3
The media was all over the case. They were drawn to the allure of the defendant’s glamorous career, and almost every media outlet sent a reporter to cover the story. Nearly all of them, too, worked in a mention or two of the defendant’s illustrious lineage as a descendant of old General Sherman. When the authorities found out that many of the falsified articles were about U.S. politics, the story’s morbid interest grew. Treason was the word that arose most often in the press during those days. It didn’t help much that precisely in those months, after two weeks of free fall, the pundits had finally declared that the market was in crisis. That a famous actress and model, the heir of Sherman’s madness, had been accused of distorting not only the markets but American history itself seemed outrageous. After a few weeks, Virginia McCallister became the obsession of a country that didn’t know where to place her on a chessboard on the verge of collapse.
All the while, the defendant refused to acknowledge her identity: she claimed until the end to be Viviana Luxembourg, even when no records existed of such a person. There was no logic to her attitude: rather than denying the charges against her, she seemed determined to defend herself; rather than declaring her innocence, she seemed determined to demonstrate that there had been no crime at all.
The fact that the defendant was detained in Puerto Rico also increased media interest. It turned the story strange, exotic, Caribbean. The Americans asked that she be tried in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, any of the states where she had resided before her sudden disappearance. The island authorities, however, refused the transfer, arguing that the defendant had also committed a local infraction the moment she’d entered the tower. Like the other squatters, she was living in the tower illegally and had to be tried locally.
The decision took three weeks, but when it came down, the news was explosive: the trial would take place on the island, and it would be open to the public and the press. Two days later, after a long conversation between the prosecutor and the defense, a final clause was added to mollify the media: the trial would be televised. After forty years of anonymity and invisibility, Virginia McCallister was returning to the spotlight, dressed as a prisoner and speaking Spanish.
* * *
Some would say that Virginia McCallister had planned the perfect return: she’d disappeared at the height of her fame and was returning now in a cloud of exotic elusiveness, enhancing the allure of a misunderstood woman. She might have organized it all to give herself one last show before the final goodbye. She refused, however, to speak English. When she did speak, which was rare, it was in perfect Spanish, with a neutral accent that was impossible to place. Her final show, if that was what it was, would be in an assumed language.
She wrote a lot, letters to professors, artists, and writers, letters full of half-formed political theories, with analysis of cases she had been archiving for decades, letters that touched on a theory of the relationship between art and law, all written by hand on pages she tore from Profile brand notebooks that her lawyer ordered online. One might think that she had turned herself over to the law in search of the solitude necessary for thought and reflection. At least, that’s what she seemed to indicate in the letters she was compulsively sending to the legion of collaborators who’d been caught up overnight in her methodical madness. Letter by letter, Virginia McCallister was preparing her true defense. She was organizing thoughts, outlining theories, searching for possible witnesses. She was preparing for her private war.
4
When Gregory Agins, a retired professor of aesthetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, received the first letter, he thought it was a cruel joke from one of his former students. The letter began by citing an article about the case Brancusi v. United States that Agins himself had published decades earlier. The article began with an overview of the case: how, in 1926, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi had sent his piece Bird in Space from Paris to New York for an exhibition of his work that was to take place at the Brummer gallery. New York customs had detained the piece, arguing that, as it didn’t resemble the bird its title suggested, it didn’t qualify as art and fell under the category of useful objects, on which there was a 40 percent import tax. Brancusi, furious and unable to understand how his piece had ended up classified alongside kitchen utensils, decided to take up the matter in court. Agins proceeded to explore the figure of the art critic as defense witness, analyzing how critics of great renown were called to demonstrate that the thing was, without a doubt, art. Through Agins’s argument and the New York courtroom passed Edward Steichen, who would later become director of the MoMA photography section; Jacob Epstein, a renowned British sculptor; and even William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum. But for Agins, the central critic was Frank Crowninshield. When questioned about how exactly the thing the jury saw before them was similar to a bird, he dared to say: “It has the suggestion of flight, it suggests grace, aspiration, vigor, coupled with speed in the spirit of strength, potency, beauty, just as a bird does. But just the name, the title of this work, why, really, it does not mean much.” According to Agins, with that relaxed declaration Crowninshield had shaken off thousands of years of art history and established a new relationship between art and law.
Gregory Agins never imagined that his arguments would lead him to the witness stand himself. Nor did he know what to make of the defendant’s theories, which seemed to him ludicrous in a certain sense, but for which he felt a strange sense of responsibility: after decades of thinking that his work was mere mental masturbation, a probably crazy defendant was giving him the chance to put them into practice. He wasted no time replying, sealing his alliance with a brief “Confirmed.”
