edited by M. Catherine de Zegher, translated by Esther
Allen (Hanover: University Press of New England, Wesleyan University
Press, 1997), 96 pp + 140 pp.
As if to mimic the outwardly opposing nature but inseparable
link between poetry and visual culture, this flip-book is partitioned
into a critical assessment of Cecilia Vicuña_s
corpus to date and, on the reverse side, into QUIPOem, a logbook
and mid-career recounting in verse, transcription and citings, by
Vicuña herself on her own varied artwork and performative
interventions.
The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Ceclia Vicuña
features contributions by Lucy Lippard, M. Catherine de Zegher,
Billie Jean Isbell, Regina Harrison, Hugo
Méndez-Ramírez and Kenneth Sherwood. Together, the
essays and interview reveal how Vicuña_s poetry and visual
art are interchangeable, each taking its essential grammar from
the notion that art- and speech-forms can be intimately linked to
natural shapes, and the stories woven to account for their meanings.
De Zegher does well by locating Vicuña_s practice as grounded,
on one level, in work that emerged out of the Brazilian neo-concrete
movement during its second, less constructivist _povera¨ phase
(as in the art of Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica). Lippard
places Vicuña_s work alongside artists such as Jimmie Durham
or David Hammons who "respect and rehabilitate in very different
ways the discards of mainstream society." And Kenneth Sherwood
does a cohesive job of underlining the peculiar crux of Vicuña_s
aesthetics: the material nature of her poems_ orality, and the conversation
her work performs "between poetry_and what has all too often
been defined as its opposite_myth."
Wood, bone, thread, clay shards, matches, nails,
shells, cardboard cut-outs, stamps, feathers, rags, tiny containers
of all kinds, twigs, and sundry rubber and plastic debris all conspire
in a work that enacts_between the city and country, between culture
and nature_an archeology whose end results are diminutive markers
of presence. With titles like Cemetery, Guardian, or Tree of Life,
these tiny flagstones or altars are borne of the question as to
whether we are in fact destined to recycle the endless flotsam of
an
increasingly disposable world; to reconstruct the constellations
found in urban streets or natural vistas_a pressing accountability
that speaks of the fragile nature involved in all refiguring.
Vicuña belongs to a tradition that harks back
to early modernist poet-painters in Latin America like Xul Solar
and César Moro, or to contemporary artist-poet practitioners
like Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Her poetry and art have also featured
a series of unagitated political interventions. In a documentary
filmed in Bogotá (where the artist lived for
many years after the fall of Allende in her native Chile), Vicuña
posed the question "What is poetry to you?" to passers-by,
beggars, prostitutes, and policemen. Also in Bogotá, when
it was revealed that 1,920 children died each year from contaminated
milk_to total indifference on the part of the State_-Vicuña
photographed herself tying a yarn
around a glass of milk set out in the street in front of a government
building, and then pulled the yarn so that the resulting white spatter
of spilled contents resembled a large blood stain.
Because many of these acts remain only in transcription
and document, they are forceful reminders that Vicuña_s work,
at its very essence, is "a way of remembering"_-as if
exile and recall joined to unravel an "autobiography in debris;"
as one personal story within a larger narrative:
The No
The first precarious works were not documented,
they existed only for the memories of a few citizens History, as
a fabric of inclusion and exclusion, did not
embrace them.
(The history of the north excludes that of the south,
and
the history of the south excludes itself, embracing only the
north_s reflections.)
In the void between the two, the precarious and its
non-documentation established their non-place as another
reality.
Vicuña_s practice is aware of the ceaseless
transformations involved in the passage of commonplace objects and
events into the realm of art-making, whereby object equals word,
speech equals act, and action equals artifact_-as if to stave off
the weathering effects of time and decay. In her writing and art,
the transient nature of the physical is made manifest, and the arbitrary
nature of the invisible world is revealed: "Desire is the offering,
the body is nothing but a metaphor."
Roberto Tejada was born in Los Angeles, California
and he presently lives in Buffalo, NY. From 1987 to 1997 he worked
in Mexico City, where he founded the English-Spanish annual Mandorla:
New Writing from the Americas. His art writing, photography criticism,
literary essays, and translations appear regularly in catalogs and
journals in the United States and Latin America. GIFT AND VERDICT,
a collection of poems, was published in 1999 by the Leroy Chapbook
Series.
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