Cecilia
Vicuña’s Cloud-Net Trans. Rosa Alcalá.
New York: Art in General, 1999
by Anna Reckin
I The Weaving of Words
ching, as in Tao Te Ching, or I Ching, sacred book: warp.
wei, its commentaries: weft
(“The Weaving of Words,” Precarious, q. 133)
When I agreed to write a response to Cecilia Vicuña’s Cloud-Net, I thought that I would slip into it as easily as one slips into her work, that “responding” would simply involve a somewhat descriptive analysis, an enthusiastic pointing out of what I admire and find fascinating in what Vicuña does. But the more time I spent with the book, the harder it has been to write about it. One reason is that so much of what makes Cloud-Net work is embedded/embodied in materiality and performance, grounded in ephemerality and transformative ritual. The remains (traces) of a project like this can be represented pictorially—as this book shows most beautifully—but the next step, to make words of my own that were not already made redundant by Vicuña’s realizations, seemed almost impossible. Not until I found myself talking with the book—using Vicuña’s words as a warp against which to construct a weft of commentary—did my work feel at all productive. Writing as weaving is one of Vicuña’s central metaphors, but it’s important to remember that dialogue implies a space, in at least two dimensions. Lines of communication don’t merely answer a with a and b with b; but open up “new” places, too.
II Entering
To remember (recordar) in the sense of playing the strings (cuerdas)
of emotion
“Entering,” Precarious,
q.131
Vicuña has been working with thread for most of her career, tying, fastening, pulling together. Looking at her earlier work, I see photos of little bundles of litter (basuritas), wound round with cord, memorials of resistance to the 1973 coup in her native Chile, and constructed in London; threads passing between stones and trees and over rivers, high in the Andes; a room in Holland strung with geometrical lines that catch the sunlight, and then here, in this book, gallery spaces hung with soft hammocks of unspun wool in Houston, Buffalo, and New York. This is only a selection; lines of straw and twigs also find their way over Chilean beaches and are laid gently into New York gutters.
First there was listening with the fingers, a sensory memory:
the shared
bones, sticks and feathers were sacred things I had to arrange.
(“Entering,” Precarious, q. 131)
The basis of Cloud-Net is an airy web of raw (unspun) wool, raveled and unraveled in three different places—Hallwells Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York State; DiverseWorks Artspace, Houston, Texas; Art in General, New York City—between 1998 and 1999, accompanied by video, performance, and workshops. Part of the video work at Buffalo included documentation of a performance on the waterfront in New York City:
a group of women make an open weaving of thread. Holding the ends and intersections, they trace the movement of a weaver, a loom, and the cloth with their bodies and their hands. A poem makes its way through the threads slowly. The threads are finally released in the river as the poem ends. (Cloud-Net 8)
The Cloud-Net book, which is documentation for that performance, and for the exhibition in its various embodiments, follows roughly the same ritual structure: first setting up, then letting go.
At the same time, it works from outside edges inwards—though of course a net can be said not to have outside edges—its lines will continue to run through, beyond any frame that’s put around them…The main part of the book—its “real” matter, separated out from prelims and endmatter, forewords, introductions, acknowledgments—is framed by a hand-drawn trellis marked on a chalkboard. At the beginning, we have the steps that lead into the ritual: a prayer, “mother of clouds, please let me through” written in cursive script across two blank pages, and a photo of Vicuña standing, draped in soft threads, face hidden under a cone-shaped hat. We also see photos of her at work on the installation, setting up threads as if setting up a loom. At the end are the steps that lead us out: a letter to the reader consisting of quotes and commentary, and a letter to the workshop participants, and, as almost the very last piece of text, one of their responses as written on a chalkboard: “earth, its god tring. to get our attention./mind. god is tring to fix my mind./wavs. its the fish tring to call us./clouds thier moving to fing a place to live.”
The innermost part of the frame is made by two photos of Vicuña holding thread above her head. At the front of the book, she’s a dark figure between evenly spaced warp threads, holding a mass of soft wool in front of her face; at the back, she’s a silhouette of body and arms up high (on a roof?) holding the end of a thread that makes its way down towards us, straight as a cable.
The poems and photos in the first half of the book set up looms and make nets. They document the Cloud-Net video, with stills of a cat’s cradle of threads running/being run along a pier; they show us photos of heads wrapped in nets (Vicuña herself, in work dating from 1969, and an eighth-century illustration of the Mayan god Pawahtun), and they point up the webs in window-frames and cobblestones, the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Nets are based on knots (if a knot is taken to be an entanglement of one thread with another), and knotting, as Vicuña reminds us, is also inscribing, a way of taking notes. This is in part a reference to quipu, woolen cords, some knotted, some not, used by the Incas as a recording system. Here there is also a reference to the knot as a crux, a place that calls for decipherment:
“The
masculine ah
in
the head of the God C,
K’u, called “the sacred”
and
the syllabic sign na/house
were read ah k’u
of the sacred house”
...
the
book and
the scribe
is
the knot
ah
k’u hun
“of the sacred book” (Cloud-Net 52)
This is the start of a poem that is made out of commentary by Dennis Tedlock and others on the text of the Popol Vuh, described in Vicuña’s notes as “the Quiché Mayan book of creation.” Vicuña has homed in on the interpretation of a single phrase, showing that close scrutiny of the syllabic signs of Quiché Maya may not result in any one meaning. Instead, the process seems to open out layered threads of possibility; words that have to do with writing, knotting, and the names of gods slide over each other, connected but refusing to be tied down.
