It’s not an exaggeration to say that Cecilia Vicuña, at the age of 24, and without even meaning to be, was way ahead of her time as a maker of conceptual art in Chile. It is also not an exaggeration
Cecilia y el quipu mestrual
to emphasize that as a performance artist, feminist artist, visual artist, and literary artist, she was way ahead of her time both now and 45 years ago, not just in Chile, but around the world as well.
Of Vicuňa’s contributions to the “artistic, political and cultural revolution” of Chile in the 1960s and 70s. Juliet Lynd, the primary scholar of Vicuna’s work in the U.S., has written the following:
Cecilia Vicuña was on the vanguard of this cultural scene: she lived in the margins, but her work (visual, performative and also poetic) of that era anticipated the important artistic and academic movements in conceptual art and performance that took off in the 70s and 80s encapsulating even the discourses of second wave feminism…..Lucy Lippard has classified her small sculptures made from objects found on the beach in Concón in 1966 as a precursor by six months to Robert Smithson’s Earthworks in the US; they also predate the silhouettes of Ana Mendieta, the exiled Cuban artist who sketched feminine figures into the landscape in the 70s as well as the earth-drawings made by Atsuko Tanaka in Japan in 1968. Nemusio Antúnez, in response to Otoňo in the Museum of Bellas Artes {in Santiago} in 1971….informed Vicuña that she was making “conceptual art.”
This was the first time Cecilia had heard the term “conceptual art,” yet in her journal notes about the installation of Otoňo/Autumn, where she filled a museum exhibition hall with dried leaves, she analyzes the piece as if she were an experienced practitioner. She writes that Autumn is “an interior piece rather than exterior one, because its conception and the experience of doing it counts more than the sculpture itself.”
