À la carte (Mid-June 2014)
An inadvertent Ana Mendieta deep dive, a cosy show, a bookstore
It’s Father’s Day and everyone in our house is sick, so I’m truly stealing time to write this weekend. Without further ado, here’s what’s currently on the cultural menu at my house:
Some books & a podcast
I became familiar with the feminist artist Ana Mendieta only recently, through Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which I read late last year. Monsters explores the notion of the monstrous artist—particularly the question of our relationship to the work of the monstrous male artist, the kind who offends contemporary moral sensibilities. (E.g., What do we do with our love for Annie Hall, or “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough”"?) Dederer dedicates a chapter to a haunting story that until recently has barely been a footnote in art history—that of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American artist who was just becoming known for her “earth-body” works when, at age 36, she “went out the window1” of a 34th floor apartment during an argument with her husband, the much more famous and established artist Carl Andre. Mendieta’s suspicious death in 1985 divided the art world much as the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements would a quarter of a century later—between those who believed a white man, one of the “fathers of minimalism,” was capable of such violence and those who did not. When Andre was acquitted of Mendieta’s murder after a bench trial, the story just sort of … disappeared from public consciousness and failed to haunt Andre as his work continued to be shown in major museums and galleries around the world. Indeed, Andre was never publicly rebuked, at least until protestors took issue with Dia:Beacon’s 2014 retrospective of the artist.
Andre died in in January, and Mendieta is finally having her moment. Maybe it is a latent product of #MeToo and our belated cultural reckoning with previous failures to recognize very obvious violence against women, or maybe it is just the Baader-Meinhof effect, but I’ve run into Mendieta’s story three more times since having a baby ten months ago (ten months that I have spent more or less living under a rock!!). Mendieta appears again in Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which explores the concept of the monstrous artist from a different angle—what does it mean to be an art monster as a woman? I then picked up Xochitl Gonzalez’s sophomore novel Anita de Monte’s Last Laugh to read on a recent vacation and thought one of the two intertwined narratives sounded familiar—Anita de Monte (a near anagram!) is a faithfully fictionalized Ana Mendieta. Gonzalez weaves her version of Mendieta’s story with that of a first-generation Latina undergraduate art history student, who doesn’t learn that Carl Andre’s fictionalized proxy was accused of killing his wife until she begins working on her thesis on his work. At this point, what were the odds that I happened to also already have an eight-episode podcast series on Ana Mendieta already downloaded on my phone????
Thank you to whoever recommended this series ages ago, prompting me to download. Curator Helen Molesworth’s first season of the Death of an Artist podcast offers the comprehensive telling of Mendieta’s story. It is a loving and respectful tribute to an artist whose career was cut brutally short. It is an introduction to the art world, the rarefied, conservative clique that refused to believe that Carl Andre could have murdered his wife. The lens through which Mendieta’s story is told is significant too—Molesworth herself is something of a divisive figure in the art world, having been fired from her role as curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and having raised eyebrows by pursuing this podcast when Andre was still living—something Molesworth addresses head-on throughout her reporting.
Whatever your preferred genre is these days—be it fiction or long-form narrative podcast reporting—I recommend any one of these introductions to Mendieta.
A show
Since returning from Scotland last week, I’ve been craving a good Scottish cop show. So many of the villages we puttered through were reminiscent of the sleepy hamlets that assume the backdrop of countless British detective dramas—the sort of places where no one ever expects a serial killer to lurk. After a cursory Google, I picked Annika, a BBC production that aired in the U.S. on Masterpiece Mystery, that stars Nicola Walker as the eponymous Norwegian-born detective in Glasgow’s Marine Homicide Unit. I’m only a few episodes in and so this is not a full-throated recommendation—I haven’t yet figured out if I like the dark comic undertone, or if I will ever more than tolerate the way the script forces Walker to break the fourth wall and address the camera. But what I do appreciate is the moderate level of darkness offered by Masterpiece Mystery—a detective drama, but one that doesn’t haunt me when I switch it off. My tolerance for grizzly murder is lower post-childbirth than it once was; my anxiety levels are high. So far, Annika is rather cosy. The marine homicides at issue are tied up in a bow at the end of each episode. They come about via interpersonal grievance (which, for whatever reason, I find more reassuring than random violence). There are a few personal life plot lines that spill over from episode to episode. Really, though, I’m watching because I love Nicola Walker, who brings to both the cast and her bumbling detective underlings her unique blend of charm and gravitas.
But I’m still looking for my Scottish Broadchurch — any recommendations? Surely David Tennant starred in something as a detective before landing in Dorset.
A new bookstore
I was thrilled to visit the new brick & mortar Womb House Books, which opened within walking distance of my house over the weekend! The new Womb House is an outgrowth of author and book critic Jessica Ferri’s popular Etsy account, where she has been selling a beautifully curated assortment of vintage feminist titles for the last few years. At her new store, Ferri will sell both new and used books—all feminist. I’m looking forward to having a bookshop in the neighborhood that feels like a community. While I pop into the other bookstores near my house multiple times a week, they have not become places where I talk about books with anyone other than my husband. When I purchased Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf (lol like my first year of motherhood is the time of my life to try to make a dent in this tome), Ferri recommended Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, a writer with whom I was unfamiliar. I am here for this bookchat!
This was the curious grammatical construction used by Andre when he called 911.