In addition to Lepecki’s essay, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

Performance and Lygia Clark

And yet . . . a paradox remains. If we shift our approach to a broader art-historical and cultural-historical perspective, we can understand Clark’s rejection of the categories of performance art, body art, and Happenings as something that paradoxically would include her in the history of performance art in its formative decades. In fact a number of her fellow artists engaging in corporeal propositions, collective propositions, antiobject propositions, aesthetic/political/healing propositions, and so on, shared a general feeling that “performance art” was an unhappy name for their work. As the art historian Kristine Stiles writes, “When the term ‘performance art’ gained currency in the burgeoning literature on action that appeared in the mid-1970s, many artists initially rejected it for the term’s connotations and association with traditional theater.”¹ In this sense Clark’s rejection becomes her way of partaking in a sensibility shared by many of her peers, particularly during the years when she was working in Europe, from 1968 until her return to Brazil in 1976.

We can now say, then, that Clark’s relationship to performance is not so simple a matter after all. The fact remains that it is impossible to write on her collective propositions, or on Caminhando, or on her sensorial objects, or on her therapeutic practices, without invoking performance-related concepts. Brett, sensitive though he is to Clark’s singularity, uses several terms associated with performance and body art in discussing her work: “The proposal of Lygia Clark is embodied in the act, and enacted in the body. It exists in the moment that you do it or live it and nothing remains afterwards” (emphasis mine).² Rolnik, another rigorous researcher into Clark, asked two French dance scholars, Laurence Louppe and Hubert Godard, to write for the catalogue of a 2005 exhibition she curated on the Estruturação do Self, and also published an essay there by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil, titled “Opening the Body.”Rolnik, De l’oeuvre à l’événement. The semantic field emerging from these texts is telling: words and phrases such as “act,” “embodied,” “body,” “in the moment,” “to do,” “live,” “movement,” and “nothing remains” clearly denote a conceptual field deemed ontological to performance. Yet performance theorists such as Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, Amelia Jones, Adrian Heathfield, Richard Schechner, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and others have defined performance as less a genre than an element or force, inflecting corporeality, ephemerality, embodiment, action, participation, lack of remainder, and liveness toward a specific (political and antirepresentational) class of effects in the world. Such would be the performative quality of performance. And Clark’s entire oeuvre after Caminhandoinvolves this particular force, prompting an understanding of the term “performance” in relation to her work after Caminhando as describing not a genre but an ethical, aesthetic, and political paradigm aimed at remaking the world.

Alongside Clark’s aesthetically and politically powerful works, insights, and propositions, a theory of performance could and perhaps should be rewritten—not to force her inclusion in the history of performance art, against her expressed wish, but to consider how that history might be reassessed under the force of her work. Through and with Clark’s work, not only the premises but the promises of performance might be reexamined. If performance theory has identified ephemerality, embodiment, presence, action, and participation as essential, even ontological, to performance, Clark scrambles, designifies, and resignifies these categories through a work, Rolnik writes, that “created a territory that did not exist until that moment, in which the modern project to reconnect art and life reached its limits.”³ In this “outlandish” territory lies the possibility of renewing performance art itself.⁴ I suggest that Clark’s work and writings advance a critique of performative reason on at least four levels: a critique of time (linked to Clark’s notion of the “time-act”); a critique of objecthood (linked to her notion of the relational object); a critique of presence (linked to her notion of anonymity); a critique of participation (linked to her notion of immanence).

First Critique: Time (Or Act)

From Kaprow’s affirmations of the 1960s that Happenings “exist for a single performance, or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place,” and that owing to their “planned obsolescence” they “should be unrehearsed and performed by nonprofessionals, once only,”⁵ to Phelan’s famous ontological diagnosis that “performance’s only life is in the present,”⁶ the link between performance art and ephemerality has been strong. Clark held a different view: “The collective body cannot function once, as a happening.”⁷ Indeed she spent an entire academic year collectively developing propositions with her students at the Sorbonne, and carried some of this work on to the next academic year. Her work was not at all a matter of privileging the ephemeral and making each piece only once. It involved a kind of accumulation in time, a continual return to the same problems, propositions, materials, and collectivity. And in each return, what was to be found was vital difference rather than dead obsolescence.

