Lygia Clark
Brazilian 1920 - 1988
Lygia Clark was a Brazilian artist best known for her
painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian
Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement.
Her artistic career began in the 1950s in abstract art, and
particulary in a critical examination of the Constructivist in the Modern
Movement to which, as a member of the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro during the
mid-1950s, she devoted a great deal of attention. Soon the social utopias of
the Constructivists no longer seemed enough for her and she became a founder
member of the neo-concrete movement in Brazil.
The Bichos, 1960, are abstract metal objects whose
individual parts are linked by hinges, which allows them not only to be moved,
but also invites the observer to handle them. With this step, her sculptural
production revealed new possibilities for the integration of tactile modes of
experience.
Caminhando, 1963, invited people to glue a strip of paper
into a Moebius Strip and to cut along the middle of it with a pair of scissors,
until the remaining strip was too narrow to be cut any more. Clark remarked in
this connection that the action should make the actor question binary way of
thinking in everyday life...right and left, and up and down prove to be invalid
categories for a Moebius Strip.
Baba antropofágica
In
collective works like «Túnel» or «Objetos relacionais,» Lygia Clark initiates
psychic processes of exchange which transform the dichotomy of subject and
object. In doing so, she follows the transgressive logic of «devouring» and
«vomiting». The reception of «Baba antropofágica» («Cannibalistic Saliva») also
relies on the documentary film «O mundo de Lygia Clark,» filmed by Eduardo
Clark in 1973. But escaping this phantasmal staging of the body seems almost
impossible: kneeling over a guinea-pig-like subject lying on the floor, a
figure pulls from its mouth—like spiders do from their bodies—a
spittle-drenched thread and spins a cocoon around the reclining figure. The
precarious division of subject and object is eliminated by this thread-like
weaving, with the gestural webbing of the passive subject completing the
inversion of the internal and external. In the retrospective, these interactive
aspects might have been what was most convincing. In contrast to Performance
and Body Art, Lygia Clark understood herself to be an initiator of processes,
and was most successful in this respect when her haptic attempts on orderings
were targeted at inter-subjective body politics.
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