Cecilia Vicuña. Quipu Visceral, 2017; site-specific wool installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

Upon entering the tall, irregular gallery spaces of CACNO, the viewer is invited to read and view simultaneously—a curatorial decision enacted most powerfully in the first juxtaposition of visual and textual representation. The viewer is greeted with the compact elegance of Vicuña’s words: “The first precarious works were not documented, they existed only for the memories of a few citizens. History, a fabric of inclusion and exclusion, did not embrace them… In the void between the two, the precarious and its non-documentation established their non-place as another reality.”[2] The text finds a visual accompaniment in the vertical installation of richly dyed streams of woolen fabric, Quipu Visceral (2017). Made of colored cotton or camelid fibers, quipus (or “talking knots”) played a crucial role in ancient Andean South American cultures as record-keeping or data-collecting devices to gather census figures, monitor tax obligations and trade payments, and mark agricultural changes in seasons; thus, they stand as a form of writing before these regions and cultures were subsumed by Spanish colonial occupation and European systems of time and representation. Vicuña’s quipu transform this ancient practice into a visual metaphor for the collisions of two competing cultures and worldviews: the Andean universe of oral communication spatialized through an embodied, nonlinear encounter with time, and the Western mapping of time through the linear, teleological unfolding of the printed word. Investing herself as the reader–writer of the quipu—the quipucamayoc, or “one that animates or gives life to the knot”—and as a full participant within the Western poetic and visual tradition, Vicuña pleads with us to reimagine and recover our lost relationship to the spatial–temporal as a way to recast our awareness of and impact upon the ecological. Weaving and threading between and within ancient and Western systems, Vicuña preserves indigenous traditions, transforming these lost ways of being in the world into urgent political tools.

Cecilia Vicuña. Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood, 2017; site-specific installation of found materials sourced from New Orleans, Chile, and New York (debris, bamboo, willows, twigs, fishing line, beads, rope, net, and feathers); approx. 42 x 6 x 11 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

Vicuña utilizes found objects culled from walks along the deltas, beaches, waterways, and streets of the Louisiana coast in her large-scale installations that stretch across the floor of the gallery, such as Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood (2017), and small-scale visual configurations, such as Precarios (2017), made up of 117 found-object sculptures that spread discursively across the walls of the gallery and operate as thoughtful meditations on the uncanny beauty of this natural and artificial sea-detritus. Strung with string, hung with wire, floating, framed, and placed with careful intention, these forms and objects are suspended in the air, on the wall, or on the floor, suggesting the diverse constellation of animal inhabitants of sea and land, and the natural environments (above or below the water) where these creatures live. Whether these inanimate life-forms are thriving or dying, memorialized or discarded, within these habitats is left ambiguously unclear. It is up to the viewer to unpack and peel apart the terrible sorrows and resplendent love for the sea and its citizens that Vicuña addresses in her works. Mobilizing us to mourn and honor the natural environment simultaneously, the artist is able to awaken an embodied form of care and concern for the beautiful that is consistently disavowed in our current culture.

Cecilia Vicuña. Precarios, 1966-2017; site-specific installation of 117 found object sculptures (stone shells, glass, wood, plastic, debris). Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

The final room contains La Noche de la Especies (2009)—an immersive, cosmologically inflected film where Vicuña’s words and lines of poetic text shift and move into and out of patterns that recall constellations of stars, planets, comets, and other heavenly bodies. A meditation on the flexible richness of writing, the fluid resonances of collage practices, the mobile symbolic relations between art and poetry, and the open channel between representation and the natural world that Vicuna’s practice seeks to keep alive and breathing, the film does not signal a climax or closure to the exhibition, but an aperture into space and time, and an encounter with our own place within them.

Cecilia Vicuña. La Noche de la Especies, 2009; looping animation installation by Robert Kolodny; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

 Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen is on view at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 18, 2017.

[1] My deepest thanks go to Allison Abney, Senior Manager of External Affairs at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, for all her help and support during the writing and researching of this article.

