Knot Writing

A new triptych of hanging sculptures titled Quipu del exterminio / Extermination Quipu feature in Spin Spin Triangulene, a retrospective of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña currently on view at the Guggenheim. Vicuña’s quipus are inspired by and take their name from a pre-Columbian Incan practice of recording information—data or narratives, possibly poems—in strands of knotted fibers. Quipu is derived from the Quechua word for knot. As a sculptural form, quipus have been a hallmark of Vicuña’s visual work since the 1960s. The three quipus here—one red, one black, one white—are composed primarily of wool but also include natural plant fibers, horsehair, metal, wood, seashells, nutshells, seeds, bone, clay, plaster, and plastic. As I look at them, I feel both wonder and uncertainty about the sculptures’ meaning. What stories do they tell? Can they be considered a kind of writing, and, if so, are they poems?

Vicuña is an exile or, as she has said, one of the expelled. She was born in 1948 in Santiago. After earning her MFA from the University of Chile in 1971, Vicuña went to London, where she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. This period coincided with the democratic election of Salvador Allende, the first socialist elected in a liberal democracy in Latin America. But Allende’s presidency ended abruptly in 1973, when a US-backed coup resulted in the brutal, long-running military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose oppressive regime went on to “disappear” thousands and imprison and torture many more. In 1973, only two months after the coup, Vicuña published her first book, Saborami, at age 25. A diaristic, dual-language collection of poems and art created over several years, the book denounced the violence in her homeland. (A 2011 US edition by ChainLinks Press remains in print.) Today Vicuña splits her time between New York and Santiago, two regions where rivers meet the sea, a fact of personal mythical significance. 

Ever since her debut, Vicuña's poetry has been entangled with her visual art and vice versa. The new exhibition includes a video work, Kon Kon (2010), which she calls a poem-documentary. A series of vignettes narrate Vicuña’s return to Concón—a coastal city named after an ancient Andean deity—where her family had a vacation home on the sea. It was also the site of her first performative installations with thread in the 1970s. In addition to chanting and dance, the film documents her “Precario” practice of creating improvised sculptural constructions made of found objects that she leaves on the beach to be taken by the tide, thus completing and dispersing the work. The film also captures Vicuña on the beach creating a web of quipu sculptures affixed with photographs that record at-risk local environments as well as local and indigenous traditions. 

Like Mayan codices, quipu are yet another indigenous innovation and intellectual achievement that was almost obliterated by Christian European settler colonists, who deemed them illegal. Fewer than 1,000 examples are known to survive. They constitute what is likely the only three-dimensional written language. Archaeologists organize them into two distinct classes: administrative quipus (for the keeping of census or accounting information) and narrative quipus (for the telling of stories, recording of genealogies, or perhaps even for writing poems). This latter category remains most opaque.

By naming her series of sculptures quipu, Vicuña adapts and reinterprets this indigenous form. The first time I saw her modern reinterpretations was in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum, where her installation Disappeared Quipu consisted of massive cords of unspun, undyed, near-white wool attached in a grid to the ceiling. The piece created an almost forest-like space below as the knotted cords descended to the floor. The work incorporated projected video, including text, and was shown alongside examples of the museum’s own holdings of Incan quipu. Vicuña’s projected text was nearly impossible to read except in fragments, perhaps relating to how quipus remain illegible, despite attempts by groups such as the MIT Khipu Research Group to decode them and Harvard’s Khipu Database Project to collect records on all known extant examples. In 2017, an undergraduate researcher at Harvard was able to match data from six 17th-century administrative quipus with census information recorded in Spanish records. Though this was a significant breakthrough, narrative quipus remain illegible, although I’ve long wondered if the knots on individual strands might work like meter in verse.