The moment for Clark, then, was not ephemeral, not a flicker of present time that was gone forever as soon as it had passed. As she explained in her short text “A propósito do instante” (On the instant), of 1965, “The act contains in itself its own overcoming, its own becoming.”⁸ Clark’s performative act was not subject to Kaprow’s “planned obsolescence,” neither can it be ontologically characterized as what “disappears into memory,” in Phelan’s phrase.⁹ Instead, “The brute perception of the act is the future already making itself. Past and future are implied in the present-now of the act.”¹⁰ Every act is both multiplicity and singularity, both temporal rhizome and willed event, both dividing and synthesizing time. Clark herself phrased the dynamic like this: “The act of doing is time.”¹¹

The consequences of this affirmation for performance theory are profound. Clark understood an act as leading the acting agent not into the past but into the elongated present/past/future of duration: “In the immanent act we do not perceive a temporal limit. Past, present, future mingle.”¹² As one performs an act, this act is already time, meaning that time is not a given, it is produced. Moreover: it must be produced in action. But what occasions Clark’s particular performative temporality is the ethical commitment to persist and commit oneself (singularly and collectively) to the proposition, and to wherever the proposition would take the collective. She once wrote to Hélio Oiticica, “I used to do my proposals two or three times and they ended up falling into Happenings. It satisfied neither myself nor the people that could not elaborate themselves as I wished. There was no participation at all.”¹³

In this collectively fabricated time, one experiences a coherent fusion between experiential propositions, enduring persistence, and precarious materials. One endures, months pass, even years may go by. And in time passing, what endures is a vital return that makes the collective body into a collective subjectivity, that turns its experiments and immanent time-acts into modes of existence, liberating and producing a deeper consistency for living life. (Clark once wrote of longing to live “like the hand of a clock; passing a thousand times through the same route.”)¹⁴ This temporal-subjective-corporeal-collective fabrication happens most profoundly in Baba antropofágica, but it is all already there in the apparently solitary Caminhando, which allowed Clark to see for the first time that “there is only one type of duration: the act.”¹⁵

Second Critique: Object (or Precarious Thing)

Should the idea and fact of objecthood matter to performance? Isn’t the force of performance art predicated on a generalized critique of the object as the privileged center of aesthetic investment? Perhaps. 

Clark’s critique of objecthood was inflected by her philosophically and politically sophisticated understanding of what linked the many temporalities informing an immanent act with the many temporalities embedded in ephemeral materials. She discovered the immanence of what we may call her act-duration, or time-act, by discarding the notion not only of a built object but also of a found object or readymade: “When an artist uses an object from daily life (a ready-made object), he intends to give this object a poetic power. My Caminhando is very different. In its case there is no need for the object: it is the act which engenders the poetry.”¹⁶ Here Clark clarifies not only her replacement of the object with the act, but also how that act, in Caminhando, must not be seen as generating another kind of object, one representing an “everyday gesture.” This is crucial: the act of cutting in Caminhando is not a re-presentation of an everyday act, not a Duchampian strategy transposed into performance, of the kind seen in Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), for instance, when a woman presses and drinks orange juice, or in some of Grand Union’s “task-based” actions, such as carrying boxes or mattresses.¹⁷ In Caminhando, the object of the proposition (which we could even call a score) is not the creation of another object, nor the treatment of behavior as an object, but the creation of a particularly intense experience tied to the precariousness of a material: the immanence of the act.