* * *
The second person to receive a letter was the Venezuelan researcher Marcelo Collado. One day in his premature retirement, he read a letter that began: “I’m writing because no one knows more than you about Macedonio Fernández’s legal function as a prosecutor in Posadas.” Collado, a boy of only twenty-six, a great lover of cannabis, had just finished his doctoral thesis on the Argentine writer’s judicial phase. It was called “Macedonio Fernández: The Legality of Art (1891–1920),” and it explored the various arguments and accusations that the writer had given during his period as justice of the peace in Misiones. A brave thesis that ended with an invented conversation between Fernández and Horacio Quiroga, another writer who had held the same legal position. The dissertation had earned Collado his doctorate, but not much more. Since then he’d jumped from job to job, teaching at multiple universities at once; he had—like many of his generation—the sense that he was living in a precarious world that seemed every day on the verge of collapse. Collado, unlike Agins, wasn’t surprised to receive the letter. Still reckless, he thought that academic knowledge was unquestionably tied to the day-to-day, or that it should be, at least. He did find it odd, though, that the defendant should refer to his imagined dialogue between Quiroga and Fernández, still more that she would correct him: “About your final section, the conversation between the two writers, it should be noted that they did in fact meet, but on that occasion the dialogue was about José Enrique Rodó, a writer they tore apart in a matter of minutes.” Overwhelmed, he left the letter aside and only picked it up again thirty-six hours and five joints later. Then the matter struck him as terrifying but grandiose, a kind of postmodern epic into which he’d been granted an unsolicited invitation. He sat down at his computer and typed out a long letter, almost twenty pages, in which the coincidences multiplied into a paranoid web, closing with a noble, innocent, and dazed, “Count me in.”
* * *
The third letter caught the Costa Rican Guillermo Porras with a beer in hand, sitting in the stables at his grandfather’s estate, where his family spent every Sunday afternoon. His mother brought the envelope to him with an air of confusion and dismay: “Look, what could this weird gringa want with you?” Porras, who had graduated with an art degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, looked
at the name at the bottom of the letter and was equally perplexed. He didn’t remember ever meeting any Viviana Luxembourg. It had been a long time since he’d received any letters from abroad. It didn’t matter. As the horses neighed in the background, it took him barely ten minutes to read the letter. When he finished, he read it over again, trying to understand how it had come to be. More than anything, he was surprised that someone had learned of his student work. Until that moment he would have sworn that not even his adviser had read his monograph on John Reid, a fictional Australian artist from a book by the anthropologist Michael Taussig. After selling the family farm for a fortune, John Reid had conceived of an enormous collage depicting the Latin American desaparecidos, made out of cut-up money. Months later, when the counterfeit squad of the Australian Federal Police showed up at his house, Reid argued that the enormous monetary mutilation was his masterpiece. Porras’s monograph, imagined as an artwork in itself, consisted in building, around John Reid’s collage, a great catalog of the history of currency manipulation as art form. His epigraph was from the Crimes (Currency) Act signed by the Australian court in 1981. Starting from there, he began a parade of a hundred alchemists and vagabonds, falsifiers and artists, and their various attacks on money. In the modern art world, argued the Costa Rican, the true artist constructs their own historical tradition, one that will allow a given madness to be read as art. That assertion was the end of the project, which would earn him a simple diploma. Three years later, it also gained him an appreciative letter from Viviana Luxembourg, who ventured to call his project “one of the most interesting commentaries on conceptual art in recent decades.” The letter mentioned the work of a certain Sergio Rojas, a Chilean philosopher Porras had never heard of, and ended by elucidating a theory about what the defendant, following Rojas, called the depletion of art history.
Reading the letter, young Porras tried to ignore, with a shy man’s modesty, the pride he felt at the praise. He couldn’t. A happy energy invaded him and made him leap up, take the reins, and gallop across the estate. Hours later, after his happiness had run its course and he sat down to read the letter again, he found the project truly great: the accused was attempting to illuminate the mechanisms by which modern art did or did not enter the public sphere. The idea that his little college project would play a part made him think that his choice to abandon his scientific career to bet everything on art hadn’t been in vain. Still, he didn’t answer the letter right away.
That week he stuck to his plans. He traveled to the coast, to Puerto Viejo, where he worked as a tour guide; he slept with an Israeli with blond braids; fought off boredom by taking still-life photographs. He tried not to think about the letter that had so excited him, until Friday came and he was preparing to go back. He tried to be objective. When you came down to it, this was a criminal trial. He tried to convince himself that getting mixed up in it all was a bad idea, but his youthful enthusiasm at seeing his art career renewed won out. He spent that morning in the hostel, sweaty and tired, writing a letter that began like this: “Dear Viviana: You are completely right. Modern art is nothing more than art history. The modern work is only the construction of the frame from which an object becomes comprehensible to the public as art. I don’t know Sergio Rojas, but I appreciate his work; it strikes me as outstanding.” He continued the letter with a great intellectual exposition, immodest and ambitious, then closed with a more humble: “At your disposal for whatever you need.” That afternoon, he tried to forget the card he’d played. He had sex with the Israeli girl again, walked along the beach again, and then, at noon, headed back to San José. Five hours later he confirmed that it was still raining in the capital.
