Cecilia Vicuña’s poetic action

Felipe Ehrenberg knew my work from El Corno Emplumado in Mexico, and invited me to produce a book for Beau Geste Press as soon as he heard I was in London. Originally I thought of doing a ‘Journal of Objects’, a three dimensional record of my life in the city. Each day I did a precarious object made from debris collected from London streets. I began the journal in June l973, shortly after receiving the news of the first attempt to topple the Allende government in Chile. I thought of the journal as a way of killing three birds in one blow: by doing a magic work to prevent a military coup in Chile, I would carry out a revolutionary and aesthetic work at once. But a few days before going to press, the military coup took place in Chile anyway. It was September 11, 1973. I knew in one instant that Chile would never be the same.

– Cecilia Vicuña [1]

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_032.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Pueblo de altares, 1990–2019, site-specific installation including sixty Precarios [Precarious objects]. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

In its final form, Cecilia Vicuña’s Sabor a mí (1973) includes autobiographical poems written while in Chile, drawings, paintings, found objects and photographs of the early Precarios works. Released two months after the coup, the book was, in Ehrenberg’s words, ‘the first howl of pain to emerge from the rubble of Chile's conscience’. [2] A copy of Sabor a mí is one of over 100 works and documents included in Vicuña’s first-ever retrospective exhibition, Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, held at Witte de With in Rotterdam in 2019. Like Sabor a mí, Vicuña’s multifarious oeuvre spanning painting, poetry, performance, video and installation, flows from the way she experiences the political as deeply intimate.

The U.S. supported coup d’etat and death of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende ended Vicuña’s hopes for the future of justice and human rights in Chile. In the following year, her activism, poetry and artistic work were driven by her grief and desire to support Chilean resistance to the military regime. Remaining in exile in London, she created the Artists for Democracy group and organized the ambitious Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College of Arts, where she showed the original La ruca abstracta (o Los ojos de Allende) (1974), now recreated for Witte de With. Assembled from bamboo and branches, the improvised structure is a shelter and a shrine, supporting paintings, plants, objects and a large portrait of Allende at the front, his eyes cut out. The viewers are invited to enter, to see through his eyes, to mourn his sacrifice.

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_009.jpg

Installation view of a selection of works from the artist’s Art for Democracy series in Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

***

PAIN THINGS & EXPLANATIONS

pain tings & ex
. . .
I regard my act of painting as a ritual. Any objects that this activity produces exist beyond art history, as if art history was already dead or it would have never existed.

– Cecilia Vicuña [3]

Having grown up in a family of artists and exposed from an early age to Western art, she admits she chose not to belong to that tradition as fully as she could, adopting, instead, an apparently naive aesthetic, influenced by the Cuzco School of Indigenous painters active between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Vicuña recounts: ‘I took my inspiration from the indigenous people and peasants who somehow saw church images and began to do their own versions, perhaps because they ascribed magic healing power to them.’ [4] She also mentions surrealist poetry she read in the 1960s, borrowing books from her aunt’s library, and an encounter with British-Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington as other influences. [5]

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_013SMALLER.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Janis Joe (Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker), 1971, oil on canvas. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini. And Martillo y repollo [Hammer and Cabbage], 1973, oil on canvas. Collection Juan Yarur Torres. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

The paintings included in the retrospective are utopian, tragic, feminist, erotic and hilarious, each accompanied by an ‘explanation’, some several pages long. The ‘saints’ in Vicuña’s ‘church’ come from folklore, politics, jazz, pop culture, and her circle of friends and lovers. The series dedicated to the ‘Heroes of the Revolution’ includes a portrait of Karl Marx, pictured against a background of pink and purple miniature trees, azure mountains and female figures, erotically entangled amidst the trees. Vladimir Lenin is recast as an elegant feminist, wearing ‘a violet velvet suit, standing somewhere in Siberia’, surrounded by the things he imagines when ‘alone in the desert’: ‘the useless stair’, ‘a stick that goes perfectly into a hole’, ‘a liberated woman jumping naked on one leg (not pictured).’ Apparently, ‘All these thoughts are so radical for him that his coat is giving birth to the flowers that always appear in the enlightenment of saints.’ [6] Vicuña also paints a meeting of Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro—‘the most augural encounter’ in Latin American history. [7] Following the carnival spirit of the day, she portrays Castro with one leg naked ‘to state his beauty’, but later is pressured by criticism to add the pants. Vicuña admits she doesn’t like the idea of the hero: ‘Laughter is the best contribution I can make to the revolution.’ [8]

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_012smaller.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Ángel de la menstruación [Menstruation Angel], 1973, oil on canvas. And Poet at Work, 1973, oil on canvas. Courtesy collection Catherine Petitgas. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

***

our macabre intent is to leave humans naked, without preconceived notions,

without conventional attachments-attire.

have no fear. our works will take years to manifest. we are not playing around.

the interior of the seed is soft.

– Cecilia Vicuña, No Manifesto of the No Tribe [9]

I longed for a collective poetic action and one day alone in my room, I wrote the No Manifesto.

– Cecilia Vicuña [10]

Tribu No, or No Tribe, a group of Vicuña’s close friends—poets and artists— gathered in Santiago between 1967 and 1972, creating poems, rituals and games. No acts, as they called their poetic actions performed in the city streets, remained undocumented. A few photographs that exist, show more intimate improvisations. In Nudo de tres [Knot of Three] (ca.1969-70), the bodies of three female friends are intertwined, knotted into a novel and absurd organism.

