary of her death was to
try to raise the profile of the case again in
(34:47):
public and make it too embarrassing for the district attorney
to drop the case and let Karl off the hook.
In that article, b ruby Rich wrote the follow A
woman artist tells Anna's sister some damaging information about Andrea,
then retracts it after consulting with her husband. A businessman
(35:10):
tells an artist friend of mine a story about Andre
ripping up a bar in the sixties, then denies it
to a reporter. Another woman artist still remembers Andrea's verbal
viciousness towards his first wife, but she won't go public either.
I believed that this had killed feminism. I thought it
was a sense of someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant,
(35:35):
this passionate. As Anna could be killed, then any of
us could be killed. If it could happen to her,
then nobody stood a chance. B ruby Rich hoped her
article would bring women forward, women who could verify the
rumors circulating about Carl Sadly, nobody came forward as a
result of that article. However, it did accomplish its main goal,
(36:00):
which was to actually get the indictment and bring him
to trial. And that last indictment stuck. And then when
they assigned a new assistant DA and it went to trial,
I felt, Wow, it really did work. Carl Andre was
about to be tried for murder next time on Death
(36:24):
of an Artist, Jack Hoffinger stood up and said, my
client wishes to waive a jury. 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. He was not going to throw
her shout out a lingo. Did its squalidness ever make
you not want to go and see his show? Now?
(36:47):
I have nine key to show. There was this crazy
thing called artistic license, which meant that artists get excused
because whatever it is that they produced is so much
more important than whatever damage they could do to people
in our lives. Death of an Artist is a co
production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment,
(37:11):
written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are
Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinig Leta Mulad, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner.
Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our
managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue
and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas. Anna
(37:33):
Mendieta's quotes were read by Tanya Burgera engineered by Sam Baer,
fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is
by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to a Lise Resmussen. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to
(37:54):
listen early, ad 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. I started
(00:33):
to leave the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute,
what if it's art? And I went an app and
it went ARC and I got so excited. It was
a revolutionary moment. This guy is now wooing her the
way he loves wooing, with champagne, expensive dinners. And this
is somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that
(00:53):
I used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
She was not fearful person, except interestingly when it came
to heights. The last person to talk to Anna before
(01:16):
she died other than Carl was her close friend Natalia Delgado.
She knew the marriage was not working. They were on
the phone. Anna was sure Carl was seeing another woman,
and she had a plan for how she was going
to prove it. She almost knew it was crazy. She said,
I think you and I should put on some wigs
and dressed like other people, and let's see if we can,
(01:38):
like take some pictures of it. You should do it,
because you won't recognize you, and I said, are you crazy.
I'm not going to do that. I mean, Carl was
in the apartment as the two women spoke, possibly within earshot.
Carl was in the background, and so I said, well,
maybe you should be speaking in Spanish. But still their
words that were the same, you know, like detective, divorce,
(02:01):
the same words, you know. So I think that he
probably could figure out what she was talking about. As
far as Natalia knew, Anna never hired a detective, but
she had talked to an attorney about how to file
for divorce on grounds of infidelity, and she had said
she was gathering evidence. She was making photocopies of all
(02:24):
of the receipts from his American Express card and his
phone bills. She's trying to reconstruct the events of the affairs,
and she wanted to use that for her divorce on
grounds of infidelity. I thought it was better to tell
him and say, look, this is what I've accumulated. I
(02:46):
want a divorce and I have evidence of this. Did
she ever say or sounds like she was afraid of him? Yes,
that night, but I had no idea because she said
he had a temper before. But I had no idea
how that he could get really violent, and she said, yeah,
he's going to blow up if I have this conversation
(03:08):
with him, He's really going to blow up. It was
late and Natalia said she had to go, so I
said I would call her the next day. She said,
waked me up. So I called her in the morning
and I got Carl. I said I need to speak
with Anna and he said she's not here and I said, well,
(03:29):
when will she be back. He said I don't know.
