She Went Out The Window
The Defenestration of Ana Mendieta
The panty-clad sculptress came out a 34-story window with a sill as high as her chest. The windowsill had on it a goodly layer of soot, bearing no footprints, and not mussed in any way. She landed on the roof of the Montien Thai restaurant on Broadway in Greenwich Village, or what they now call NoHo. People would always think she landed on the Delion Deli, but no, it was the Montien Thai. The restaurant and the deli next door shared the roof, however, and rising to great height through that roof was 300 Mercer Street, a blond brick apartment tower of many, many windows.
The kitchen ceiling of the Delion Deli shook with the impact. The short order cook and his assistants ran out into Waverly Place. The doorman of 11 Waverly Place was walking along Mercer Street to the Broadway corner and the deli.
“Maybe somebody pushed somebody out of a window,” the doorman said, “because I just heard a woman screaming.”
What the doorman said he heard was: “No, no, no, no, don’t!” Then he heard an explosive sound, the likes of which he’d never heard before, not even in Viet Nam, the sound of 93 pounds of woman hitting a rooftop at a speed of 125 MPH.
“She went out the window,” is what Carl Andre said to the 911 Operator. “She went to the bathroom and I went after her and she went out the window.”
An hour later he was telling the police at the 6th precinct that he had not seen her jump. He’d been dozing. There was no note. He hadn’t looked out the window to check. He just knew, he told them. “You see, I’m a very successful artist and she wasn’t. Maybe that got to her, and in that case, maybe I did kill her.” Maybe so, but nobody’d asked him. Then he asked if they were going to read him his rights, and they complied. It was what the police call an “investigate DOA” – somebody dead, something screwy.
When Ana’s best friend called and asked to speak to her, Carl said, “No, you may not.” He’d give Ana the message when she got in, he assured the dead Ana’s best friend.
There was to have been a party that evening to celebrate Carl’s birthday at Sabor’s on Cornelia Street. When Carl and the police returned to 300 Mercer at 11 AM, the police listened while Carl made a series of phone calls canceling the dinner party. If he reached a message machine, he simply said Ana was dead. If he reached a person, he said the dinner party was canceled, with no mention of the death. To one friend, the police heard him say, “Something happened that is unmendable.” Almost every single bone in her body had smashed in the fall; every major organ was torn to shreds.
It was Sunday, September 8, 1985, at 5:30 AM, when Ana went out the window, Carl Andre’s 50th birthday. She was 37.
In 1979 Ana Mendieta had her first one-woman show at the AIR gallery on Wooster Street in SoHo. The exhibit consisted of color photographs of Ana’s sculpted earthworks. She was an artist who used her body in her work with organic substances, leaves, blood, soil, tree bark. The Silueta Series on display that night at AIR was described as, “an ongoing dialogue between the artist and nature.” That night following the exhibit, Carl Andre, an important minimalist sculptor of the 1970s, sat on a panel discussion of male interpretation of female art.
In the middle of the discussion, sudden, sharp sounds were heard that interrupted the talk. Ana’s pictures were popping free of their frames and crashing to the floor. This happened the first night they met. By the time she “went out the window,” the joke going around the American Academy in Rome asked which one would kill the other first: Ana Mendieta or Carl Andre.
In 1984 Ana was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and was invited by the Vatican Museum for an up close view of the Michelangelo frescos on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel. This was a high honor; it had been a century since anyone had seen the frescos intimately. Ana made it two steps up the scaffolding before she was physically overcome with the anxiety of acrophobia. Visitors to 300 Mercer were struck that Ana would even live so high up in the sky. She literally stayed away from the windows in her own home and never went out onto the balcony to take the view.
So, everybody had to ask, would she have jumped? Her friends and family say she could not have jumped. She simply would not have been able to do it with her morbid fear of heights. And then there was the windowsill that reached the height of her chest and how she could have flown out that window without stepping on or smearing the soot that covered the sill.
A few hours before she died, Ana had a telephone conversation with a friend during which she described documented evidence of Carl’s infidelities to use for her divorce. She told her friend she had half the set in photocopies there in the apartment and the other half in Rome. She had said to her sister, “When I’m finished with him nobody’s going to want to talk to him! Nobody’s going to want to have anything to do with him!”
Huh?
Expose Carl Andre to the scorn of his peers? Flatten him with social disgrace? Turn the Downtown art world against him? What on earth was she talking about? In Soho they called him The Man with a Hundred Lovers. He never hid his philandering from anybody, not from their famous friends in SoHo and the Village, not from waiters at chic restaurants, and not from Ana herself. He’d call his lovers long distance while she was in the bathroom. Carl Andre was a womanizer. What was to shock?
We will never know, since no such documents ever turned up in either Manhattan or Rome.
There was no jury trial. The judge announcing his verdict, said, “I have concluded that the evidence has not satisfied me beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.”
Carl Andre is still making art.