The knots are not resolutions, then, and we need to keep paying attention to what lies between them. The dancers spinning threads along the pier are Fates,
but
fate is not
the
force that predetermines events
as
the dictionary says
fate
is to speak
and
you fate yourself
as
you speak
(“Er,” Cloud-Net 34)
Words are movement, and breath, and the spinning out of a thread, even a story:
and
they came to a mysterious place, at which
there
were two chasms
the
myth says
two heavenly openings
and
two earthly openings
by
one of each pair souls departed
and
by the other they came back
and
there
in
that intermediate space
(Cloud-Net 34)
*
The second part of the book both meditates on and enacts processes of fragmentation and dissolution. It includes the contents of the three “poet’s tables” that Vicuña constructed for the exhibition’s three venues, tiny sculptures made of trash, which she calls precarios, or prayers. Lists of their titles, some in Spanish, some in English, form three poems.
Among the pieces shown close up are “wool satellite,” a puff of orange wool with bright red plastic netting loosely wound round it, and “nuestra casa espiral,” a cone-shaped spiral of metal ribbon, with a mass of orange threads hanging down inside it, suggesting a tent, the frailest kind of shelter. These are made from found objects, a reminder of Vicuña’s account of the origins of spinning, quoted in an interview at the beginning of the book:
The first weaving must have been the crisscrossing of grass and twigs, for building a nest or a shelter to give birth, or twisting vines to make rope. But to get from that early imitative gesture to spinning wool requires a powerful leap of imagination—noticing, perhaps, that any piece of wool, either caught by the wind, or by an object in passing, tends to form a spiral. When a person rubs these two fingers together, whatever is between the fingers spins, either to the right or to the left. Everything around us has this spinning energy in it, which probably originates in that first spiraling energy coming out of the big bang, spinning things out from a center. (Cloud-Net 18)
The New York table, illustrated here, looks like a painting by Miró, with its black and red lines drawing out colored blobs across a pale surface. The scale of the pieces, and their attenuated quality, makes me think of other surrealist objects: the minute sculptures, many of them less than an inch high, that Giacommetti made during his sojourn in Switzerland during the Second World War. Laura Hoptman, in one of the introductory essays to Cloud-Net, describes the powerful poignancy of Vicuña’s sculptural work:
I had heard that Vicuña, a poet, made books, and I went to her studio to search for one. When I got there, I saw an object, small, and made of plaster, V-shaped, with each wing unevenly rectangular and awkwardly keeling over to one side. It looked like a tiny white cliff, and it cut me to the heart. In that object, in that moment when I perceived that object, I read a profound and terrible story of leaving a place never to return, of utter loneliness and of absolute silence. “What is that,” I asked. “It is a book,” Vicuña replied. (Cloud-Net 11)
In his discussion of Vicuña's precarios, “Cryptic Weaving,” Hugo Méndez-Ramirez mentions the phrase “al filo del agua,” which he translates as “on the edge of disaster.”(Precarious 60) Whether figured as “down to the wire,” or the thread of water as a precipitous edge, this phrase seems to encapsulate the vulnerability of the precarios,—a suggestion, perhaps, of the drop below the net that becomes apparent at moments of great danger.
The tone of the second half of the book is bleaker than the first half. In a sense, “cloud,” representing smoke, sweat, clouds of steam, the miasmas of city life, and the dangers to the earth of environmental imbalance, is in danger of taking over from “net.” In the “Letter to the Reader” at the end of the book, Vicuña asks
Has the earth lost its cool?
Did we lose a moist place within? A place where tolerance and moderation reside?
(Cloud-Net 90)
Reversal isn’t impossible, though, if you know where to turn to:
As the weather becomes more extreme, the difference between rich and poor intensifies, diseases go wild, and the poet dreams of enlarging her stitch, of cooling herself and the earth at once.