I said, well, please tell her. I called and he
said I will. This detail astounds me. Anna's best friend
calls the morning Anna died, and Carl doesn't tell her
what's happened, but agrees to pass on a message. Natalia
has been sitting with this for decades. You know, it's
(03:53):
something that's very painful for me, because I thought it
is better to tell him and say, look, this is
what I've accumulated. I want to divorce. It never occurred
to me that he would kill her. I'm your host,
Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
(04:16):
Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist. Episode three,
The Feminist Cabal. Even when the whole world was arranged
(04:41):
to keep her away from what she wanted. Anna was
invested in trying to change things. She wanted to go
home to Cuba, the home she hadn't seen since age twelve,
but icy Cold War relations between the US and the
island made travel between the two countries impossible. Exiles were
not allowed to return to Cuba. You leave, and it
(05:04):
was like you're a trader and that's it, it's over.
That's Coco Fusco, an artist and the author of Dangerous Moves,
performance and politics in Cuba, and this was deeply traumatic
for people who left family members there, left homes, left lives.
I grew up in a world in which, like all
(05:25):
my relatives were like crying about Cuba all the time.
So Anna pushed to change it. There were some groups
of younger Cuban exiles like Anna who had come as children,
who in the seventies organized politically to reopen the possibility
of family reunification. Flights, who was one of the Cubans
(05:49):
from the American side who sat down with people in
the Cuban government and tried to bring the two sides together.
That's pretty daring, and they succeeded, and in nineteen seventy nine,
those flights began. One hundred and fifty thousand Cubans went
in the first few years of this. In nineteen eighty,
(06:14):
Anna made her first trip back to Cuba, where she
was able to reunite with her grandparents and extended family.
It was a return to her roots. Here's how Anna,
voiced here by the Cuban artist Tanya Brigera, explained it.
I find that my roots are Cuban. The branches might
be American, but the trunk of the tree is Cuban,
(06:35):
or the roots, you know. Anna started to travel to
Cuba often, and these visits opened up a whole new
world for her politically, socially, and artistically. On one of
those trips, she made what I personally considered to be
one of her most beautiful pieces, a striking group of
petroglyphs carved directly into cave walls located in a dense
(06:59):
patch of tropical jungle in Jaruco. More than three decades
after she made them, an artist and fan of Anna Mendieta's,
named Elise Resmussen, set out to find them. She recorded
a video of her journey through the overgrowth and into
the cave. Oh ship, we found one of the sculptures.
(07:22):
I don't know which one off hand, show us you
can see, can see the head. I really thought that
all of them would be destroyed, gone. There's others, he's times,
others founded. The wall reliefs Mendietta left behind are thickly
(07:48):
carved lines cut directly into the limestone walls. Then she
took luminous black and white photographs of them. The images
resemble a primordial female form from the Neolithic period. Clearly,
Cuba meant a great deal to Anna. It's no easy
task to carve into a stone wall, and no matter
(08:09):
how deep in the jungle this cave was, no matter
how hard the sculptures were to find, to leave a
mark like that says I was here, I'm from here,
and I plan to remain here. While in Cuba, Anna
also explored her interest in the Afro Cuban religion Santaria.
(08:31):
She was finding a way into the culture. That's Eltrano again,
one of Anna's Cuban friends in New York. You have
to understand that Afro Cuban culture permeated the entirety all
the classes in Cuba. Anna had grown up Catholic, with
all of those images of sacrifice in blood, and as
a little girl, she also liked to listen to the
(08:53):
maids in the kitchen talking about their religion Santaria, with
its images of blood and sacrifice. That interest was already
visible in her work. Her early grad school performances include
references to Santa Via rituals through her use of candles
and chicken sacrifice. But Elatreiano makes the distinction that Anna
(09:15):
was more student than practitioner. She was not a santeata,
she was not dressed in white. There is a very
big difference between a practitioner of Santia and somebody who
studies or uses it as a way of working with
the culture. In fact, there's been criticism of Anna that
she was working with a religion that she really didn't
(09:38):
know enough about. Anna was interested in excavating her Cuban identity,
but her trips weren't only about her. She regularly brought
American artists and critics to Havana, hoping to build a
cultural pipeline between her two worlds. This wasn't to everyone's liking,
(09:59):
and her attempt to ch lenge the status quo earned
her a visit from the FBI. For the first time
in my career as an art historian, I found myself
looking at copies of heavily redacted FBI files. In September
of nineteen eighty three, just before she left for Rome,
an agent arrived at Anna's little apartment to question her
(10:19):
about her trips. Her answers must have been satisfactory. The
agent recommended the matter be closed. But it wasn't just
the FBI who perceived her as a threat. She's threatening.
