Cecilia Vicuña Liberates the Body and the Land in Her New Guggenheim Retrospective

Across her textile installations and paintings, Cecilia Vicuña mounts a critique of the patriarchy and its destructive effects against women and the land. Her impressive, large-scale quipu—knotted fiber works that hang from the ceiling, inspired by the Inca tradition of recording information through knots—reflect her Chilean heritage and act against colonialism, serving to repair history and the environment. And in figurative paintings, Vicuña harnesses her spiritual practice to construct Surrealistic visions of nature and human interaction. These works draw out parallels between the Earth and humanity, suggesting that the liberation of the body mirrors the liberation of the land.

The Chilean artist is currently featured in her first New York museum retrospective, “Cecilia Vicuña: Spin Spin Triangulene” at the Guggenheim in New York, which runs through September 5th. The exhibition arrives on the heels of Vicuña’s triumphant showing at the 59th Venice Biennale, for which she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The Guggenheim retrospective, organized by curators Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, traces Vicuña’s rich, multidisciplinary practice across a 50-year period, spanning film, textiles, paintings, and installation.

“Spin Spin Triangulene” features several striking, site-specific quipu that take up the cul-de-sac gallery on the museum’s second floor. The exhibition leads up to a one-time performance by Vicuña on August 31st entitled, Ex-termination Living Quipu (2022), commissioned by the Guggenheim’s Latin American Circle. The performance reflects Vicuña’s longstanding decolonial practice by conducting a healing ceremony for the Earth. The public can take part in the construction of a quipu to express their love for land, sea, and one another.

“Socialism has to be warm and erotic” writes Vicuña in one of the exhibition’s “bays of thought”—areas where two paintings are paired together to expand an idea. A table, chairs, and large plants occupy these spaces to give the audience a place to pause and reflect. Midway through the exhibition, we encounter the artist’s portrait of Karl Marx from 1972. He appears standing in a blossoming garden; his head is disproportionately larger than his frame. A series of illicit images of women surround Marx, including two women mid-coitus and a woman flashing her thigh garter and breasts toward us.

The eroticism of the work betrays the almost childish, two-dimensional palette and brush that we also see in the painting. Vicuña’s portrait of Marx is paired with a more muted autumn-toned portrait from 1986 of María Sabina, an Oaxacan curandera (shamnic healer) and oral poet of Mazatec origin. Sabina’s intensely spiritual practice contrasts strongly against Marx’s written practice. However, Vicuña acknowledges that both are necessary for socialist liberation, albeit with an added dose of sex.

In her book on witchcraft and philosophy, A Vexy Thing (2018) professor Imani Perry writes that what made Black and Indigenous practices of ritual so rebellious was how they used feelings and sex as a resource for producing knowlege in the same way a book would. This went against the rational focus of Western thought. Vicuña’s return to sex throughout her practice is not mere titilation, but rather a desire to situate sex as a means of liberating the mind and the body.

Vicuña’s early figurative paintings attract audiences for their seemingly superficial surface—they grab our attention through bright colors and large, irregular shapes, as in Pantera Negra y yo (ii) from 1978. But her work deceives as much as it attracts: Vicuña developed this style as a “decolonizing act to subvert the oil tradition imposed on Indigenous culture by the European conquest,” as the show’s press release states. The works also function as a means to convey Vicuña’s own biography. This includes her road to socialism following the 1973 Chilean military coup, which brought forth the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and led her to flee to London. Vicuña has been in exile ever since.

One of the more impressive paintings on view is 1971’s Janis Joe (Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker). The piece features her take on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500). Vicuña is represented with her partner as Adam and Eve walking through paradise amongst a series of other vignettes. Janis Joplin, who had died the year prior, and Joe Cocker both loom large towards the top of the canvas; Joplin appears to be singing in a large sweater with no pants or undergarments.

The revelatory power of the vagina is a running motif in Janis Joe, where we also see a young Vicuña receive her first period, juxtaposed with two women engaged in sex. Alongside the images of female pleasure is a scene of active rebellion: Angela Davis escaping prison, gun in hand. The oil-on-canvas work manifests and merges the psychedelic spirit of the activism of the 1970s with Vicuña’s socialist-surrealist politics.