Cecilia Vicuña: Precarious prayer

Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition at England & Co begins with a series of paintings from the 1970s in which religious icons are replaced by personal, political and literary figures.

Vicuña learned this technique in the late 1960s from the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and was initially inspired by the naïve and subtly subversive images made by 16th Century indigenous artists in Latin America after the Spanish conquest when they were forced to paint angels and saints for the Catholic Church.

Salvator Allende, Fidel Castro and Karl Marx simply replace the Christian saints in these images; a reversal of the images indigenous artists were forced to paint by the Catholic Church and an acknowledgement that the Marxism of Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s was, for Vicuña, more compelling than Catholicism. Yet, as these works are also deliberately naïve with their subjects depicted within a utopian setting, they also indicate the fragility of the freedoms which had been won and which the Chilean coup d'état of 1973 - when Allende’s life was lost, along with 43 years of Chilean democracy - brought to an end.

Vicuña writes that her artistic practice changed as a result. Prior to the coup d'état she had each day made an object in support of the Chilean revolutionary process. Post coup d'état her objects supported the resistance against the dictatorship.

These objects, composed of feathers, stones, sticks, and other found materials, are known as ‘Precarios’ because they are literally precarious - “they can’t endure, they may fall apart by themselves.” They show their socialist character through their poverty and by the fact that “they can be done by anyone.”

Not only are these objects beautiful in and of themselves but they also reveal the beauty of what is thrown away and ephemeral. As such, they are also deeply spiritual. Vicuña has explained that: “Precarious is what is obtained by prayer. Uncertain, exposed to hazards, insecure. From the Latin precarius, from precis, prayer”:

"These materials are lying down and I respond by standing them up. The gods created us and we have to respond to the gods. There will only be equality when there is reciprocity. The root of the word 'respond' is to offer again, to receive something and to offer it back. 'We are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away,' say the objects. Twice precarious, they come from prayer and predict their own destruction. Precarious in history, they will leave no trace. The history of art written in the North includes nothing of the South. Thus they speak in prayer, precariously."

Vicuña finds deep personal connections between Taoism and Andean culture but her art of exile and its spirituality also resonate strongly with aspects of Christian understanding and practice, for example, Peter Rollins’ interpretation of St Paul’s claim that Christians are the refuse of the world. Rollins suggests that “Christians are the de-worlded … the part of no part, the community of outsiders … learning from, leaning toward and reaching out to the people who live day to day as the trash of the world … [who] lay down the various political, religious and cultural narratives that protect us from looking at our own brokenness and allow it to be brought to light.”

Would that we genuinely lived in the way Rollins suggests! Vicuña’s art provides an object lesson in visualising such praxis.

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Rob Hallingan - Another Fine Mess.

Saints - evolving, personal and alive

Several current exhibitions in London make significant use of the Christian tradition of saints to comment on contemporary issues.

In Iconostasis at the Halcyon Gallery, Mitch Griffiths asks, 'Who are the icons of today? Who are the celestial equivalents of our age?' "Griffiths plays with the notion that our saints have now evolved – no longer heavenly, but worshipped for their unending trials and self-promotion through the media. Griffiths’ figures exist in a state of purgatory – neither holy nor common, famed nor unknown – hanging on the edge of a nirvana which is based no longer on divinity, but instead on a false sense of ecstasy ensued by the rituals and expected behaviours of contemporary society."

In Cecilia Vicuña's early paintings, "religious icons are replaced by personal, political and literary figures, and some were previously exhibited in her 1973 exhibition (Pain Things & Explanations) at London’s ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)." Her exhibition at England & Co begins with a group of these "paintings from the early 1970s that narrate her own history, interwoven with that of Chile and Salvator Allende. These use a painting technique Vicuña learned in the late 1960s from the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington; and were initially inspired by the naive and subtly subversive images made by 16th Century indigenous artists in Latin America after the Spanish conquest when they were forced to paint angels and saints for the Catholic Church."
Michael Landy: Saints Alive is the culmination of Landy’s position as the National Gallery’s current Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist in residence.

"Landy’s imagination has been captured by images of saints in the collection; the colourful and detailed portrayal of their lives, their attributes, and stories of their single-mindedness and strength have provided powerful stimuli for Landy’s work. Towering over visitors, the seven large-scale sculptures swivel and turn, in movements that evoke the drama of each saint’s life. Saints Apollonia, Catherine, Francis, Jerome, Thomas – and an additional sculpture that takes a number of saints as its inspiration – fill the Sunley Room alongside collages on paper that show the creative process on which Landy embarked to arrive at the kinetic sculptures.

The large-scale sculptures are formed of re-imagined fragments of National Gallery paintings cast in fibreglass, painted and assembled with the surprising addition of metal cogs, wheels, defunct fan belts and motors that Landy has accumulated from junkyards, car boot sales and flea markets. Landy has reworked the two-dimensional images into energetic three-dimensional pieces, creating elements hidden from view in the original paintings, such as a saint’s back or the fullness of folds of drapery. Keen to involve visitors and to facilitate interaction with the works, Landy has devised foot pedal mechanisms that crank the works to life."
Richard Dorment, reviewing the exhibition for the Daily Telegraph, concludes:

"Landy’s interest in saints who were willing to suffer and die for their beliefs doesn’t seem so remote from the subjects he’s been dealing with throughout his career. What makes his take on the world so interesting to me is that he rejects both the materialism of Marxism on the one hand and of consumerism on the other in favour of a third possibility, that we can live our lives according to spiritual values, placing our trust in things we can’t see or touch or own – whether that entails religious belief or not.

What an artist."

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James Macmillan - Padre Pio's Prayer. 

Serpentine & Westbourne Grove

I met up with Alan Stewart on Monday at the Serpentine Gallery for one of our periodic sessions comparing notes on our respective ministries while taking in some art. It was also an opportunity for me to firm up my input to the Everyday Icons day which Alan has been involved in organising.

We began with a coffee under the sinuous and mesmeric Serpentine Pavilion 2009 which provided the opportunity for some great 'Windows on the world' photos (which will feature in coming weeks) and the more descriptive photos above.

From the Serpentine, we walked through Notting Hill to Westbourne Grove where we saw Chair Poetics at England & Co and an exhibition of works from the School of Paris at Hanina Fine Arts.

Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor use design as a critical, visual discourse to communicate ideas about design, culture and society today. In Chair Poetics ordinary, everyday chairs are reconfigured to ask questions about our relationship to utility, familiarity, obsolescence, sustainability and value. While interesting in their own right, the reconfigured chairs, to my mind, had greater aesthetic values in the photographs that Ball and Naylor had taken of them than in their battered and broken reality.

Hanina Fine Arts write of the School of Paris that:

"From the concentration of radical thought in Paris, after the second World War, a new generation of artists emerged, known as the Jeune École de Paris. These artists came from all over Europe and the vibrant and provocative nature of their work reflected the turmoil of civilisation and sought a renewal of language and aesthetics that would provide expression and orientation to the loss of faith in traditional values within post-war society."

These are artists that in terms of art history are not well known because they pursued abstraction after the Art World's interest had moved on from that movement to the next and subsequent movements. This does not mean though that their explorations of the potential of abstraction were without value making this an exhibition of surprises from artists about which I had read very little. I particularly enjoyed the thick brush strokes of Claude Vernard into which he scraped patterns and over which he splayed lines of pure paint.

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Fleet Foxes - Your Protector.