In 1966, when Clark began to make her Objetos sensoriais, she wrote, “We propose the precarious as the new concept of existence against all static crystallization of duration.”¹⁸ The Brazilian performance artist and theorist Eleonora Fabião has linked Clark’s privileging of precariousness and precarious materials to the temporalities of her politics and to a theory of contemporary performance. Fabião suggests a “temporal quality made possible by precariousness,” and “a mode of temporality acutely related to ‘poor’ materiality.” As she convincingly explains, the “temporality of precariousness differs from, as well as adds to, ‘ephemerality’ (the term usually used to conceptualize the temporal aspect of live art).”¹⁹ In a language quite similar to Clark’s, Fabião concludes, “A bio-poetics and a bio-history of precariousness approximate time and matter in such a way that their claims for autonomy are diluted; indeed, precariousness is the performance of time and matter’s distinct sameness: time becomes a force of matter and matter becomes a force of time.”²⁰ Following Fabião’s argument, we can understand Clark’s embrace of precariousness as less an embrace of the ephemeral than a potent affirmation of what remains: the immanent, transtemporal experience of the act’s overcoming of its objecthood as it is performed. Perhaps the critic and curator Paulo Venâncio—still bearing the relational objects that Clark had placed on him during a therapy session, and barely yet returning to language—was nevertheless right when he carefully called those fantastical/mundane objects “things.” It is in the precarious dignity of the thing that Clark’s critique of objecthood is most potent, anticipating Mario Perniola’s insight that “to give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the new radical experience that asserts itself on contemporary feeling.”²¹

Third Critique: Presence (or Anonymity)

We have already seen how Clark admonished body and performance art for not going far enough in their critique of art: both, she felt, mistook the replacement of the art object with the artist’s body for radicality. To Clark, this replacement was only a displacement: the body of the artist became the new art object, the object of contemplation, even admiration. She also saw ethical and political complications in a kind of narcissism, a martyrology, an unbearable epideictic mode of praise and self-praise for the newly glorified presence of the artist. Just as Clark had problematized the question of the support in painting and sculpture, she also addressed the question of the subject as the living support of his or her own expression: “artists who no longer make objects but, instead, propositions turn themselves into superstar characters [personagens super-vedetes] to compensate for the anonymity of a work’s authorship. This is where a whole catharsis and regression invades the processual field.”²²

We can now understand why, as Bois has written, Clark’s “entire oeuvre aims in some way at the disappearance of the author.”60 In her own words, she sought the dissolution of artist and object into a life (or “living structure”) divorced from both martyrological presence and heroic genius: “I become terrified of being the catalyst for my propositions. I want people to live them and interject their own myth, independently of me.”²³ At a time when neoliberal forces increasingly create subjectivities based on daily social self-presentation as virtuoso creators,²⁴ Clark’s notion of performativity as a force leading to anonymous, impersonal subjectivities is crucial. “What’s important is the the act of doing, in the present,” she wrote; this doing fuses subject and object, thus “achieving the anonymous work”—“the artist is dissolved into the world.”²⁵ Just as the object must escape its traps and become a precarious thing, the author and the participant must escape what Esposito calls the “dispositif-person” to also become an anonymous thing.²⁶ We can thus understand Clark’s confession of wanting to be just anonymous thing: “Thus sometimes, this nostalgia of being a wet stone, a stone-being under the shade of a tree, on the banks of time.”²⁷

Fourth Critique: Participation (Or Immanence)

The three previous critiques (re-)qualify Clark’s notion of participation. For her, participation was not simply taking part; it required an added element without which it was only empty interactivity, empty play. A letter to Clark from Oiticica makes this point well: “For you the most important is the discovery of the [body] . . . and not the ‘participation in a given object,’ because this relationship with the object (subject-object) is overcome . . . while in general the problem of participation keeps this relation.”²⁸ This is quite close to Félix Guattari’s definition of participation as not only “being a part” but “a collective subjectivity investing a certain kind of object, and putting itself in the position of an existential group nucleus.”²⁹ For Clark, participation surpassed the weak force that Brian Massumi calls “interaction” in some forms of art, where participants are just excitedly moving objects around and fulfilling the gestural options that have been given to them, registering only their conformity to a codified situation rather than transforming and reinventing the relation itself.³⁰ But it also surpassed the passive participation of Jacques Rancière’s “emancipated spectator,” when what matters is the reflexive-perceptive exploration of “dissensual distributions of the sensible” offered by artworks as sufficient political and aesthetic labor.³¹