* * *
The fourth letter was, in fact, perhaps the first one the defendant sent. When it finally reached Sofia Baggio, it had already made three complete trips around Mexico City. The Italian wasn’t surprised by the delay: if she’d learned anything in the five months since she’d moved to the country, it was that postal delays were the only thing you could rely on in Mexico. Sending a letter meant daring to engage with the labyrinths of time. When she saw the postmark she thought it was from her friend Luisa Burgos, who had just returned to the island, but then she realized she was wrong. It was signed by a certain Viviana Luxembourg, whose name made her think for a second of a fashion designer who had died a few years back. But the letter went in an unexpected direction. After explaining her judicial situation and setting out the bases of her defense, Luxembourg congratulated Baggio on the work she had done as a doctoral student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her monograph, called Francis Alÿs: Toward a Poetic of Rumor, was about the conceptual ramifications of the Belgian-Mexican artist’s work, paying particular attention to the way he used fiction to intervene in reality. Baggio found the praise so excessive and strange that she came to wonder if it weren’t Alÿs himself playing a mean joke. A simple Google search was enough to prove at least that the defendant existed. She was surprised at the image of the woman, elderly but elegant, in prisoner’s clothes. It was hard for her to fit that image with the tone of the letter, a severe and scholastic voice that said things like, “Someone like you, able to see the conceptual resonances of Jacoby’s, Escari’s, and Costa’s work with that of Francis Alÿs, will be able to understand the tradition within which my project is inscribed, a project that now has me in jail, awaiting trial.” Then the letter went back to discussing some of the Belgian’s main works, like The Collector, The Rumor, and Doppelgänger, which, according to Luxembourg, “circulated false fictions within the circuit of official fictions.” Baggio finished the letter in one sitting and immediately, without thinking about it much, wrote a reply:
Dear Viviana:
Thank you very much for your interest in my work and its ramifications, but, due to a small work accident that happened last year, I’ve decided to put a (premature) end to my academic career and to dedicate myself instead to a small hostel my husband and I built on the outskirts of Mexico City. I hope you understand. I wish you all the best in the trial.
Affectionately,
Sofia Baggio
And she closed the letter, walked to the post office, and mailed it, sure that it would take ten turns around the city before making it to the Caribbean. She spent that afternoon stretched out on the mattress at home, watching cartoons, contemplating the tedium like a person watching a fly, trying to convince herself that things were better like that—best to stay away from her old vices. She thought of the career she’d left behind, the hours she’d dedicated to that academic project, hours that now felt distant and useless, without consequence or results. She told herself it was for the best not to think about the defendant or her crime. Not to stick her nose into other people’s business, even when they asked her to. At three in the afternoon, tired of searching unsuccessfully for anything interesting on TV, she poured herself a glass of wine. An hour later, when her husband came home from work, he found her snoring with the television on.
* * *
The strange thing, thought Viviana Luxembourg’s lawyer, was that the people the accused woman summoned for her defense didn’t seem to be recognized critics, or even established professors, but rather a battalion of the exhausted, a vanguard of the irrelevant and invisible. The strange thing, he thought as he read the letters, was that his client had to have searched for those names ahead of time, in a premeditated way, expecting that ominous day when the police would come after her in the tower. Strange, he said to himself, to declare war when you lead an army of one-eyed soldiers. He was attracted by the idea of going to war with an army whose bravery is in doubt, a contingent that all other colonels would have ruled out. He was left with just one question: Did he, too, belong to this strange vanguard that, hidden in her tower, the artist had gathered for a future war?
* * *
The fifth person to receive a letter was the Guatemalan artist María José Pinillos, who had been brought to the brink of catastrophe by her life as a poète maudit. So dru
nk was she in those days that it took her almost two weeks to even realize she’d received a letter. Finally, she stumbled over a small mountain of mail as she entered her house, and when she picked up the first letter, she realized, even in her alcoholic stupor, that its subject was precisely the one she was beginning to tire of: art and destruction. In the early nineties, Pinillos had erupted in local art circles with a brief text titled Thesis on Iconoclasm in Art, a sort of manifesto that posited the iconoclastic, destructive, and violent nature of all art. The corollaries of that seemingly theoretical text were unexpected. Two weeks after launching the manifesto, when observers were starting to comment that it was all just theoretical posturing, the artist had burned a dozen Guatemalan flags in twelve different ways. That was followed by other radical acts: book burnings, exhumations of cadavers, the destruction of civil registries. However, infamy, or fame—depending on one’s perspective—had only come a decade later, when, along with a group of collaborators, she had organized the simultaneous burning, in church, of a dozen statues of saints. The incident landed her in jail. She was saved by the international fame the performance had generated: hundreds of recognized artists interceded on her behalf, which was enough for the government to decide to free her after fifteen days. Spending even two weeks in a Guatemalan prison at the end of the nineties was not, however, an easy matter. When she got out, she wasn’t the same. She’d moved far away from the intellectual passion that had distinguished her in the past, the analytical enthusiasm that, on more than one occasion, had carried her to the border between art and madness. Prison had done its job.
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