What do you need to know about an artist to view their art? Can the artist and the work be separated? And whose responsibility is it – if anyone’s – to let the audience know who the artist was, or perhaps more importantly, what they did?
Contemporary art curator Helen Molesworth asks all of these questions in the absorbing and smartly-written Death of an Artist. Molesworth is revisiting the story of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist whose career was just taking off in 1985 when she was killed in a fall from the 34th floor window of the apartment where she lived with her husband Carl Andre. Fell, or was pushed, or threw herself out? That’s the squirming unknown at the heart of this story. Andre, a prominent and highly respected artist who at that point was commanding huge sums for his minimalist work, was ultimately tried for her murder and acquitted.
So why is Molesworth retelling this now? Because in the wake of Me Too and Black Lives Matter, things look different these days. And the juxtapositions in this story – artfully underlined in Death of an Artist – seem all the more glaring in 2023. The work of Mendieta, a woman of colour, an immigrant whose career was just taking off, was visceral, focused on the female body: Andre was the white male genius at the height of his fame, his work cool and intellectual, intensely cerebral.
Molesworth is an expert storyteller, and exactly the right person to contextualise the moment in the New York art world when all this took place, and the work of the story’s protagonists. She also makes clear she is not a journalist, and her stated position as a curator fired from a high-profile position for her stance on some of these issues frees her from the constraints of reportorial objectivity: she has an agenda, and she can push it.
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She sketches the biographies of the two principal characters in this dark tale, chronicles the night of Mendieta’s death, and then takes us through the subsequent trial, bringing a wealth of voices to defend Andre but more persuasively to speak up for Mendieta and call attention to her work and story against the backdrop of a white male dominated art world.
Defence lawyers pointed to Mendieta’s alcohol consumption, her interest in the Cuban santería religion, and even her body of work – which deals explicitly with violence and erasure – to spin stories about why she might have thrown herself out the window, despite being known to have a terrible fear of heights. Meanwhile, reports from friends about the fractious state of her relationship with Andre and her fears about his temper were excluded from the trial, and his shifting account about what happened that night was allowed to stand.
But Death of an Artist is not here to put Andre, who is still alive at 87, behind bars, or reverse a court decision made almost 40 years ago. Rather, the questions it asks are levelled at the art world, and at those of us who interact with its physical and metaphorical spaces.
Molesworth brings in compelling arguments on all sides, from the likes of writer Roxane Gay to New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl: do we still put on Carl Andre shows? Should we still attend them? Cancel him? Call him out? Or tell all on the wall labels? And ultimately, who is it all for?
Death of an Artist doesn’t answer every question, though Molesworth makes a strong case for a change to the system of patronage within which the American art world operates, as well as an argument that cancel culture is its own damaging form of silence. Ultimately, she encourages the listener to examine the status quo from all angles, even as a coda to the podcast makes clear that when it comes to cold economics, white men are still at the top of the art world heap. In the wake of Me Too and Black Lives Matter, things don’t look that different after all.
