ABSTRACT
In 1966, Cecilia Vicuña drew a spiral in the sand on the beach of Concon, along the Pacific coast of Chile (Casa Espiral, 1966). She smoothed over the sand around the spiral and, at its perimeter, erected a precarious fence-like construct of materials found on the site. Not long after the work came into being, the tide washed it all away. A black and white photograph now indexes the occasion. Vicuña considers this her first artwork and has since returned to the same site to repeat and produce similar iterations.
In these and other works by Vicuña, the landscape is not a static ground for the figure of the work, but rather it is a relational site that is the very condition of possibility for the work, allowing it to take shape and then cease to exist. Conceiving of the work through feminist approaches to a decolonial Anthropocene, the essay will consider the act of art making, not as an act of autonomous innovation on the part of an individual, but always as a repetition of contingent and situated acts that are necessarily inherited as well as provisional.
Land art is typically the art historical category in which artists situate their works in a landscape, beyond the confines of an art institution. Vicuña's work, made for a particular landscape, falls within the temporal frame of land art's heyday. However, troubling habitual notions of both landscape and artwork, the essay will also seek to critique ideas of unidirectional influence and teleological development through which art history is habitually thought.