[2] This excerpt comes from Cecilia Vicuña’s text Quipoem—printed and used as the first wall text for the CACNO’s exhibition About to Happen.

Adam Pendleton. Yes, But, 2008; acrylic paint on wall; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans.

The immediate impact of Pendleton’s engagement with the architectural space of the institution invites visitors to understand his engagement with site as a form of occupation. The vertical space of each gallery is dramatically papered with the artist’s stark black-and-white materials—collages, posters, paintings, silkscreens, and acrylic texts swarm the walls, covering the visual field with appropriated and fragmented photographic materials that shout and stutter across three dimensions.[1] Viewers are continuously met with a cacophony of printed matter and textual fragments that tautologically enact Pendleton’s desire for hierarchies of aesthetic representation, production, and historical origins to cross-reference, and subsequently, re-signify.

This mode is powerfully introduced at the start of the exhibition with Yes, But (2008), a wall painting of quotes appropriated from the legendary French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard in the 2002 film The Future(s) of Film. Oscillating somewhere between portraiture, poetry, and fragmented non sequitur, Pendleton covers the wall with appropriated text—a gesture that nods to the French auteur’s critique of style and his embrace of the productive possibilities inherent in the accumulation of found content. Pendleton’s destabilization of authorship is a strategy that follows the structures and dynamic history of the avant-garde in the 20th century, and forms the conceptual foundation for a practice that expands from a dissolution between material and process.

Adam Pendleton. System of Display, X (EXPRESS/Poro secret society mask, Mano, Liberia), 2016; silkscreen ink on Plexiglas and mirror; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans.

The heterogeneous series of silkscreen works entitled System of Display (2016) present the ways that Pendleton lifts source materials to create an image that points to discourses of artistic and political emancipation rather than re-presenting them. By resisting the tendency to simply align and insert himself within the lineage of negational art—from Dada to Conceptual Art—Pendleton complicates this history of oppositional art and institutional critique by interrupting it with his own subjectivity as a politicized African American artist. Pendleton states, “I am working to establish a system of display, of organization. I want to create a situation where we’re inclined to rethink notions of the past and the future, as well as our ability to understand them enough to make reductive statements.”[2]

Adam Pendleton. Installation view of the series Untitled (Code Poems), 2016; ceramic. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans.

At the heart of this exhibition is Pendleton’s continual engagement with an expanded history and definition of abstraction as it has developed and cross-pollinated in the visual and poetic arts. A new series of ceramic floor works referred to as “code poems” gather a range of references to the interaction of visual form and language, namely a nod to the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics through an appropriation of Hannah Weiner’s experimental text Morse Code (2002), as well as the spatial elegance of Carl Andre’s minimal floor sculptures. Again, Pendleton’s appropriation of ready-made sources turns the act of referencing into an integral part of the creation of new systems of representation. Pendleton’s foregrounding of the processes of organizing, arranging, and classification—themes that are at the heart of Western modernism, and specifically the minimalist canon—are then mobilized, critically mined, and reopened to create new forms of consciousness that ignite with our present aesthetic and political moment. For Pendleton, abstraction is not a dead, empty visual language, and appropriation is not a form of meaningless relativism, but rather a charged set of assumptions and strategies that, when displaced, offer 21st-century viewers a vital affirmation of the possibility of new orders and narratives.

Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible is on view at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 16, 2016.

[1] Andrea Andersson’s thoughtful exhibition-catalog essay points to the ways in which Pendleton uses “incompleteness” of language and “dysfluency” (commonly known as stuttering) as a formal and conceptual strategy. See Andersson’s“The Disobedient Copyist: Adam Pendleton’s Language of Resistance” in Becoming Imperceptible: Adam Pendleton, exhibition catalog (New York: Siglio Press, 2016), 4–12.

[2] Quote lifted from the CACNO’s gallery guide, “Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible,” compiled by Dr. Andrea Andersson, Curator of the Visual Arts.