As I viewed Extermination Quipu, Vicuña’s installation at the Guggenheim, I thought about the status of quipus as unsolved puzzles and as a nearly extinguished achievement of human culture. Incan quipus were usually approximately necklace-sized strands of strings—large ones were no longer than two outstretched arms—rather than massive, hanging, mobile-like soft sculptures. Where one might expect to find knots on a traditional quipu, Vicuña intersperses small objects. These bits of shell, bone, or other humble materials relate to her “Precarios,” her small, sculptural assemblages of found material. This practice of collecting and assembling small things and putting them in relation continues in her poetic practice and method (see The Precarious: The Art & Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña / QUIPOem, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1997). In a poem titled “Entering,” she writes, “I thought that perhaps all this was only a way of remembering.” Later she continues, “the scattered bones, the sticks and feathers were sacred objects I had to put in order.”

Handwritten on the wall behind Extermination Quipu, in an easy-to-miss corner nook of the Guggenheim’s High Gallery, I recognized Vicuña's unmistakable notelike and diagrammatic writing in earthy red pastel, slightly smeared in places. The writing recalled the style of the drawn poems that open and make up most of her book Instan (2002), written in English and Spanish—the book that introduced her work to me almost 20 years ago. These “gramma kellcani (the drawings)” are delicately penciled visual poems in which lines—straight, arcing, or spiraling—and words of drawn letterforms combine into curves, Xs, circles, helixes, and stars. The lines often connect to the letters, creating a spatial visual cursive. The drawn-written poems recall the staggered typography of the Stéphane Mallarmé poem “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance” (1897), although Vicuña's pieces are rendered in facsimile of handwritten pencil rather than set in type. If these drawn poems are viewed primarily as visual art, they evoke the letterforms and typography in the work of Vicuña’s older Latin American contemporaries, such as the Argentinians León Ferrari and Mirtha Dermisache and the Brazilian Mira Schendel. But what distinguishes Vicuña's penciled writing is the economy of her method and language, bringing to mind the look and syntax of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript poems or the broken and reconstituted words of Paul Celan.

The wall text accompanying Extermination Quipu shares the form of the drawn poems that open Instan, but here this mode of writing can stretch across and down the wall, creating a mobile-like branching structure that mirrors Vicuña’s sculptures. The text reads more like notes toward a sequence of poems than the poem itself; if it is a poem, it reads like a map charting conceptual relations. The rubricated notes link the form of the quipu variously to scientific knowledge, weaving, poetry, and environmental disaster. Written on the wall in descending steps is this phrase: “the quipu spins its magnetic force,” with the Ss of spins written oversize, emphasizing their cordlike shape—perhaps referencing that Ss and Zs are used to note the knot directions when transcribing patterns on quipu specimens. Some phrases connect quipu or weaving to scientific concepts, such as one quoting the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima—“Weaving is the birth of light”—which appears above a fragmented quotation from the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek: “weaves atoms into molecules.” Other passages suggest environmental struggle: “We / are / ex / Terminating / (all) life” and “Maximum fragility / against maximum power.”

In an accompanying exhibition video, Vicuña explains the meaning behind the sequence of quipu colors: “red is the lifeline, black is mourning, white is death but death as renewal and transformation.” In Vicuña’s vision, the quipu is a locus where scientific knowledge meets indigenous knowledge and where lifegiving forces meet potential extinction so as to confront it. She reclaims a tradition with a 5,000-year-old history to at once lament the loss of indigenous knowledge and to highlight, through the reclamation of this form, that indigenous wisdom may be a guide for living in mutual care and abundance with Earth. She braids interconnections between science, art, and indigenous wisdom in a manner similar to the way she pulls Quechua out of English and English out of Spanish and so on in her poetry. In Instan, she writes, “In ‘awake’ is awak, the Quechua ‘who weaves.’” And then a few lines down,

                                           Voy       a           tejer
                                                                   mis      tres
                                                                             lenguas              away.
 
                      Una lengua ve en la otra el interior del estar.