She is not like a pretty little girl, you know,
making pretty paintings. That's Sarah Thornton, a sociologist whose book
(10:43):
Seven Days in the Art World is an in depth
study of the network of galleries, art schools, and auction
houses that make up the art community. Her work is
a threat to patriarchy. She's playing with gender and the
body every single time, whether it's wearing beards and mustaches,
(11:06):
her use of blood. For me, she is experimenting with
the things done to women's bodies under patriarchy, and she's
revealing it. I agree with Sarah. Anna's work does feel
(11:28):
like a threat to patriarchy. Anna was not a well
behaved woman. She was literally playing with blood and fire.
She's hiking into a jungle to make a carving of
a vagina on a cave wall. Her studio equipment included
chainsaws and gunpowder. This is a major badass, and badasses
(11:49):
are enthralling, and when they are women, they also tend
to be threatening. When Anna left for Italy and nineteen
eighty three, she was thrilled to have the opportunity to
spend an entire year, all expenses paid, on the lush
grounds of the American Academy in Rome. This was Anna's
(12:12):
chance to live in a city literally filled with art. Sculptures, paintings,
and frescoes are everywhere on buildings, in churches and in parks.
It was a dream. But not everything at the studio
was to her liking. And as my grandmother would have said,
she made a stink. She kind of mobilized a group
(12:36):
of people to protest conditions at the Academy. She came
in with a list of demands, and I don't think
the challegy was really used to that. There were sort
of used to people being docile. That's Chris Halbe, a
painter who was at the Academy with Anna. He describes
how she made a bad first impression, but then organized
(12:56):
some of her peers and got the academy to make
improvements that helped every one. Your really more impression was
who was this fin in the alice? More appreciative and respectful,
you know, and all of that. But I think by
the end they realized there was something about her. She
had the guys completely redoom or starlight, and I think
it parlably led to a kind of reconstruction, the scarlights
(13:17):
all around the building, just based on her complaints. There
it is again Anna, the outspoken one, not afraid to
nibble at the hand that's feeding her. Anna's time in
Rome was her own for most of her fellowship. Carl
was back home in New York or working in Germany,
so he wasn't there. When Natalia Delgado came to visit
(13:38):
Anna at the academy, I think with her a week
and so she announces, I'm not here to babysit you,
which of course I wasn't expecting, but she was like
very clear. Anna gave Natalia a book of walking tours
so Natalia could roam the city while Anna worked in
the studio. She had started to experiment with freestanding sculptures
(13:59):
made out of would that she was burning with a blowtorch.
In the evenings, the two friends went to the movies.
They saw Apocalypse Now and they also went dancing. But
Natalia's visit wasn't only for fun. She came carrying news
from New York. I told her about the rumors that
Carl was having affairs. She basically called it off with
(14:22):
Carl and said, you know, it's over for us, you know,
and she was wanting to make a new life for herself.
But Carl and Anna had been in a cycle of
breaking up and getting back together for several years and
it would continue. But then he decided to go out
and court her. It was very sick. I thought, very
(14:43):
very surprising to me that somebody breaks up with you
because you're having relationships with other people. And what you
do is the reaction is you go to see the
person to try to get them back. And that's what
he did, and that's when he proposed marriage to her,
and Anna said, yes, she gave it a chance. You know,
(15:05):
she wasn't going to find somebody outside of the art world.
