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拍品专文
“From the start I understood art and poetry as a form of transgression,” Vicuña once reflected. “Poetry, as the essential life-transforming experience, led me to search for different ways to extend its effectiveness. And the silence in poetry, that which could not be expressed in words, drew me to art” (in Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, exh. cat., Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2019, p. 330). Since the mid-1960s, Vicuña has probed the creative (im)possibilities of art and language across a prolific practice spanning painting and performance, poetry and sculpture, film and textile. She belongs to an experimental, ecofeminist generation that includes Ana Mendieta and Harmony Hammond, and her work continues—in the face of censorship and exile—to critically engage with issues of human rights, indigenous history, and ecological devastation. If Vicuña was once overlooked, accolades have lately poured in: major exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2022), the Tate Modern (2022), and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2024) as well as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the LIX Venice Biennale (2022).
“I regard my act of painting as a ritual,” Vicuña wrote in Saborami, the artist’s book she published in response to the military coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende. “In my paintings I need every form to irritate, disgust or disturb. They issue from a convulsed state in which images, helix forms moving as propellers, force their way out. What are those images I yearn to capture in a poem, a painting, a conversation or a concept thing?” (Saborami, Cullompton, 1973). The Benefits of Poetry suggests one such image: Vicuña envisages herself (“a nimble old lady”) and her boyfriend at the time, the poet Claudio Bertoni, in a red, radioactive desert that she declared both a “representation of the future” and “the only place left for us.” Set almost fifty years into the future—but already in our past—the scene is apocalyptically and magically real, populated with a house “dressed like a person” and “skies [that] melt with water.” Poems lay “abandoned on the ground” between the couple (“Atacama’s taoists”), yet the scroll is blank, expressively silent (“The Benefits of Poetry,” 1973).
Vicuña left Santiago in 1972 to pursue postgraduate work at Slade School of Fine Art, and she painted the present work in London in February 1973. In January, she wrote “Rubbish Dump,” a text that suggestively prefigures The Benefits of Poetry and that speaks to its eco-activist meditations. “I go to a forest (in Chile) that used to be a beautiful wild place in older times but today is a rubbish dump with polluted air,” she begins. “A part of myself is crying. Another one wants to die. And a third one laughs. These are my three ways of approaching the ecological breakdown.” She poses a series of questions, all left unanswered (and maybe unanswerable): “Why did I paint the rubbish dump as a paradise? Because I perceive existence on earth as a wonder, even in the midst of pollution? Because I perceive wild beauty above, under, or in destruction, rottenness and extirpation? Because this ‘beauty’ is also part of the beauty of the universe?” (in Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Future, op. cit., p. 307). In The Benefits of Poetry, Vicuña “jump[s], dance[s] and frolic[s] around,” her naked body reveling in the joy of being alive—and, to wit, in the benefits of poetry (“The Benefits of Poetry,” op. cit.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“I regard my act of painting as a ritual,” Vicuña wrote in Saborami, the artist’s book she published in response to the military coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende. “In my paintings I need every form to irritate, disgust or disturb. They issue from a convulsed state in which images, helix forms moving as propellers, force their way out. What are those images I yearn to capture in a poem, a painting, a conversation or a concept thing?” (Saborami, Cullompton, 1973). The Benefits of Poetry suggests one such image: Vicuña envisages herself (“a nimble old lady”) and her boyfriend at the time, the poet Claudio Bertoni, in a red, radioactive desert that she declared both a “representation of the future” and “the only place left for us.” Set almost fifty years into the future—but already in our past—the scene is apocalyptically and magically real, populated with a house “dressed like a person” and “skies [that] melt with water.” Poems lay “abandoned on the ground” between the couple (“Atacama’s taoists”), yet the scroll is blank, expressively silent (“The Benefits of Poetry,” 1973).
Vicuña left Santiago in 1972 to pursue postgraduate work at Slade School of Fine Art, and she painted the present work in London in February 1973. In January, she wrote “Rubbish Dump,” a text that suggestively prefigures The Benefits of Poetry and that speaks to its eco-activist meditations. “I go to a forest (in Chile) that used to be a beautiful wild place in older times but today is a rubbish dump with polluted air,” she begins. “A part of myself is crying. Another one wants to die. And a third one laughs. These are my three ways of approaching the ecological breakdown.” She poses a series of questions, all left unanswered (and maybe unanswerable): “Why did I paint the rubbish dump as a paradise? Because I perceive existence on earth as a wonder, even in the midst of pollution? Because I perceive wild beauty above, under, or in destruction, rottenness and extirpation? Because this ‘beauty’ is also part of the beauty of the universe?” (in Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Future, op. cit., p. 307). In The Benefits of Poetry, Vicuña “jump[s], dance[s] and frolic[s] around,” her naked body reveling in the joy of being alive—and, to wit, in the benefits of poetry (“The Benefits of Poetry,” op. cit.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park