“If a lamp
can be considered an art work, why not our life itself? This Foucault's
sentence sums up Lygia Clark's work. Connecting art and life. She went through
a long way to get to this conclusion, a long way where every step was a crisis,
where every step was painful but needed. Her first paintings were connected to
Constructivism, regular shapes reminiscent of Cubism, that very soon started to
fight to get off the wall. Her Beasts (1962-64) did it: they fell from the wall and
they were able to move like little animals, but only when somebody touched
them. They didn't have right or left side, no front or back, little creatures waiting to be touched.
But some of these pieces were installed in a gallery surrounded by glass, in
cases: they were dead inside, like trapped corpses, and Lygia decided that it
would be the last time for her to exhibit in a gallery.
Her Mobius strip (Caminhando, 1964) couldn't exist in a gallery. It only exists when somebody touches it, when somebody cuts the strip into infinity creating an endless path. The artwork is the action, but there is still an object that is about to disappear completely. While she was teaching at Sorbonne, she realized that art could be therapy. In a society where body had been forgotten and ignored, recovering it could be a catharsis, a way to be aware of ourselves, of our body and what surround us. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945,) the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that when we touch something is not the object what we feel, but our own body in contact with this object. The new surface’s contact is the way to know that we do exist.
This is Lygia Clark’s goal: returning the body that we have forgotten. In her following works the object is less and less important: in Baba Antropofagica (1973) people pull from their mouths a spittle-drenched thread until it covers a person who lies on the floor. People vomit thread, or maybe they “vomit experiences”. We don’t need objects anymore, our body has become the tool for a catharsis that allows us to expel fears and traumas.
“Ritual without myths”, Lygia used to said. Art, at last, is life itself.
(Ana González Chouciño)
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