The project of participation is totally different in Clark’s work. One does not move what is given, one does not aim at “participation in a given object,” as Oiticica wrote; one certainly is not a “spectator,” emancipated or not. Instead one gives oneself to a practice of overcoming a world in which these terms still signify a fossilization of experience and subjectivity according to a conformity of behaving and appearing—even of appearing to be radically “artistic.” Clark wrote, “Here, it is not participation for participation’s sake . . . but that the participant gives a meaning to his gesture and that his act be fed by a thought, in this case one that emphasizes his freedom of action.”³² It is clear, then: one participates not in an artwork, but in constructing a collective space-time for the “experimental exercise of freedom”—Mário Pedrosa’s famous phrase that Clark, as early as 1965, claimed for herself in order to describe her own practices.³³ Clark quoted her friend’s phrase in her text “On the Magic of the Object,” but misquoted it, instead writing “the spiritual exercise of freedom.”³⁴ As Rolnik has suggested, this was something other than a slip demanding an editor’s correction.³⁵ Rather, the experimental, spiritual, corporeal, collective exercise of freedom, where thought and action fused in a plane of consistency through the immanence of the time-act, was the last frontier of Clark’s singular quest for an affective geometry of living. Perhaps another name for it, thanks to “all the potentialities contained in the empty-full, whose meaning is given by the act,”³⁶ could have been this one: performance.

This is the third and final section of an essay by André Lepecki on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the first section here and the second section here.

The post Part 3: Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts: Lygia Clark and Performance appeared first on post.

In addition to Lepecki’s essay, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

Between 1972 and 1976, Clark developed the ideas embodied in the Arquiteturas biológicas in a weekly seminar on “gestural expressivity” that she had been invited to teach in the recently established fine-arts faculty of the Sorbonne’s Centre St. Charles. She and her students deepened the notion of collective creation explored in O corpo é a casa, expanding it into sets of propositions called Fantasmática do Corpo (Fantasmatics of the body) and Corpo Coletivo (Collective body).¹ Experimental, collective, and participatory, Clark’s seminars were aimed not at creating artworks or performances but, in her words, at creating a “living culture, in which the artist cuts himself off from the traditional base and gives the body its central position again. This is a living form of production for this productive society. . . . To get there, one needs to make a disinstitutionalization, both of the body as of all concrete relationships.”²

We must remember two aspects in particular of the “disinstitutionalization” to which Clark refers. It is not just a matter of institutional critique, so important in such performance works of the late 1960s and early ’70s as Mierle Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Process (1968–72) and Hans Hacke’s MoMA Poll (1970). In fact Clark doubted the effectiveness of this kind of critique. In a taped conversation at the Museu do Imagem e do Som in Rio de Janeiro, on September 14, 1979, she told yet another story of refusing a curator’s invitation, this time to show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. According to Clark, the curator had urged her to reconsider, given that several other artists engaged in what the curator called a “critique of the museum” had accepted the invitation so as to “work against the museum.” Clark said she had replied, “Do not think I am so naïve as to believe that these artists will destroy the museum. It is you who have devoured the artists, and integrated them. I will not take part in this.”³

For Clark, institutional critique was not enough for disinstitutionalization. A deeper politics was required, predicated on two intertwined notions: the perception that our bodies had been captured by various institutional forces and “sad affects” (in Spinoza’s phrase) that robbed it of life; and the belief that the idea of artistic creation had to be replaced with that of collective work. What mattered was collective production of new experiential corporealities, new intersubjective relationships, as fundamental actions leading to a fuller way of living life. These two ideas led to a third: a critique of art as communication, and consequently an escape from semiotics. Clark wrote in her text on disinstitutionalization, “From this comes much more than communication. There is a geometry in all fantastic creations, which are a continuous intersubjective exchange” (emphasis mine).⁴

This is Clark’s deeper point—that “creating has always been something different from communicating,” as Gilles Deleuze was to remark. “The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”⁵ For Clark, intersubjective exchange creates above all not communication but a processual, immanent, and unfolding geometry within which the collective and anonymous production of “circuit-breakers” against micro-fascist control (including micro-fascist self-control) can take place. This is the organic, affective geometry that Clark described as early as her 1959 “Letter to Mondrian.”⁶ It is the geometry that she discovered in 1954 in what she called “the organic line,” a vacuole she inserted in the canvas surface, and from which another concept, another vacuole central to her practice, would erupt in 1959: the vazio-pleno (empty-full). Suely Rolnik defines Clark’s existential, aesthetic, non-Euclidean geometry of the empty-full as “the experience of the vibrating body at the moment in which the exhaustion of a cartography is processed, when the silent incubation of a new reality of feeling is under way.”⁷

