True crime is, at best, morally dubious. This is not a new or particularly revolutionary statement, but there’s been a recent wave of insightful criticism that makes indulging in it harder to ignore. Think of Eliza Clark’s Penance from last year, hailed as a sharp meditation on our online obsession with serial killers. Netflix, in a bizarre but nevertheless entertaining metafictional critique of itself, put out an episode of Black Mirror that seemed to ultimately condemn true crime altogether. And the less said about Gypsy Rose Blanchard the better, who upon her release from prison in December (after serving eight years for the murder of her mother), has been the subject of internet-wide fervour which – in and of itself – has sparked its own flood of criticism.
Today enjoying true crime feels morally indefensible and there seems to have been a major shift in the way people talk about it; admitting to watching/listening/reading about it has become a social faux pas and Netflix’s rep has taken a relative beating since releasing Dahmer. The same could be said for the way we sensationalise and commodify the tragic deaths of female artists. Their impact on art, their entire lives: the stuff of clickbait fodder. It’s still true crime – only this time it’s repackaged as cultural intrigue.
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Since Carl Andre’s passing last week, talk of Ana Mendieta dominated the internet. Currently, if you look up her on Google News there’s an addendum that says: ‘News about Carl Andre’. Then follows several pages of articles about Andre’s death When Mendieta’s name is mentioned , the focus is on her death (Andre was initially charged for her murder, and later acquitted), not her life or work. Despite her brief career, Mendieta is regarded as a leading figure of feminist art during the 1970s and 80s. Influenced by artists like Lynda Benglis, Robert Smithson and Carolee Schneeman, as well as the Viennese Actionists and the Fluxus group, Mendieta quickly developed a prolific and distinctive practice. Her body, the earth and organic materials like blood, fire, feathers and wood became subjects in photographs, slides, films, videos, performances, prints and books, used as a medium to explore diasporic life as a Latina woman. In her Silueta series (1973–80), Mendieta staged performances where she laid down in natural landscapes or covered her body in natural matter and then documented the resulting imprints or silhouettes. In the same year, she responded to the rape and murder of a local student by performing Untitled (Rape Scene) (1973) in her apartment and creating the video Sweating Blood, both using her own body to address violence against women.
It feels particularly tragic then that Mendieta is so often remembered for her death and marriage to Andre. It’s also part of a broader, creeping tendency within the arts: mythologising and capitalising from the deaths of female creatives.
Following her death in 2015, The Guardian released an article titled ‘How Chantal Akerman’s suicide alters her final artwork’. The author, Adrian Searle, talks nothing of Akerman’s legacy as an avant-garde and feminist filmmaker (though she famously resented this label, domesticity, sexuality, mothers and daughters are undoubtedly central to her work). Instead, he chooses to write at length about the bleakness of her films and their depiction of life, full of ‘sorrows and complications, its lengthening hours, its difficulties and terrors’. An iNews review of Nina Hamnett’s 2021 show at Charleston likewise calls her ‘an enthralling artist whose life and death too often overshadowed her work’ before recounting how she died. Knowing this is all well and good, but to what end does it help us better understand their work, if at all?
A couple of years ago, writer Lilian Crawford asked a question along similar lines: will writers like Sylvia Plath always be defined by their deaths? She references Sarah Kane and Virginia Woolf in the same vein, and how their collective bodies of work have been read as ‘manifestations of mental illness’. The same can be said for a spate of other female writers: Izumi Suzuki, Anne Sexton, Sanmao and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, her murder – completely unrelated to her broader artistic practice, spanning film, performance, text-based installations and poetry – consistently overshadows the monumental achievement of Dictée (1982), published only a few days after she died.
It’s one thing to frame their work in terms of their deaths – it’s another to capitalise off it altogether. Perhaps the most egregious case of this rubbernecking-masking-as-high-art comes in the form of the biopic, most notably Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). I began watching it with bated breath, though at no point did I expect to see Ana de Armas’ Marilyn Monroe talking to a CGI fetus that she had aborted earlier in the film. Only time will tell if Back to Black takes a similar route, allegedly set to follow Amy Winehouse’s turbulent marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil and her battle with addiction. Money aside, I’m not sure what the point of the film is, or what it could contribute to the narrative of her life, but of this I’m certain: Amy’s music speaks more authentically to her life than the film ever will.
This, as far as I’m concerned, is the approach we should try to take with all female artists who’ve passed in tragic ways. While their cultural contributions cannot be understated, their deaths have since become synonymous with their artistic legacies as the work itself. There’s an inevitable temptation to revisit the deaths of artists like Mendieta through the lens of true crime, but it’s ultimately an unhelpful one. The longer we dwell, the more we push a narrative that we only care about them because of their deaths. At the end of the day, art is long and life is short – and in the case of these artists, their work will probably outlive us all.
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