I didn't think, you know, somebody who would understand that vocation.
You know, she had a vocation. I mean she never
wanted to have children. I get it. Anna was independent driven.
Her whole life revolved around and stemmed from her art practice.
(15:26):
She needed to be with someone who would understand that.
The two got married in Rome in January of nineteen
eighty five. Their close friend Carol LeWitt was at the wedding.
She was radiant. I'll never forget how she learned jobs.
Absolutely beautiful. Do you remember? Yeah, she's wearing a gray
(15:49):
knit dress and the girl I found her a great beautis.
The newlywed started their next chapter with a honeymoon in
each a place full of art that commemorates death. Anna
had wanted to go for a while. Anna was so
interested in death that she once said, I don't think
(16:10):
you can separate death and life. And we can see
how her meditations on death showed up in her art.
For two works that I believe are on view by
Anna Na Mendieta M E N d I E t A.
They currently have art on display in gallery two O three.
(16:35):
Thank you so much. I appreciate that, no problem. Thanks.
My producer Luisa and I decided to go to a
museum to see one of Anna's pieces and what we're
looking at is a work from nineteen eighty four, so
you know, Mendietta dies in eighty five, and what we're
(16:56):
looking at is a four worm that looks like an outline,
maybe like a silhouette of a mummy. It's called Nile
Bourne and I l e. Bourne. Anna's interest in Egypt
was so deep that she was even dreaming about it.
She recounted a dream to a friend in which she
(17:16):
and Karl were the king and Queen of Egypt at
sale on a river, surrounded by thousands of snakes. So
I wasn't surprised to see that her sculpture from this
period resembled a sarcophagus. It looks like it's made out
of dirt that's held together with some kind of binder.
It's really thin. In the interior, there's a very extenuated
(17:42):
tear drop form slightly raised in a roll. It intimates
the interior of the body. It intimates legs that spread open,
it intimates that, you know, the interior space of the vagina.
Louisa noticed that it looked like an out line of
a dead body or a coffin, and that is exactly
(18:04):
one of the things that has made Anna's art so
chilling in the aftermath of her death. She's in the
space of death for sure, So I think you gleaning
That makes perfect sense to me. Almost all art is
connected to the problem of death, because one of the
(18:24):
things art is seagory of objects that we have decided
we are going to save. But being interested in or
making art about death isn't the same as wanting to die.
It seems clear that Anna had so much more work
she wanted to do. This is like the moment when
(18:45):
I actually find I get angry, because that's made in
nineteen eighty four and she died in nineteen eighty five,
So we actually don't know whether or not she thought
that was successful. Did she keep making them? What would
she have done with that idea moving forward? This is
(19:06):
the tragedy of the artist who days young. We simply
don't know how their work would have matured, how it
might have changed over time. Anna's work was very dynamic,
and in her short career the work changed quite a bit,
from her use of blood to her use of nature
to the final freestanding sculptures in her studio. Her work
(19:27):
was already changing and growing. All of that potential violently
halted and my moment of anger in a museum in
twenty twenty two. It gave me some small insight into
how angry Anna's friends and family must have been when
Carl showed up at her memorial. Let's go back to
(20:10):
the morning of September eighth, nineteen eighty five, and to
Natalia Delgado, just hours after Anna's death. Remember, Natalia called
that morning and Carl had answered. She asked Carl to
have Anna call her back, and he said he would,
even though Anna was already dead. So I asked her,
(20:32):
did you call a second time? Yeah, because she didn't
call me back on her second call. The person who
answered the phone was one of Carl's lawyers, Jerry Rosen.
Carl was at the police station, but he had sent
Jerry back to the apartment to collect some documents. Here
he is in a nineteen eighty eight interview describing that
(20:52):
phone call with Natalia falls ring and I pick it up,
and she says Anna there and decided to tell her.
