Public announcements such as posters, flyers, and advertisements have long been used by artists to engage everyday citizens and spark dialogue out of the bounds of the art institution. Often these media are printed en masse, in formats such as digital, offset, or letterpress printing. The letterpress was invented in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg and became one of the first tools for the mass dissemination of ideas. As abolitionist Wendell Phillips said in an 1852 speech on public opinion, “What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind. . .” 6 When Phillips referred to the printing press, he was speaking about the letterpress.

It’s no coincidence that CADA and Vicuña employed this production method commonly used for the spread of political discourse in the public sphere. CADA used these tools to enlist a broader public in their antiauthoritarian protest and denounce the institutionalization of Pinochet’s regime. Furthermore, these printed announcements become the first phase of their ephemeral actions; they are a referential index of the event in the register, telling us where, when, and for how long the action will take place.

Vicuña’s poster for Vaso de leche is a letterpress-printed sheet that appropriates the aesthetics of bullfighting posters. The design of this register prepares our subconscious to perceive the action—the overturning of a glass—in a violent light, suggesting that life itself is a battle of life and death.

While the print announces the event to come, it continues to circulate even after the performance. My access to this object is twice removed—what I see is an image of the register, a digital photograph of the letterpress print. There is an aspect of the speculative in looking at the record: we draw conclusions from what we see and what we can’t see at all. All I know is that each letter on Vicuña’s poster is an inky gradient from red to blue—from the color of blood to that of the sky.

I imagine this poster pasted up along the streets of Bogotá. I wonder who saw it and who attended the event. But such a level of detail is not something I can access through the register. The ephemeral is always in debt to the context. That said, what is recorded through the design and production of the poster provides clues as to the intentions of Vicuña’s action.

Beyond the poster, eight thirty-five-millimeter photographs are the only documentation that remains of the event. As an audience of the register, I’m drawn to the perfect compositional balance of each image. In the photographs, I can only see Vicuña’s legs and arms. The aesthetics are considered and poetic: the red string, the cursive font, the abstract spill, and the close point of view of the lens, as if it were capturing a crime scene. The way the photographs are sequenced suggests the precise tempo of the event. The harsh shadows turn Vicuña’s disembodied hands and feet ghostly. I’m also enthralled by the expressive mark left on the pavement by the white paint—in what seems like the result of the role of chance in registering the movement. The handwritten letters of Vicuña’s poem are cursive and childlike yet meticulously drawn on the pavement. The word sangre (blood) is emphasized in red, and the prose is deliberately spread across three photographs, allowing us, the audience, to read each word carefully.

Through the photograph, Vicuña asks, “¿Qué estamos haciendo con la vida?” (What are we doing with life?) La vida (life) is an ephemeral and precarious act, which the state—whether democratic or fascist—persistently misunderstands and fails to support.

Decades after Vicuña’s action, we are facing a baby formula shortage in the US as a consequence of a network of phenomena, including labor shortages due to the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and a product recall prompted by the deaths of nine infants. 7  In the New York metropolitan area, seventy percent of infant formula was out of stock as of May 21, 2022. 8 The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced an effort—Operation Fly Formula—to import baby formula from overseas and distribute millions of cans. These measures are expected to ease the shortage by the end of July. 9 Yet, while the population awaits these governmental interventions, parents are still scrambling to find ways to feed their newborns through informal milk swaps, which offer an example of collective action in response to neglect by the state. In the words of one mother, “You’re trying to bond with your baby and do all of the things that mothers feel pressure to do in the beginning. You are sleep deprived. Your hormones are racing through your body. And now you have this fear: ‘How am I going to feed her?” 10 

In 1979, Vicuña’s action specifically alluded to former Chilean president Salvador Allende’s socialist policy of providing a half liter of milk to each Chilean child daily as a preventative measure against malnutrition and infant mortality—and put it in direct dialogue with the criminal negligence of a private company, which sold milk mixed with paint and consequently killed thousands of children. Today, the register of Vicuña’s action could also be seen as a criticism of the US government’s failure to address the formula shortage. It has taken more than six months for one of the richest countries in the world to resolve this issue. Although I have written on Vicuña’s Vaso de leche as both a document of an art action and an index of a historical political moment, it is disconcerting how relevant her ideas continue to be to our modern day lives.

When I feel disempowered by the institutional lens, I reread a 1985 essay by writer and activist Audre Lorde in which she writes, “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into ideas, then into tangible actions.” 11  Her words are a reminder that poetry allows us to express the kind of future worlds we hope to live in. Poetry itself becomes a written register for liberation.

You can sense this in Vicuña’s practice. She unpacks words’ etymologies to form new meanings, like she does in her project Palabrarmas or in her characterization of her practice as “precario” (precarious). Vicuña’s actions suggest a way of being through poetic thinking. Curator and artist Surpik Angelini writes of Vicuña’s “voice, breath, accent, gestures, signs, traces, and marks” as containing an “aural” dimension. 12  This aurality is palpable in the rhythm and visuals contained by Vicuña’s photographic documentation of Vaso de leche. In a 1982 piece for the New York–based feminist magazine Heresies, founded by a feminist artist collective of which Vicuña was a member, she writes, “I had known from the beginning that Western civilization had done away with poetry as a necessity of life, that poetic thinking was a transgression.” 13 It’s imperative that we transgress not only in the register’s frame but also in the way we live collectively. By bridging the worlds of art and life, Vicuña and her practice provide a model for how we can do that.

For me, poetry is a tool for surviving the everyday. In this world ruled by a patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist, and imperialist system, poetry is the language that provides a portal for imagining other ways of being and belonging. In my practice, I explore these concepts—being and belonging—through different modes of audience participation. In her work Eman sí pasión / parti sí pasión, 1974, from the series Palabrarmas, Vicuña plays on the word “participación” which means to “share or take part in.” When we participate—take part—we are prompted to experience society as a collective. And through this collectivity we become aware of our shared powers. Perhaps it is this type of collective awareness that often gets lost in the documentation of an event. In the ephemeral records of Vaso de leche—in the poetry and rhythm of the photographs, the invitation of the poster—Vicuña’s distinct gestures and marks provide a portal for imagining other forms of collectivity. Through the register, we become aware of the art action’s significance, then and hereafter.