Clark’s understanding of geometry as “continuous intersubjective exchange” reorganizes everything: language, body, art, creation, sexuality, imagination, objects, modes of being a collective, modes of being singular. This geometry, as topological as it was affective, delineated a rigorous experimental quest for nothing less than a new organicity and its concomitant new subjectivity. If Clark called her works between 1968 and 1976 “a preparation for life,”⁸ it is clear that her affective geometry corresponded to a diagrammatic approach to both life and art—indeed Paulo Herkenhoff has called works of hers “diagrams for social coexistence.”⁹ Participation, corporeality, fragility, precariousness, ephemerality, the politics of the collective: these crucial components of performance art, Happenings, and body art all undertake a different “geometry” in Clark’s propositions.

We can now understand how, caught in the vital budding moment of her experiments with her students, and realizing that “disinstitutionalization” must implicate the destruction of the idea of the artist as creator and that an affective geometry of expression must imply deep collective participation, Clark could only allow the episode with the curator that Bois witnessed in 1973 to arrive at one outcome: she could only reject both the classification of her work as body art and the exhibition format itself. Her resistance to being captured by the institution and categories of performance was not merely the idiosyncratic response of a supposedly difficult artist. Rather, it suggests a lucid premonition: it is as if Clark knew that in the decades to come, performance would become a dominant paradigm, to be devoured and digested by institutional power. She had to anticipate and resist all the future dead ends, misunderstandings, and reinstitutionalizations such dominance would entail.

A few months after this episode with the curator, Clark felt compelled to clarify her position on the distinction between her work and performance art. In a text published in 1975 but probably written in 1974, she identified works of the kind she felt had to be rejected in the performance and body art of the period: Pane’s action The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portraits (1973), in which the French artist lay on a metal surface with dozens of lit candles beneath it, her pain from the heat visible to the audience; Gino de Dominicis’s Seconda soluzione di immortalità (L’Universo e immobile) (Second solution of immortality [the universe is immobile], 1972), in which the Italian artist hired a young man with Down syndrome to wear a sign around his neck bearing the work’s title; and finally a work by a male American artist that Clark describes somewhat unclearly—probably Dennis Oppenheim’s Parallel Stress (1970), in which the artist bridged two sets of cement blocks a few feet apart with his body.¹⁰ What matters in these examples is less who the artists were but the fact that Clark perceived their very different actions as profoundly misguided on three levels: aesthetically, the works were unable to overcome the “suppression of the object” that Clark had advocated since Caminhando, and made the performance artist or body artist him- or herself the new object of contemplation; ethically, they resulted from a “corruption which might be called modism,” and the performance artist merely reproduced the expectations of the market;¹¹ and psychologically, they offered no more than a voyeuristic display of personal fantasies. What troubled Clark most, however, was what she called a “regressive attitude,” pathological not only at the psychological level but at the art-historical one: “as the artist becomes the object, he does not accept the still transferred poetic loss, on the contrary, it is still the body which becomes the object, but there is no qualitative leap, it is a regressive attitude” . . . “a romantic attitude by the artist who still needs an object, even if he is the object, in order to deny it.”¹²

For Clark, the most objectionable aspect of performance art and body art was their assimilation of the body of the artist with the body of the work, a convergence of author function and artwork in the figure of the artist’s body that gave to the artist’s presence a highly problematic primacy. She saw, and found intolerable, how a system of authorial hyperpresence (particularly in body art) risked being inflected with a kind of martyrology. We may think here not only of Pane but of artists active in the late 1960s and 1970s such as Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Otto Muehl, and Chris Burden, to name just a few. As unfair as this critique of their works might be, Clark remained faithful to her positions until the end of her life—not without justification, given the current glorification of selected performance artists’ (often martyrological, almost always objectified) presence in museums, galleries, and international biennials. 

