Cecilia Vicuña

Born in 1948 in Santiago (CL)
Lives and works in New York (US)

  

Vaso de Leche, Bogotá

1979
Photographs, three digital prints, poem
Dimensions variable
Purchased in: 2009

Parti si Pasión, New York
Quipu Austral
Vaso de Leche, Bogotá
¿Qué Es Para Ud. la Poesía?

“People are tied together by ropes and it’s bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into the empty space; ghastly when the rope breaks and he falls. That’s why we should cling to the others.” ¹

“A cow / is a continent / whose (blood) milk / has been spilled. / What do we do / to our life?” ²

Cecilia Vicuña, Chilean poet and artist, combines political activism with an experimental esthetic practice. Her work is centered on her own country from which she was exiled in 1970, as well as on the places of her refuge, in particular Colombia. She enacts a South-American humanism and consciousness in a reticular form of artistic mediation spanning all arts: plastic arts, literature, music, theater… She elaborates her concept of “arte precario,” ³ a type of anti-historical materialist (precario – precarious) and spiritual (precario – prayer) art which opens up the questioning of the present. For precariousness and prayer give us reasons to learn to live.

The three photographs of Vaso de Leche, Bogotá, 1979 contain neither a face nor a site nor a historical reference, nothing but a “synopsis” of a performance featuring symbolic elements, the true historical actors.
1: A glass of milk, placed on tarmac and held on a leash made of red thread (metaphor for the blood tie, the lama wool is the material signature of the artist) by a woman’s extended arm (the gender is deduced from the hem of a skirt),
2: which is tipped over by a tug of the arm
3: and spills its whiteness on the ground, outlining a ghostly figure.

The photographs proceed as “aids to memory.” It’s the esthetic of the instant, of the ephemeral trace, of “the document against the monument,” or what Gina Pane called the “photographic constants.” The performance eludes the idea that “everything is image,” predominant in Western culture, and constitutes a direct realization which mobilizes the context in order to experience contemporary art in its social, political, and economic issues.

Created at the invitation from the Chilean group C.A.D.A. ⁴ as part of the manifestation Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte (In Order Not to Starve to Death in Art), the performance Vaso de Leche, Bogotá, 1979 is a reinterpretation of a scandal in which the sale of spoiled milk caused the death of 1920 babies in Bogotá, imputing blame to Colombian public officials.
In her public performance, the artist invites the viewer to play the role of a witness in order to elevate the performance to a collective catharsis and to a “truth” in the face of facts. The act of spilling milk is a metaphor for the crime in which Colombians poison their own brothers with milk, literally an unbearable waste. Ironically, the artist installs her ephemeral memorial in front Simón Bolívar’s ⁵ house―an anti-spectacular gesture intended as a protest against the ambiguous relations of complementarity between order and violence which dominate in Colombia to the point of becoming “two sides of the same everyday reality.”
There are crimes of milk as there are crimes of blood.

_{luc jeand’heur}

_{1 Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak (1903) in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Schocken: New York, 1990. p. 12}

_{2 Cecilia Vicuña – Vaso de Leche, Bogotá, 1979.}

_{3 Precarious art which is based on the “idea that we are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away,” in the tradition of 1960-70s’ avant-gardes appropriated in South America.}

_{4 Colectivo Acciones De Arte, an action art collective established in 1979 in Chili in order to protest against the dictatorship of General Pinochet.}

_{5 Simon Bolivar, nicknamed “el Libertador,” South-American general and politician, an emblematic figure of liberation struggle of the Spanish colonies in South America from 1813, and in particular of Colombia.}

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