Spinning the Common Thread
by Lucy Lippard

Cecilia Vicuña, born, and raised in Santiago de Chile, has been an exile since the early 1970s, when the murder of elected president Salvador Allende by General Pinochet found her in London. As a poet and painter, she had been a supporter of Allende’s Popular Unity government, and participated in the cultural vitality that accompanied it. In London she became active in the Chilean solidarity movement and was a founding member (with Guy Brett, John Dugger, and David Medalla) of Artists for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College of Art in 1974. In 1977, she returned to Latin America, settling in Bogota, Colombia, where she worked with theater and music groups. She made stage sets for Candelaria and Quilapayun, and, on her own, traveled around the country lecturing on the Chilean struggle, reading her poetry, or creating workshops for indigenous peoples. In 1980 she arrived in New York, and two weeks later was living with the Argentine painter and writer César Paternosto, whom she married in 1981. They now spend several months a year in Latin America.

Since 1966 the consistent element in her artmaking has been the precarios, a series of very small sculptures and installations constructed of found objects, or "rubbish," made in landscape, streets, or studio. "A force impelled me to do the precarios," she recalls, "a desire to expand. They began as a form of communing with the sun and the sea that gave me a lot of pleasure and a lot of strength."

The precarios are visual poems, "metaphors in space." Scraps of stone, wood, feathers, shells, cloth, and other human-made detritus are gently juxtaposed. They are often shades of white, gray, black, brown, bound perhaps with bright-colored thread—very pure, clean, washed by the weather. Their "fastening" is so loose, so flexible, that the parts seem to have blown together into a whole that might metamorphose at any moment into another. "Precarious is what is obtained by prayer," Vicuña has written. "Uncertain, exposed to hazards, insecure. From the Latin pecarius, from precis; prayer." The word oir (to hear) was originally the same word orar (to pray). "Reciprocity. By praying you reconnect."

If the precarios are the common formal thread, the action of weaving itself is the esthetic and spiritual thread that runs through all of Vicuña’s cultural production. ("In the Andes, they say that to weave is to give light.") Textiles were frequent offerings in pre-Columbian cultures. Miniature textiles are found in tombs and in Peru the most precious fabrics, which took months to execute, were burned in ceremonies.

Often the thread in Vicuña’s work is combined with, or stands for, water. This is an apt emblem for her art, which also has a certain fluidity, clarity, and fragility, as well as a sense of change. (A book of her poetry is titled Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water.) "The water wants to be heard," she says. "Everything is falling apart because of lack of connections. Weaving is the connection that is missing, the connection between people and themselves, people and nature." She identifies with "the first Western environmentalist movement—that of Saint Francis in the thirteenth century, talking to birds, to the sun as Brother Sun. We need to respond to the environment the way it responds to us. Everything we do mirrors and reflects us." The prime connection between the urban and even planetary scale and these tiny artworks is a spiritual/political one with the land, with nature, especially in term of what society has done to the waters, our precarious threads of life.

Much of Vicuña’s outdoor has been done in or by waterways. The process began in 1966, when she arranged the refuse on Con-cón, a stony beach in Chile where two waters met, a natural gathering place for wandering rubbish, which she called her "mine." Beginning with sticks, stones, and feathers, later she added plastic detritus, drawings on the sand, powdered pigments and objects made in the studio form beach finds, completing a cycle. In a high Andes stream that becomes contaminated as it descends, she made an offering of woven, tangled threads of yarn uniting rocks and water. (She has since recreated some of the sixties work.)

There is a strong spiritual element in the process of making the precarios, which begin in the recognition of worth in the lost and discarded. "I look at things backwards, as they are going to look when I am gone," says Vicuña. "I have a very intense feeling that what we do is already the remains of what we are doing. The dead water, our poems. I try to bring an awareness of what we are leaving, so that by picking up things I am conscious of what has been thrown away but is staying."

Over the years, Vicuña has gradually found deep connections between Taoism and "the incredible coherence" of Andean culture. (Although here family is Spanish and Basque, Vicuña, who speaks with a high, wispy Andean voice, and has apparently "Indian" features, identifies fully with indigenous Latin America, especially the Mapuche).

All of the important ideas of the Andes, says Vicuña, are conceived in palindromes, or pairs, like the ancient quipu (one line, or horizon), with threads extending below (the amounts) and above (the summation). One mirrors the other. "A circular thought finds reverberations in every aspect of life," she says. "For example, you ask a weaver, when you spin yarn, why do you spin it in two. She replies, ‘because everything needs to have a couple, a pair,’ so it’s the same concept union complementaria, complementary unity."

Reciprocity is the essential law of the ancient world. Vicuña sees all her work as a response to her materials (and everything in life is material for art): "These materials are lying down and I respond by standing them up. The gods created us and we have to respond to the gods. There will only be equality when there is reciprocity. The root of the word respond is to offer again, to receive something and offer it back," as in the Native American concepts of the "giveaway," "potlach," and the "giveback," echoing the quipu, the sky reflected in the lake. One of Vicuña’s precarios is a bone, a blue stick and a spurt of grass from a sacred island on Lake Titicaca.

The Inca is about to be
And the ruins of the past
Are the model for the future
Being created by our
Remembering.

For the full text of Lucy R. Lippard’s essay "Spinning the Common Thread", see: The Precarious/quipoem: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña, edited by M. Catherine de Zegher, University Press of New England, 1997.

All quotations are from interviews with the author in 1985 and 1989 and from Vicuña’s book Pecario/Precarious. For further information on Vicuña’s paintings, see Lippard’s essay "The Vicuña and the Leopard," in Red Bass (1985).