Book Proofs and Blue Nipples
Cecilia Vicuña's La Migranta Blue Nipple & New Work
I’ve just finished the final proof of Blood to Purify the World (out soon from Spuyten Duyvil). The small-press world (or perhaps the whole publishing world) is strange. Things move slower than expected because we expect instant gratification and success in today’s (flailing) economy.
This semester two people I know became TikTok stars. I think this is what I mean about instant notoriety and expectations. This is the kind of notice I’ve never been comfortable with. At times, I wish I could change this about myself.
I spent the last week sequestered in Brooklyn (which is part of what Blood to Purify the World is about—sequester on the East River). On Sunday, I watched tourists gawk at a fire on the Brooklyn Bridge. As I inhaled burnt rubber I thought about catastrophe—that which we are in and that which will continue to envelop us because we are relentless and ruthless.
On Friday, I made it to Lehmann Maupin Gallery to see Cecilia Vicuña’s latest show, La Migranta Blue Nipple, a collection of oil paintings reconceptualized from the late 70s, photographs, an exquisite precarios quipu, a wall of precarios, and two films—one a meditative buzz of pollinators, the other from her menstrual work in Athens.
A few years ago, Vicuña did a pollinator project with the High Line in which people buzzed like bees. If I showed the video to people who weren’t into performance or didn’t participate in the collective ritual, they thought it was slightly odd. I think we’re at the juncture where oddity might be what can save us, or at least preserve some elements of human culture.
Her second film followed a ritual at Elusis (also some of what Blood to Purify the World is about). She rolls a swath of red wool into a ball and places it in the mouth of Hades cave.
In a podcast interview about the show, she discusses the consistency of death and change, that everything within the cosmos is impermanent, even galaxies. It is the worldview the rites of Elusis sought to cultivate among members of the millennia-long mystery cult—an appreciation for life because it will soon enough be followed by death.
The 43-minute podcast interview contextualizes her practices days after the US presidential election. Vicuña weighs her childhood experience of the deforestation of Chile with the climate crisis—a drive to extinction through capitalism that will likely get worse over the next four years if the last Trump presidency set any sort of environmental precedent.
In class, we’ve spent the last several weeks focused on cultivating community as an antidote to fear. One student wrote their future self a letter with the reminder that community is how we will survive. This is also evident in Vicuña’s work. In the film at Elusis, she wraps participants in a giant sheet of white wool. One participant seems to be asleep as the wool envelops their body before they all submerge the fibers into the sea. Today, I was reading about the shoreline as a liminal space—neither ocean nor land. Menstrual with its tides.
This past week, it felt as if I’d fallen into a void—not the typical stupor of fall break exhaustion, but the kind that feels a bit like Alice down the rabbit hole, flailing. I jotted down so many ideas after a semester without much energy to complete anything beyond book edits and a few small artist books.
We took photos of a new menstrual vulva coat I made, and I dreamed of a few more wearable pieces to begin during the Colorado winter snow. Staring into the river, I realized, I’m ready for more overt menstrual symbols—I’m ready for the menstrual revolution on par with Sophia Wallace’s Clitoracy. I’m ready folks to stop turning the color of period blood when they hear the word “menstruation.” I’m to turn my anger into gold (or at least into the thread that I will later spin into gold when I am imprisoned by a daft and greedy king).
Students have asked lately “Where do you sell your work?” I’m tired of replying, “Generally, I don’t.” But like a maiden wandering the forest, a maiden trapped in a glass castle, a maiden trapped in a tower with only peas to eat—I’m not yet sure how to change my fate. Will it be a magic mouse (like the one that appears to be living in my car)? Will it be a fairy? Or will it be a lump of gold growing into my shoulder?
This week, I began building encaustic “lamps”—light-up trash, waxed and sealed in photographs. They weigh almost nothing. The inside lights are either intricately wrapped and woven into each other or taped in a spiral formation.
Hiding the spiral highlights the trash. I’m thinking about highlighting the trash as trash-talking a kind of language in which trash has something important to say if we just take a moment to listen. These little lamps will soon be looking for new homes—let me know if you know the perfect place for a little trash-talk.