The reconcretion of the work of art as a work of life, which Clark announced as early as 1956 in a lecture at the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura in her native city of Belo Horizonte (two years before Allan Kaprow announced a “new concrete art” in which “all of life” would be at hand as material),¹³ required a double dissolution, a double becoming-imperceptible: “the work of art once again takes on the sense of anonymity” and “the artist thus abdicates something of his personality.”¹⁴ There is more than mere disagreement, then, on whether or not the terms “performance art,” “body art,” and “Happenings” conceptually or semantically express the essence of Clark’s work; it is a question of a radically different vision of art, in which what is at stake is not Kaprow’s “blurring of art and life” but a dissolution of the central figure that creates the binary: the artist as exceptional object of praise.

In this dissolution it is the artist him- or herself who vanishes. The participants in Clark’s propositions do not exactly “take part” in a performance exterior to them, or participate in a work authored by another. Rather, they incorporate propositions, inevitably transforming them, inventing them, refusing them, altering them—until finally they are incorporated into a new way of living life. The becoming-imperceptible of the artwork accompanies an anti-epideictic understanding of the artist’s presence and subjectivity, but this understanding must also be extended to the participant, in what Annette Leddy (in a different context) called a “person-eliminative approach” to art.¹⁵ Anticipating Roberto Esposito’s insight that “the person is not to be conceived of as the only form within which life is destined to flow,” Clark theorized and practiced a positive understanding of the impersonal.¹⁶ Her own propositions at the Sorbonne were aimed at a multiplication of anonymous propositions—rather than at the perpetuation of a system constantly (re)producing ever more artists and ever more art objects. Clark narrates how at the Sorbonne,

In the first three months I would give [the students] my sensorial objects. Three months later, they started making their own activities and propositions. I have several examples of works of that period that I did not invent or create. . . . Another curious thing: at the beginning the students would always communicate to me or through me. After a month, they did not even look at me anymore, and discussed the work among themselves. I was an outcast element.¹⁷

This is the second section of an essay by André Lepecki on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the first section here and the third and final section here.

The post Part 2: Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts: Lygia Clark and Performance appeared first on post.

In addition to Lepecki’s essay, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

Accept the provisional since the process can never stop.

—Lygia Clark, “Letter to my son,” c. 1970

This sensation of precariousness, of being absorbed in the immanence of the act of discovering the sense of existing.

—Lygia Clark, “Capturar um Fragmento de Tempo Suspenso” (To capture a fragment of suspended time), 1973

Lygia Clark and Performance

At first glance, Lygia Clark’s relationship to performance seems a simple matter: when she moved from painting and sculpture to what she called her participatory “proposições” (propositions) of the mid-1960s,¹ and when she started her “corpo coletivo” (collective body) experiments in the 1970s,² she adamantly refused to allow these works to be called performance art, or for that matter Happenings or body art, the other major forms of live visual art as consolidated at the time. The critic and curator Guy Brett, who met the artist in the mid-1960s and has written on her extensively, notes that throughout her career, “Clark distinguished her work from many forms of ‘body art’ and ‘performance.’”³ The art historian Yve-Alain Bois, who also met Clark in the 1960s, when he was still a teenager, witnessed a meeting between her and a European curator in 1973. “Thinking he could categorize Lygia’s work, he made the mistake of referring to ‘Body Art’ (particularly to the masochistic scenes of Gina Pane), and to Happenings.” Clark’s response was “a torrent of furious abuse: her work had nothing to do with any performance whatsoever nor with the offering on a platter, for the secondary benefit of a voyeur, of her fantasies and impulses.”⁴

Others besides Clark differentiated her work from performance and body art. Her singularity in using propositions to assemble and mobilize bodies, participants, and live action, her “unprecedented orientation for the issues of her time,” were obvious to those following the development of her practices.⁵ In a letter to Clark of December 11, 1967, Brett drastically distinguished her experiments from “other things I have seen by other people in Europe and America vaguely related to what you are doing—in happenings and so on.” Compared to Clark’s experiments, the latter seemed to him “like choreography, mere effect” (emphasis mine).⁶ What was Clark doing in the mid-1960s that would prompt Brett to describe North American and European Happenings as by comparison “mere effect”? What was she doing in 1973 that could make her fly into a fury when a well-informed and well-meaning curator aligned her work with the booming performance-art scene of the day?