I said, Anna's dead, all right, and that Carl is
in jail charge. And that time, Karl's lawyer, I think
(21:17):
he just sat Anna's dead, and I was like, oh
my god, you know, I was in disbelief. Remember Natalia
is a lawyer. She realized something was off. I just said,
what are you doing in there? Isn't that apartment blocked
off cordoned off? And he said, well, yes, but uh
(21:39):
he was in there. He went in. Then I thought
Karl must have killed her. When she learned that her
friend was dead and that Carl's lawyer was in what
was now possibly a crime scene, Natalia immediately got in
touch with the NYPD. She told them about her last
phone call with Anna, that Anna had been making copies
(22:00):
of telephone and credit card bills to prove Carl was cheating,
and that she was planning on filing for divorce. I
was concerned about, particularly as I'd spoken to Jerry Rosen
about what was in the apartment, that you know, that
her evidence wouldn't disappear. We'll come back to this later,
to the mysterious story of what happened to the xerox
(22:23):
copies of telephone and credit card bills for now. In
the immediate aftermath of Anna's death, news of what happened
was spreading quickly. Some of Anna's friends began planning a
memorial service. Many were art stars, in their own right,
heavyweights in the burgeoning feminist art movement. But it was complicated.
(22:46):
Several of Anna's friends were also friends of Carl's. One
of them, the extremely influential art critic Lucy Leppard, who
played a major role in planning the service, had even
been Carl's lover before he met Anna. The art world
was small, and Anna's death was starting to divide it.
(23:07):
There were those who believed Carl that she jumped, or
that maybe it was a terrible accident. And there were those,
including many who identified as feminists, who were convinced that
he had a hand in her death. The memorial service
brought these two opposing factions into one elegant room. The
(23:30):
memorial was in a landmarked building on Park Avenue called
the Salon Boulevard. It had the grandeur of a high
society mansion. Imagine Roman columns and crystal chandeliers. One of
the many artists in attendance was a woman named Anne Minich.
She described the service to the journalist Robert Katz. The
(23:52):
audio on this archival tape is a little hard to follow.
They had music that Anna love, and they had flowers,
and Anna of some of her Cuban friends brought a
record player and the old fashioned Afro Cuban music that
Anna loved to dance to. Anne said, tons of people
showed up, including Carl, and it was in this huge
(24:13):
room and there were sharedge amounts of people there, including
Carl Andre who came. And of course he would have
had to become because because his defense was that she
committed suicide. It was an impossible predicament. On the one hand,
Carl wasn't welcome, and on the other hand, not showing
up would have been tantamount to an admission of guilt.
(24:35):
On the day of the memorial, Lucy Lapard had a
difficult task. She had to tell Anna's family that Carl
would be in attendance. On a sister made it clear
that the family did not want to see him. Lapard
had already prepared for this by seating Carl in one
area and reserving seats for the family in another, such
(24:56):
that they couldn't see each other. Here's Anne minuture. He
sat over in the corner, and a lot of people,
he's a very powerful man, went over and they felt
very bad for him, and blah blah blah. It was,
you know, there's probably hard to take for some people
that he was being comforted as much as he was
(25:17):
because and Minis doesn't finish her sentence there, But it's
not hard to fill in the blanks. For the folks
who thought he killed her, his appearance must have been galling.
They had this set up, this slide show that was
(25:37):
continuous of the work, slide the documentation of her work
since from the time she was in Iowa. And then
after a while they asked people to start giving testimonials
the way Anne remembered it. Nobody sugarcoated their memories of Anna.
They described her as she was. It came out that
(26:01):
Anna was a difficult person. It gave the thing a reality.
