Precarious Memory: Cecilia Vicuña
Considering what it means to hold a work of art in memory
Dear Friends,
As an experiment, I’ve been working on a series of “memory objects,” paragraph-long attempts to conjure particular works of art from memory. When I sit down to them I refrain from looking at images or reviewing my own research or writing. I want to see, instead, what has survived of the work in me.
I’m curious how objects in our lives (works of art or not) attract and accumulate memory. Writing entirely from memory, of course, introduces error. But might that error itself be of interest? Each person’s own errors as a kind of fingerprint—unlike a biometric, though, the particular errors of memory are likely to change over time. One sort of error today, another sort next year. One sort in this mood of relative calm, another sort in anger or anxiety.
I’m also curious about the way works of art live in us. Some of us have seen thousands of artworks, perhaps many many—uncountably many—thousands. What remains of them in the self? What have we made of them? If most are forgotten, at least in their specifics, how many can we call to mind?
A fusion of self and other lives in our memory-object. The memory-object, the remembered work, is no longer something outside of us, but rather something internal. Inherently personal. Inherently made.
—Sal
Memory Objects: precarios
She began at the shore, where sand meets water. The sand was close, intimate under her feet, intimate in her hands, already finding its way inside her clothes. The water stretched to meet all waters everywhere. Bits of wood and trash, bits of rope that had washed up. She made them, I think, to say hello, to say thank you, maybe to say please. They were not crosses, in the Christian sense, but when I call them to my mind the resemblance is clear. In that same manner they were reminders she could carry away. She was quite young, seventeen I think. I see her hair whipping in the sea wind. I see her emotions wild in the confines of her body. What makes me think I have something to say to her as she was back then, or that she has something to say to me? There’s no question it was a form of worship, but also one of sacrilege. This body had already resolved not to obey. This body had already come to understand the fragile and the precarious have their own kind of power in relation to cruelty and order.
Cecilia Vicuña, precarios, 1966-present
Deep in the pandemic isolation I was asked by a friend to contribute to an issue of the Boston Art Review with the following prompt: "Recount a work of art made in unusual proximity to uncertainty." The work, or works, I thought of were Cecilia Vicuña's precarios. I had run across some photographs of them, and, in my isolation, I felt a pull, a tug, a thread of connection. Her objects were fragile, ephemeral, yet they had a charismatic presence we usually associate with definiteness and strength. The charisma of the precarios was instead the charisma of the quiet voice, the small gesture made with intention. Responding to them, I began making some small objects at the desk in my bedroom, things that didn't aspire to the status of art, but were not quite not-art either. I dropped swirls of black thread onto sheets of white paper and called them drawings. With Vicuña's precarios floating at the edges of my mind, I tangled fallen twigs. These objects and drawings were made “not for the sake of anything.”
In her 2010 film, Kon Kon, Vicuña said this about the moment when she started making precarious objects in 1966:
Since childhood I played on these beaches. One day I felt the sea sense me. In this instant, I understood the body and sea conversed in a language I needed to hear. I started picking up little sticks, arranging them on the beach for high tide to erase them, to knock them down, to complete the work.
The sea completed the work like a word vanishes in air.
Here is what I wrote about Vicuña’s work in the spring of 2020:
Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios are tiny assemblages of debris, litter, beach drift, and thread — barely held together, barely there. Some are like mobiles, some are like boats or bodies, some are like garments or flags; many feature string or thread linking the elements. Vicuña began making them as a young person in Chile at the end of the 1960s, then as an art student in London, and into the present. One early array, “A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance” was created after the attempted Chilean coup in 1973—“to support the Chilean revolution and stop the conspiracy against it,” she said. She claimed for them the ability to act in multiple ways: “Politically they stand for socialism, magically they help the liberation struggle, and esthetically they are as beautiful as they can be to recomfort the soul and give strength.” Exiled from Chile, Vicuña eventually settled in New York, writing poetry and collecting debris from the Hudson for her sculptural work. The precarios, slight, fragile, fashioned from what is thrown away or washed ashore, evoke for me the possibility of making under any conditions. They are full of feeling and of sympathetic magic, wielding their deliberate precarity as declaration of tenacity and resilience.
Cecilia Vicuña
Visit Cecilia Vicuña’s Website.
Follow Cecilia Vicuña on Instagram.
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
Precarious... like the thread winding just that way... like our lives... just winding unwinding edging toward precarity and the edge...