This sequence roughly translates to “I will weave / my three / tongues away. // One language sees in the other the interior of being.” Though it’s arguable whether Vicuña’s quipus themselves can be read as poems, beyond a gesture to a lost form of writing, they, along with the wall-text-drawing, seem to construct an environment where poetry might be conjured. As she writes in a later section of Instan, “Hear the image?    See the sound? The crossing performed?”

In her introduction to Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (2012), Rosa Alcalá, the volume’s editor and, in recent years, Vicuña’s principal English translator, describes her reaction after first experiencing the artist perform. Alcalá had invited Vicuña to Brown University to give a poetry reading following the publication of Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (1992, edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine). She expected Vicuña to read a selection of poems and stay for questions. Instead, at the start of the event the poet was nowhere to be found. As the audience’s anticipation peaked, Vicuña suddenly began singing what Alcalá describes as “a cluster of vowels” louder and louder, until she emerged “from within the audience, having wrapped wool thread around those sitting next to her,” a thread that she took to the podium where a reading—at least in the sense that Alcalá expected—never happened. “I can’t say for sure if what I have just experienced is a ‘poetry reading,’” Alcalá later wrote. “I only know I am sure that it is poetry.”

Poetry activates some aspect of almost all of Vicuña’s visual work. Its presence can be allusive and indirect, as in the painting Amados (Loved Ones), from 1969, which depicts the poets William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, José Lezama Lima, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud alongside Jesus, Buddha, Vincent van Gogh, and the jazz greats Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane, among others, to form a sort of firmament of Vicuña's early influences. Or the presence of poetry can be explicit, as in her palabrarmas, or “word weapons.” (A book, PALABRARmas, which collects this series in a Spanish letterpress first edition, is also on view at the new exhibition.) At the Guggenheim, several palabrarmas take the form of screen-printed poster poems, which extend the tradition of concrete poetry. In “Sol y dar y dad,” for example, syllables that translate in English to “Solidarity: To Give and Give Sun” are broken up. Against a blue background, SOL appears across the poster’s center in yellow lettering, with a white Y in the middle of the circle made by the letter O. Written above is dar and below, dad, both in red arcs that combine to create a circular, sun-like form completed with six white illustrations of hands, roughly approximating rays reaching out from the center.

Sol y Dar y Dad: Una palabra bailada is also the title of a short film (the subtitle means “a danced word”) that documents a performance in collaboration with children in a public park and Corporación Colombiana de Teatro, an organization that promotes theater and human rights in Bogotá, Colombia. In the film, on view at the Guggenheim, a yellow balloon with the word sol written on it is passed around in a circle. One participant holds a large cardboard Y; others wear gloves to form the words dar and dad, creating a dynamic play of slipping in and out of sense making and bringing new dynamism to the wordplay in Vicuña's screenprint. This and a related palabrarma film on view were made between 1975 and 1980, when Vicuña was living in exile in Colombia after her stay in England. Not on view is her film ¿Qué es para usted la poesía? (What Is Poetry to You) from this same Colombian period, in which she asks the eponymous question to people on the streets of Bogotá, among them a scientist, a sex worker, a police officer, and children.

No clear line demarcates where Vicuña's poetry ends and her visual art or performance practice begins. The Guggenheim includes a “reading room” off the ramp, almost secreted through a regular-sized doorway in the middle of the exhibition. As a dedicated space that is neither a research library nor a bookshop, it is easy to miss, and in previous exhibitions, it has often been poorly utilized to simply make accessible the exhibition catalogue and earlier artist’s monographs. But here, the room feels essential. It provides a dedicated space to browse many of Vicuña’s books, allowing visitors to read her poems concurrently while experiencing the artworks in the other galleries. Essential introductions for English readers are her New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, from 2018, and About to Happen, a book that synthesizes her poetry, sculpture, and performance, from 2017. Reading her poems helps viewers better apprehend the poetry in her visual practice, and seeing her artworks helps readers better appreciate the spaces she constructs in her poems. As a visual artist, Vicuña remains always a poet who at times transgresses language, legibility, and history. At the edge of writing, there is a knot.