Precarious Forms: Altarpiece
Precarious Forms: Altarpiece. Clothing, bedclothes, trash bags, gloves, branches, mud, bricks, 2022.
Precario es lo que se obtiene por oracion. Inseguro, apurado o escase. (del Latin, “precarious”, de “preces”; plegaria.)
Precarious is what is obtained by prayer. Uncertain; exposed to hazards, insecure. From the Latin “precarious”, from “precis”; prayer.
Cecilia Vicuña, Precario (1983).
translated by Anne Twitty.
Artist Statement
This project takes its name—Precarious Forms—from Candice Amich’s Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas [1]. Precarious forms, according to Amich, “engage neoliberal forces” — particularly commodification, dispossession, individualism, and state violence — in order to “privilege precarious life over capital." Unlike art that exploits labor and enacts neoliberal entrepreneurship, precarious forms “dwell in, rather than obscure, the embodied suffering to which neoliberalism gives rise." The forms feature “disappearance and risk of erasure," “the ephemeral”, and “the trace."
The project takes particular inspiration from two artists Amich analyzes: Cecilia Vicuña, Chilean poet and installation artist, and Ana Mendieta, Cuban American body-earth artist. Quotes from Vicuña's Precario are included as epigraphs.
The project materials were gathered from trash dumps in the artist's neighborhood, Interbay Seattle. They include clothes and bedding, as well as plastic bags, bricks, branches, and other trash. All materials were clearly abandoned: caked in mud, disintegrating, or otherwise unusable. No materials were cleaned. No additional materials, such as glue or tape, were used. In between work sessions, the forms were left outside and exposed to rain, wind, and human disturbance. After the project was finished, the objects were placed in the artist's backyard, where they are decomposing.
In these forms, the city's waste is transformed into an uneasy altarpiece. Here: a little prayer object, in which precarious life is held precious, if only for a moment.
[1] Candice Amich, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 19-25.
La concencia de la propia muerte trae una nueva visión del Tiempo.
Una obra dedicada al gozo quiere hacer sentir la urgencia del presente que es la urgenencia de la revolución.
Being conscious of death brings a new vision of Time.
A word dedicated to joy wants to make the urgency of the present, which is the urgency of the revolution, palpable.
Cecilia Vicuña, Precario (1983).
translated by Anne Twitty.