In 1963, Clark made a fundamental discovery. Having critiqued the flat support of painting in her 1960 text “The death of the plane,”⁷ having rejected the passive objecthood of sculpture in creating the small manipulable three-dimensional works of the Bichos series (Critters, 1960–63), she would take her views to their logical conclusion: it was the artwork itself, along with the very notion of the artist, that had to be superseded. To reach this double goal of “achiev[ing] the anonymous work” and of “the artist dissolv[ing] in the world,” she devised her first “proposition” for an “act” to be carried out by a “participant.”⁸ She called the work Caminhando. Anyone can “make for oneself” a Caminhando, Clark wrote in 1964: take a strip of paper, twist it once, glue the ends together to form a Möbius strip, pick up a pair of scissors, and cut the strip along its length without ever fully severing it—an exercise of concentration, commitment, and continuous choice. Clark’s discovery that carrying out a propositional act without an audience produced an artwork that was not an object but an always singular, always provisional expression of a commitment would have deep repercussions for her future practice. From this point on, she would “attribute an absolute importance to the immanent act carried out by the participant.”⁹

The Argentinean artist Lea Lublin, who became friendly with Clark in Paris in the late 1960s, has remarked that Clark “never took her own body as the support for her work.”¹⁰ Her withdrawal of her body’s presence, and her ending of the dichotomy between work and audience, indicate that what was emerging in Caminhando was something other than performance. It is in this sense that Clark’s propositional works differed from much of the performance art seen in Paris (Clark’s city of choice throughout the mid-1960s and early 1970s) and elsewhere, from Jean-Jacques Lebel’s first Happenings in 1960, to works such as Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy, which debuted in the first Festival de la Libre Expression in 1964, to Lublin’s Mon Fils (My son), performed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1968 — the occasion on which Lublin met Clark. Determining all of Clark’s propositional works to come would be what she discovered in Caminhando: that the point was not to create an event for an audience, and to use the artist’s actions and body as the object of contemplation (or even worse, as the object of admiration), but to invite everyone to experience his or her own body as an agent of choice, in an open process of discovery immanent to the performance of an act.¹¹ Caminhando brought Clark to understand that through the proposition she could generate a crucial divorce between artwork and artist, elements that performance art and particularly body art tended to conflate. Consider a work contemporary to Caminhando, also involving scissors, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece(1964): Ono sat still on a stage, under theatrical lighting that made her body the object of the audience’s undivided attention, and invited viewers to cut off her dress, fusing their participation with a sense of violence and violation. Here the artist’s body was both object and support, something Clark would directly go against, as we will see. The difference in each artist’s approach to action, art, participation, and the artist’s own body could hardly be greater.

After Caminhando Clark went through what she called a “regression” to form.¹² She needed time to digest the radicality of Caminhando’s destruction of the artwork as object, its replacement of the art object with an “immanent act” performed not by an artist but by a “participant,” and in a nonartistic context. For three years she created soft sculptures, the Trepantes (Climbers), but in 1966 her research led to a whole series of Objetos sensoriais (Sensorial objects), eventually to be joined under the title Nostalgia do corpo (Nostalgia of the body). These objects became the catalysts of participatory propositions involving precarious, cheap, or quotidian materials (elastic bands, plastic bags, onion or orange sacks, pebbles, water, rubber tubes, etc.). Crucially, they had to be linked to actions, perceptions, and sensations, often shared among two or more participants — actions to which there were not really scores, but simply generic suggestions. The extraordinary Respire Comigo (Breathe with me, 1966), Máscaras sensoriais (Sensorial masks, 1967), and Máscara abismo (Abyssal mask, 1968), derive directly from another important lesson Clark had learned in Caminhando: “the proposition (for the word ‘work,’ which denotes the passivity of the result of a previous work, is not the right one here) makes us aware of our own bodies.”Clark, ¹³ The discovery of the awareness of one’s own body through propositions for collective acts, catalyzed and mediated by “nonobjects” (Ferreira Gullar’s term)¹⁴ and invested with unpredictable sensorial potentials: until Clark’s death, this would be her sole purpose in making quasi-objects, or quasi-bodies, out of everyday, transitory materials and things, all activated, and often constructed, by one participant or more.