In other words, this was we're not memorializing a saint
who was being assumed into heaven. It was a very
impressive service. The most distasteful thing about the whole thing
was carl Andre being there with these girlfriends. Well, I
understood that that was his girlfriend. And she would walk
(26:24):
across the room and she would go get coffee or
whatever they were serving, and she would bring him back
to He sat like a bump in this place, and
he was like a specter. It was a strange thing
to see he con at or what happened. This has
got to be a terrible thing for him. How you
saw Carl sitting in the corner depended entirely on whether
(26:47):
you thought he bore any responsibility for Anna's death. But
however uncomfortable his presence was, Anna's presence loomed larger. Oh,
I know that the memorial service was completely impression was
very well done. It was we got a real sense
of how these women were willing to pull behind her.
(27:13):
Anna's memorial was the first gathering where it was clear
just how ruthlessly this small community had been torn apart.
That night divided the Soho art world, and the tale
of the two Carls began. There was guilty Carl, an
innocent Carl. There was Carl the person and Carl the artist.
There were those who loved Anna and wanted to see
(27:35):
him convicted, and others who loved Carl and wanted to
protect him. And when these two groups of people would
meet in a gallery on the street at a bar
or restaurant, which inevitably happened, things could get dramatic. Honest
friend Eletroyano remembered an encounter with Carl. He was at
a diner and at some point I used jilled at
(27:58):
him that he was a murderer. But you know, he
didn't do anything. He wasn't going to be confrontational. His
thing is manipulation and silence. Here's Carl's friend and fellow artist,
Laurence Weener. Well, sometimes people would scream at you on
the street. I would usually just ignore it, just stare
(28:19):
at them. The majority of people who had something to
say were quite provincial people. There was quite a confrontational thing.
People saw this as the demarking of a feminist issue.
The feminist issue, as Laurence Wiener called it, began when
it became clear that Anna's friends were pushing for the investigation.
(28:40):
The women who knew Anna best knew the following things.
She was excited about her work and had plans for
the future. She was about to file for divorce. She
was afraid of heights, and they knew that if they
wanted justice, they'd have to fight like hell for it.
These women included Natalia del Go, who was herself a lawyer,
(29:02):
be Ruby Rich, who was writing for the Village Voice
and had the power of the pen, and Anna's devoted
sister roc Lean and they were all talking to the
young assistant Da Martha Bashford, who in her five years
on the job had already seen plenty of cases of
men assaulting their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces. These women
(29:24):
were prepared to use whatever power and influence they had
to convict Carl Andre and the pro Carl camp, the
friends who bailed him out of jail and decided there
was quote nothing more to say. They took note of
this group of women, and that's how the journalist Robert
Katz entered the picture. He had covered the art world.
(29:45):
He understood that Carl Andre was already a canonical figure,
and one of Carl's supporters told him quote the poor
guy as being victimized by a feminist cabal. The folks
who supported Carl simply assumed the cats would be on
their side, which is of course why they asked him
(30:05):
to look into the case. But that's not what happened.
Here's a bit from his interview over dinner with Carol
and Saul Lowit have you wudn't covered anything but shopping,
the biggest shocking thing that lives and currents the strange
kind of networking that went to protector if you talk
(30:29):
to Pauloopfen. I have talked Polo s part of the networks. Yeah,
she was one of the people who wanted things to
write about this, But really from from Kyle, from their
point of view, that was that the sub exactly is
the point of views that at one point it was
(30:50):
what they believed was that feminist cabals sort of aout
to get it with the district attorney. So they threw
it as something, you know, like some evil force behind
So when I got to look at that, I didn't
agree with them. That's that it was some sort of blob.
(31:10):
What is their scenario for the event? I would like
to accept whatever he said, he said very little. What
is the problem with his story was that he contradicted
the self stuff for a time that first day and
then it's lawyer's all to shut up, said, it's an
episode of word after. I wish there was a feminist cabal.
(31:33):
I don't think there was one, and I don't think
there is one now. That's Connie Butler, chief curator at
the Hammer Museum, who legendarily organized the most comprehensive exhibition
of feminist art to date. Connie is one of the
most respected curators in the art world. Cabal is just
another word for in a way at which hunt you know.