Pachacuti el soñar
Space/Time reversals: the dream,
keeping balance
(Cloud-Net 91)
Pachacuti,
“world reverser,” is the Andean deity associated with rain, thunder and
lightning. He is also, the notes to the poems tell us, “the supreme mediator
of sound.” Two poems at the beginning of the second section are dedicated
to him, under the names of Illapa and Illapantac, and they call upon the
powers of song and the mediating flow of water and tears to
open
vessel’s door
open it wide
to carryits broken sustenance (“Illapantac,” Cloud-Net 63)
Illapa’s
clouds, containing sound and light, form a dynamic matrix out of which
help can come:
touch
in transitone in three
light
in noisenoise
in light (“Illapa,” Cloud-Net 65)
And even clouds as smoke can have ambivalent powers, especially when grounded, given roots:
the breath
of the earthits pain
a strong smell (“dheu,” Cloud-Net 65)
Here
the haze, illustrated by photos of buildings obscured by rising steam
from heating vents, becomes the smoke of the oracle pouring through a
crack in the earth.
But the ending of the ritual is as light as its beginning, marked by a return to the girls dancing and weaving—making a net, making a web of living, singing connections, re-making nest/shelter/matrix/cloud/net:
These girls
weavingour undone hem
They,
a nestWe,
a passingready
to takea cloud
thread (“Cloud Nest,” Cloud-Net 81)
The last few photos show white woolly threads, oddly comforting, laid over rooftops. Caterpillar-soft, a thick white line is swung across a flat roof, climbs up and over a stepped gable. Finally, as described at the beginning of this essay, a fluffy cable swings up on a steep diagonal, connecting earth and sky.
*
|
String in the air |
(“Antivero,” Precarious, q. 64)
The threads are wound through and between unlikely pairings (the Andes mountains and the streets of New York City), like the tendrils of a plant or the running of water, making strands/streams of connection but never stopping still; pushing or pulling against only to keep moving on. It’s in the nature of thread to be linear, but this is the linearity of drawing (Klee taking a line for a walk), an exploratory line that draws out a relationship, points up the possibility of convergence, rather than the straight and narrow path that already knows its own conclusion.
If, at the beginning of time, poetry was an act of communion, a form of collectively entering a vision, now it is a space one enters, a spatial metaphor.
(“Entering,” Precarious, q. 131)
The paradox of the net is rather like the paradox of a line drawing; the line that wraps and encloses but also releases form. A containing-within that is also a passing-through. “Open” and “closed” also start to blend into each other. Cloud-Net’s soft squares were woven indoors, in galleries, but an earlier squared-up mesh was constructed in the stone-walled space of a corral in Chile. In the photo, the field is flat, and beyond the walls are trees and mountains. The threads that pass over it seem to say, “here, in this ‘empty’ space, is where the connections become clear.” And also, maybe, “there is no inside and no outside.” (“The Corral Grid,” Precarious q. 114-15)
III Connection
The art of joining, union
from ned: to bind, to tie
zero grade form: nod
Old English: net
Latin: nodus
knot (Connection, Precarious q. 134)
At the center of the book,
where I have made a division between its two halves, a small and very
simple black and white image: one thread laid over another. A cross(ing).
Heart of a weave, simplest kind of knot. Knitting, lace, and crochet are
based on knots, and the most basic kind of stitch (for fastening, or embroidery)
requires that resistance—the thread against itself, or against another.
Scattered across the matrix, these shining moments, constellations of little crosses
Back to the net, though—what (it) slips, splits through…
IV Crossing Over
dwelling in in-betweenness, one language is transforming itself into the next…like dwelling in the trans, transformation of the language
(Interview)
This
project is fabricated out of translation: translation of metaphor (between
material and spiritual, poetry and artwork), and translation between languages
(English, Spanish, Quiché Maya). Not all the Spanish also appears in English;
specificities (knots, cruxes?) are important. Where the translation reads
across facing pages, it’s as if there’s a third poem that hangs between.
Sometimes Alcalá’s English words are directly opposite their equivalents
in Spanish, sometimes they appear at a diagonal. As I try to write and
explain this, I find myself making cross-shapes in the air with my fingers—the
same movements one uses to hook up the string of a cat’s cradle.
el ruido light
en luz in noisela luz noise
en ruidal in light(“Illapa,” Cloud-Net 64)
The “change” in exchange
spin, to draw out and twist into thread, from spen, pen, Latin pendere,
to hang, weight, pensare, to think
(“The Weaving of Words,” Precarious q. 133)
Works Cited
Vicuña, Cecilia. Interview, conducted by Charles Bernstein. Granolithic Productions, 1996. Also available at http://wings.buffalo.edu.epc/authors/vicuna.
_____. Cloud-Net. Trans. Rosa Alcalá. Art in General, 1999.
Vicuña, Cecilia et al. QUIOem/The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña. Ed. M. Catherine De Zegher. Trans. Esther Allen. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1997.
BIO: Born in England, Anna Reckin has been living in the USA since 1995, and is currently studying in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Her poetry has appeared in Chain, Prosodia, Key Satch(ell), and The Texas Observer. Broder, her first book, can be found in the mixed media section of this issue.
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