One of the first instances of Clark’s activation of body awareness through a simple sensorial object is the elegant Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue of hands, 1966). A white cloth band, made into a Möbius strip, is twisted into loops that encircle the wrists of two participants. The result, a mute dance of hands and arms, produces a discovery of the moment as immanent, intersubjective, and corporeal. The participants’ hands may be bound together but there is no sense of imprisonment; instead, the tie that binds becomes an opening for an endless dialogical exploration, since “the act’s instant is the only living reality in ourselves.”¹⁵ Limits between self and other blur and fuse. A third emerges, unexpectedly free and liberating. Two years later, in 1968, Richard Serra’s short black-and-white film Hands Tied would show a singular subject struggling to free himself of ropes binding his wrists. To compare these two works is to see how Clark’s Diálogo de mãos offers a totally different understanding of action, gesture, body, and the experience of freedom. For Clark these were always deeply intersubjective practices.

By 1969, Clark was developing the collective and participatory propositions she called O corpo é a casa (The body is the house), expanding but also reversing her 1968 work A Casa é o Corpo. Penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão (The house is the Body. Penetration, ovulation, germination, expulsion). The latter is a twenty-six-foot-long penetrable structure made of wood, plastic sheets and fabric, where the audience goes through several small “rooms,” each with different elements on the floor and ceiling, and connected by a transparent black fabric. O corpo é a casa meanwhile names a series of different propositions, and what we have is not one fixed environment but increasingly more participatory, increasingly less object-oriented, increasingly more collective “gestural expressions” aimed at developing “a living architecture, biological, which, as soon as the experience is over, is dissolved.”¹⁶ Clark wrote on this series that “it inverts the concepts of house and body. Now the body is the house. It is a community experience.” And she continued,

I have incorporated the object, making it disappear. From now on, it is man who assures his own eroticism. He becomes the object of his own sensations. . . . It is a community experience. There is no regression since it is the opening of man toward the world. He connects itself to others in a shared body. He incorporates the other’s creativity in a collective invention of the proposition.¹⁷

This disappearance was less the “dematerialization of the art object”¹⁸ that Lucy Lippard described as characteristic of experimental art between 1966 and 1972 than an “incorporation” and “assimilation” of the art object as something indistinguishable from the bodies and actions of the participants. This assimilation of objects with bodies, this incorporation of the environment in a deeply sensuous process, for Clark could only occur through an engaged practice “simultaneously personal and collective,” where one’s “own eroticism” was assured by a “community experience” in the creation of propositions.¹⁹ In Clark’s experiments of the late 1960s (when the “collective invention of the proposition” began to appear more commonly in her production), elastic bands and large plastic sheets functioned as relational materials, expressing her rhizomatic understanding of corporeality. All her Arquiteturas biológicas (Biological architectures) of 1969 involved two or more participants connected by long transparent plastic bags or tubes. These bags functioned as connective tissues, extended skin, as participants unfolding and entering into these surfaces become so many limbs and organs of a fantastical construction that was always renewed at each new experiment. The Estruturas vivas (Living structures, 1969) discarded the large plastic surfaces and instead used thin elastic bands of several lengths, revealing minimal, indeed “structural,” yet always dynamic links among the participants. Essential to both the Arquiteturas biológicas and the Estruturas vivas was a communal commitment to an unending process of always experimental, always renewed and renewable, always intersubjective exercises mediated by quotidian, cheap, precarious materials similar to those used in the Objetos sensoriais. Later, Clark would tap into the relational capacity that she had identified in ephemeral materials to create the Objetos relacionais (Relational objects), with which she would develop the therapeutic practice that she would call Estruturação do Self (Structuring of the self, 1979–88), in which art would be replaced by a practice of aesthetic healing.

This is the first section of an essay by André Lepecki on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the second section here and the third and final section here.

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