It is Cecilia Vicuña’s first retrospective in a Chilean museum since 1971. Two years later, in 1973, she fled after the military coup. Exile, this wounded country, took her to London, Colombia and Venezuela. The 75-year-old artist and poet (with more than 20 published books) has installed a quipu, the thousand-year-old communication and recording system made of knotted cords of cloth used by the Quechuas until Spanish colonization, at Chile’s National Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a menstrual quipu. Red. Remember the extinct glaciers and the blood of menstruation. “But it’s neither craft nor art until I come to the conclusion that it’s a poem in space,” he explains over the phone from New York. In 2017, Documenta 14 – one of the art world’s most important events, held every five years in the German city of Kassel – rescued her from that other exile that had been forgotten. His work radiates a lament about the loss of nature, language, the way of life of the ancestors and their culture. And win the fight. “There’s a new feminism on the planet that, while not related to art, is born out of the social and political struggle for women’s rights,” she admits. His sentences are the beginnings of poems or stories. “We’re part of a river of memories.” “In Chilean culture, when a girl is born, you don’t tell anyone unless you’re sorry, because it’s always better to have a boy child,” she says.
Perhaps for reasons of justice, perhaps to bring novelty to the market, textile art has found a space that in 17th-century Europe it had only with tapestries. The Bauhaus set up a textile creation department during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), as it would otherwise have been impossible to take on women. There Sheila Hicks was trained together with the painter Josef Albers and the weaver Anni Albers. A symbol. She was born in the USA, has lived in Paris since 1964 and is active at the age of 88. She lives in the Latin Quarter. In a building that housed Balthus, Hockney and even Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, he experimented in the courtyard, butchering lambs with his macabre device. Hicks braided texture is made from yarn and paint. “It’s in my blood,” he says.
Curator Lynne Cooke prepares the exhibition Woven Stories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Hicks will be present. Also the past. “There are two reasons why textile art has been vilified or marginalized,” he muses. At first they were considered decorative, i.e. complementary arts, and some of their forms, darning, sewing, quilting or knitting, were “women’s work”. They required little skill and training. Everything “breaks”. The verb comes from the independent curator Bartomeu Marí. “You have to get used to the arrival of the applied arts. If we are already at odds with the work versus the document, we are preparing for the entrance of the traditional craft.” The contemporary museum will be very similar to the ethnographic museum. “There are practices that are exceptional, like those of the Amaziges in Morocco, and others respond to market pressures without compromising quality,” says Manuel Borja-Villel, former director of Reina Sofía. Limited for now. The highest price – according to the platform MutualArt.com – for Sheila Hicks at auction is 116,000 euros for a monumental cotton sold in 2016. In Spain, Teresa Lanceta or Leonor Serrano are renewing the language. Weaving art the same way writer Marguerite Dura wove words. “Now there is peace. It is like a deep night that is coming, it is also the beginning of forgetting.”
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