Natural History by Carlos Fonseca

Author:Carlos Fonseca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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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 drunk 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.

A decade later, the last icon the artist seemed intent on breaking was her own body. She’d given herself over to alcohol like it was a furiously poetic act. She was seen on the streets of her university town, dressed as a clown or a bride, bottle in hand, stammering verses that verged on nonsense, usually surrounded by stray dogs she found on the streets. Then, when night fell, once she’d collected enough money to feed her vice, she would disappear into the bars. To say that this woman had been one of the nation’s great artists could seem, at times, like a joke in poor taste. A joke that Pinillos herself would have laughed at. A joke whose real punch line would come the day the poor woman opened an envelope at random and found herself involved in a trial whose components struck her as strangely beautiful. Minutes later, she looked around and said to herself, “Well, maybe this is how I finally get out of this pigsty.” Then, for

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