Vicuña continued with improvisationin ‘Palabrarmas’—a series of colourful banner-like works made in London and Bogotá, where she lived and worked between 1975 and 1980. Breaking down words into units and setting them in motion, she uncovers their intent and performative potential, each drawing a propositional coming together of the parts, forming a precarious architecture of meaning. The word ‘Palabrarmas’ itself contains palabras (words) and armas (weapons), suggesting that language can be a weapon for symbolic resistance, but also pala (a shovel) that could be used to dig up meanings.

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_018.jpg

Installation view of a selection of works from the artist’s Palabrarmas series in Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

Vicuña hoped Palabrarmas could act as pedagogical tools, a starting point for people to open up the language together and examine what it can do. A long-standing Chilean tradition of what she describes as ‘the other poetry’—oral, improvised and often anonymous, inspired her to continue her search for the kind of poetic event that could be shared with others beyond a small circle of friends. [11] In Que es para usted la poesia? [What is Poetry to You?] (1980), the camera follows the artist as she wanders the streets of Bogota, asking car mechanics, prostitutes, street entertainers, policemen the same question: ‘What is poetry to you?’ Crowds gather around as she records impassionate, eloquent, and considered responses. Watching the film today, it seems impossible it isn’t scripted, and an awareness of a loss settles in. ‘(W)e seem to have forgotten the art of complex conversation’, laments Vicuña, ‘(a)nd my heart says it must be fear, the ocean of lies we live in, under a continuous stream of doublespeak’. [12]

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_020.jpg

Installation view of a selection of works from the artist’s Palabrarmas series in Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_034.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Pueblo de altares, 1990–2019, site-specific installation including sixty Precarios [Precarious objects]. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

***

I proposed a day of the seed to Salvador Allende... He laughed and said ‘Maybe by the year 2000.’

– Cecilia Vicuña, Semiya, 1971– . [13]

The fragile materiality of La ruca abstracta (o Los ojos de Allende) is echoed in Pueblo de altares (1990-2019), an installation that includes over sixty Precarios [Precarious objects]—delicate assemblages Vicuña has been making since the 1960s. At Witte de With they fill a blanket of light-coloured sand that covers most of the floor in one of the galleries, and an entire wall from floor to ceiling. Improvised architectures of found twigs, straw, brightly colored plastic remnants, seashells, they are intimate in scale, each embodying an investment of attention and time.

As evident from Sabor a mí and A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance (1974), the making of these ephemeral three-dimensional poems was, for Vicuña, imbued with a magical intent and connected to a desire to support Chilean resistance. At other times, such motivations give way to an awareness of a shared vulnerability, a meditation on the existential precariousness of all forms of life, ecological destruction, inevitable impending loss, and a practice of nurturing. [14]

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_030.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Pueblo de altares, 1990–2019, site-specific installation including sixty Precarios [Precarious objects]. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

The title of the exhibition Seehearing the Enlightened Failure (‘a very funky translation’ from Spanish Veroír El fracaso Iluminado according to the artist), can mean both throwing light on failures of the past and casting the failure itself as a source of enlightenment. In 1970, realizing the importance of reforestation, Vicuña urged Allende to begin replanting Chile’s forests and proposed for everyone to be involved in the gathering of seeds. That the proposal was never carried out on the scale she imagined, was in Vicuña’s mind, her foremost failure. [15] Semiya [Seed Song] (2015) documents her gathering seeds alone in the foothills of the Andes. Her hands are closely followed by the camera as she caresses plants, collects and arranges seed pods, washes off a drop of blood from her finger in the stream. Vicuña’s deep entanglement with the world is registered through the intimacy of this performance. Her chanting voice carries through Witte de With’s upstairs galleries, soothing, then empathic and arresting, making her presence felt.

WDW_Cecilia Vacuña_highres_024.jpg

Cecilia Vicuña, Pueblo de altares, 1990–2019, site-specific installation including sixty Precarios [Precarious objects]. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Kristien Daem

Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, Curated by Miguel A. López, will be traveling to Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City in 2020.

[1] Cecilia Vicuña, quoted in exhibition materials for Poetics, Politics, and Song: Contemporary Latin America/Latino(a) Artists' Books, Yale University Library, Accessed January 6, 2020. http://www.library.yale.edu/aob/Exhibition/vicuna.htm

[2] ibid.

[3] Cecilia Vicuña ‘Pain Things & Explanations’ in Cecilia Vicuña Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, ed. Miguel A. López, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2019, 302

[4] Dawn Andes ‘Cecilia Vicuña’s Calcomanías’ in ibid, 117

[5] Ibid, 116

[6] Cecilia Vicuña ‘Lenin’ in ibid, 309

[7] Cecilia Vicuña ‘Fidel and Allende’ in Cecilia Vicuña Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, ed. Miguel A. López, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2019, 306

[8] Ibid

[9] Cecilia Vicuña ‘No Manifesto of the No Tribe’ in ibid, 301

[10] Cecilia Vicuña, quoted in the exhibition label in Cecilia Vicuña Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019

[11] Cecilia Vicuña ‘Lecture on the arts in Chile afte 1970’ in Cecilia Vicuña Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, ed. Miguel A. López, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2019, 317

[12] Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Language Is Migrant’ in ibid, 339.

[13] Cecilia Vicuña, Semiya, 1971– , quoted in material accompanying DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking (2015) Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, Accessed January 6, 2020. https://tagboard.com/semiya2015/231493

[14] Miguel A. López, ‘Cecilia Vicuña: A Retrospective For Eyes That Do Not See’ in Cecilia Vicuña Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, ed. Miguel A. López, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2019, 40.

[15] ‘An Awareness of Disappearance’: an Interview with Poet, Activist and Artist Cecilia Vicuña, Frieze, Accessed January 6, 2020. https://frieze.com/article/awareness-disappearance-interview-poet-activist-and-artist-cecilia-vicuna