(31:55):
It's just it's generations, old stories and year of women
and the power that they might have if they really
were to organize. Just for fun, I looked up cabal
in the dictionary. It means a secret political clique or faction.
And it's true that b ruby Rich in, Natalia Delgado
(32:17):
and a few other women had meetings with the assistant
da It's true there was a letter writing campaign and
a series of phone calls and meetings to see if
any of Carl's x's would verify rumors that he had
been violent. Nothing came of it, but it wasn't a secret.
The folks agitating for Anna were highly vocal, and it
(32:38):
certainly wasn't all the feminists banding together against Carl. Notably,
both Lucy Lepard and Paula Cooper, two of the most
powerful women in the art world, would not speak out
against him. As b ruby Rich wrote in The Village Voice,
the folks who supported Anna were quote the feminist artists,
(32:58):
Latino artist, black writers, and unintimidated Cubans, all of whom had,
as she would say, more passion than power, so not
exactly a cabal. And what's underneath that, of course, is
a long history and deeply rooted misogyny that gets thrown
around too easily. In circumstances like this, it's easy to
(33:20):
blame the feminist cabal. Yep, Blaming feminism definitely has a history.
And it wasn't only Carl's protectors back then who use
this kind of language in which they imagine a coordinated
plot in which they are the victims rather than the
women who they've harmed. We still hear this kind of
thinking from our entertainers, politicians, and even Supreme Court justices.
(33:44):
No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and
well funded effort to destroy my good name and destroy
my family. After Anna's memorial, the criminal justice system slowly
turned its wheels. Martha Bashford, the assistant DA, made two
attempts to indict Karl, and both times she succeeded in
(34:04):
getting the grand jury to agree with her and indict
him on murder charges, and both times those indictments were
thrown out on technicalities. Even though the judge wrote, quote,
it appears that there may still remain sufficient evidence to
sustain the indictment. It was coming up on a year
(34:25):
since her death, and Team Anna was starting to fear
that the DA's office might drop the case completely, so
b ruby Rich made a Hail Mary pass in the
pages of the Village Voice. The reason I wrote the
article on the first anniversary of her death was to
try to raise the profile of the case again in
(34:47):
public and make it too embarrassing for the district attorney
to drop the case and let Karl off the hook.
In that article, b ruby Rich wrote the follow A
woman artist tells Anna's sister some damaging information about Andrea,
then retracts it after consulting with her husband. A businessman
(35:10):
tells an artist friend of mine a story about Andre
ripping up a bar in the sixties, then denies it
to a reporter. Another woman artist still remembers Andrea's verbal
viciousness towards his first wife, but she won't go public either.
I believed that this had killed feminism. I thought it
was a sense of someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant,
(35:35):
this passionate. As Anna could be killed, then any of
us could be killed. If it could happen to her,
then nobody stood a chance. B ruby Rich hoped her
article would bring women forward, women who could verify the
rumors circulating about Carl Sadly, nobody came forward as a
result of that article. However, it did accomplish its main goal,
(36:00):
which was to actually get the indictment and bring him
to trial. And that last indictment stuck. And then when
they assigned a new assistant DA and it went to trial,
I felt, Wow, it really did work. Carl Andre was
about to be tried for murder next time on Death
(36:24):
of an Artist, Jack Hoffinger stood up and said, my
client wishes to waive a jury. 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. He was not going to throw
her shout out a lingo. Did its squalidness ever make
you not want to go and see his show? Now?
(36:47):
I have nine key to show. There was this crazy
thing called artistic license, which meant that artists get excused
because whatever it is that they produced is so much
more important than whatever damage they could do to people
in our lives. Death of an Artist is a co
production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment,
(37:11):
written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are
Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinig Leta Mulad, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner.
Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our
managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue
and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas. Anna
(37:33):
Mendieta's quotes were read by Tanya Burgera engineered by Sam Baer,
fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is
by Pooge Rue. Special thanks to a Lise Resmussen. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to
(37:54):
listen early, ad 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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