by The work of Carl Andre, the minimalist artist who died this week, was not sculpture in the traditional sense. It ranged from plainly laid tiles on the floor, to bricks stacked on top of each other; the latter became the subject of a scandal in 1975, when it was revealed that Tate had paid £2,297 (about £24,000 today) for what critics believed to be building materials. Instead of carving, sanding or shaping, Andre left his objects alone, arranged in temporary forms without bolts or notches to hold them together. The most important thing, according to Andre, was the relationship they had with the people going to the gallery that encouraged them to walk past them. It was “sculpture as a place”, he called it.
With Andre’s death on Wednesday, several tributes to Titan have duly appeared. His gallery, Paula Cooper, said he “redefined the parameters of sculpture” and was “guided by a commitment to the pure material”. But the reaction among figures in the art world, especially online, was particularly muted – even hostile. That reception is one night in 1985, and Andre’s name has been permanently blackened ever since.
It was September 8, 1985, at 5.30am, when Andre called 911 from his apartment in New York City. “My wife has committed suicide,” he said. “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had an argument about the fact that I was more – uh – exposed to the public than she was, and she went to the bedroom, and I went after her , and she went out the window.”
Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta married Andre earlier that year, after an on-again, off-again relationship that began in 1979, following a meeting at New York’s feminist art gallery AIR. They met at Mendieta’s first solo show, the walls of which were covered with her Silueta series (1973–8)—a collection of photographs of outlined feminine forms, which were carved, burned, and traced on various landscape backgrounds.
That morning in 1985, Mendieta’s body was found on top of a delicatessen, 33 floors below her and in Andre’s apartment. The resemblance to the splayed horizontal forms of her “siluetas” was particularly grim: a few times, she had even drawn the female figure in blood. Like the white, typological figure in her artwork, her body was almost bare, clad only in bikini bottoms.
The story of Mendieta’s death quickly became entangled with shifting narratives, and art world allegiances, which never waned. Mendieta and Andre were fighting that night – she started gathering evidence about her infidelity, and she was talking to friends about the possibility of divorce – and they were both drinking. The bedroom was a mess, as if after a fight, and Andre had scratches on his face and body. Mendieta, standing at 4′ 10”, was not tall enough to climb out of the window unaided. Friends spoke of his terrible fear of heights.
When the police arrived, Andre told a different story than his frantic 911 call. This time, he claimed that Mendieta “wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to watch TV… I don’t know, maybe I should sleep with her if that’s what she wanted. In that sense, I might have killed her.” He claimed that he “knew[e]w” that she had a “jump”.
Then, by the time he made a written statement later that day, the story had changed again: Andre now claimed that it could have been an accident, that Mendieta had “fallen”. 26 years later, while giving an interview to the New Yorker, Andre gave yet another version: he stated that there was no fight, and claimed that Mendieta “just lost her balance” while trying to close windows.
Because of his inconsistent narrative and strange behavior – answering the phone to a friend of Mendieta’s shortly after her death, he did not mention what had happened, and even said he would pass on a message for her – he surprised Andre. he was acquitted of second-degree murder in 1988, after a non-jury trial. He walked out of the Manhattan courtroom saying “justice was served”.
For Mendieta’s friends and family, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Whereas, during the trial, Andre’s gallery kept his art on display and for sale, and he was now able to do more, Mendieta’s career was curtailed just as it was taking off. She was 14 years younger than Andre – and, when they met, not in the same league of fame – she was preparing a new work, aiming for the big break that would bring her the acclaim she needed. Lauren Elkin, who wrote about Mendieta in her 2023 book Art Monsters, says that Mendieta “was thriving when she died. She was breaking new ground in her work, working with new and independent material.” She was “stolen from her future, from her new direction”.
For all Andre’s bravado about having “justice” served to him, Mendieta’s death permanently damaged his own career. In the months and years immediately following Mendieta’s death, the New York art scene was divided. Performance artist Carolee Schneemann summed up the divisions when she noted that half of the art world was behind Andre and his work, saying “we have to protect him from … the terrible thing this is what she did, this destructive wild creature”. The other half, Schneemann, said that most were women, he believed guilty, and they were sure that “he lost it. It went wild.”
As a result, from the high point of his youthful success – at the age of 30, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1970 – Andre retreated. After the trial, he showed mainly in Europe, where gossip about the trial was so widespread.
But he could not hide forever. In 1992, when the Guggenheim staged another exhibition of his work, around 500 protesters picketed the exhibition, chanting “Where’s Ana Mendieta?” Three years later, when American football player OJ Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole, the art group Guerilla Girls produced a poster comparing the two men. “The IO of the art world” is a nickname that has stuck; he is still connected to Andre today.
In the last years of his life, Andre again became the object of great institutional attention. He was subsequently awarded by New York’s Dia Art Foundation, which then traveled internationally. But by God, in 2014, he was “crying in”, and a ceremonial bag of bloody chicken was dumped on the doorstep. Later, in Berlin, protesters came to the show with their hands covered in blood. In 2016, protesters marched on the Tate Modern in response to the gallery’s decision to display Andre’s work, chanting: “Oi, Tate, we have a vendetta – where’s Ana Mendieta the fk?”
There is a certain irony that Andre’s work – minimal, silent, unwilling to count as anything other than bare industrial material – has become the subject of such outrage. Most important, however, is the life and artistic career that was brutally cut short. Sinéad Gleeson wrote about Mendieta in her 2019 collection of essays Constellations; the fact that Mendieta’s work, she tells me, “is so intertwined with the man who [allegedly] she was killed, it undermines the legacy of her feminist, political and corporate work.
“All the pieces she didn’t get to do make this great loss even worse.”
