In addition to Macel’s commentary, you can access installation views and the press release in MoMA’s comprehensive online exhibition history archive here.

Clark’s work sketched out a path to moving beyond the idea of an autonomous object in an attempt to surpass the subject-object relationship, with the aim of putting the body back at the center of an art experiment, such that the turning point of the mid-1970s, when she returned to Brazil, seemed to follow naturally from the previous period. From 1976 to 1984, the objects she used shifted from being “sensory” to being “relational,” as part of a true therapeutic treatment aimed at structuring the self. At her Rio residence she saw “clients” three times a week, offering one-hour sessions over the course of varying lengths of treatment. They were placed in a state of regression back to a primal stage, while Clark used her objects to work with them on the body’s fantasy dimension. Her practice, which was now on the fringes of art, was nevertheless based on objects created from the mid-1960s on, and those objects had no other existence than their activation through the therapeutic treatment. Clients were invited to lie down on the Grande colchão (Large mattress) full of styrofoam balls. Clark used various objects, such as stones placed on different parts of the body, or fabrics, from veils to blankets; she also offered cushions filled with heavier or lighter objects, objects made from stockings containing different materials (balls, stones, shells), and plastic bags filled with air, water, or sand. Some were the product of her earlier experiments with sensory objects, like Respire comigo. Others, such as a long cardboard tube, had been used in acts at the Sorbonne — in this case Relaxação, a collective act from 1974–75 similar to the therapeutic protocol. Heavy or light, quiet or noisy, hot or cold, the object moved over the client’s body, was used or even destroyed, like a plastic bag she suggested they pop — or not. Some objects, like honey, could even be incorporated into the body. A stone held in the palm of the hand served as a proof of reality. Stripped of any intrinsic qualities, the object became the “target of acting out for the subject manipulating it,” in a loving or destructive process,¹ in a sort of preverbal language, sometimes accompanied by words on the subject of the lived experience, the fantasy brought to life within each person — for it was the fantasy of the body that interested her, not the body itself.²

Through this therapeutic approach, which sprang from her art, her own experience of therapy, and her knowledge of psychoanalysis, Clark proclaimed her curative intent, targeting the types of pathologies that interested her and that best fit her method. Borderline states,³ unstructured places on the border between neurosis and psychosis, and psychotics, whose denial of reality pushed them to dissociate, were better able to respond, according to her, to a “massive maternalization” (unlike neurotics, who were caught up in repression), “personal contact and not classic analytical interpretation,” and thus to “intensify” their “primal anxieties.”⁴ Without judging the effectiveness of these unorthodox courses of treatment — which Clark and Lula Wanderley, an artist and psychotherapist trained in her methods, claimed were truly effective — we see that this experimentation is echoed in a questioning of the system of psychoanalytic treatment itself. Reconsidered in the 1950s by Winnicott, and then by psychoanalysts such as Anzieu and Green, the analytic framework had been adapted to address an increase in new pathologies and their resistance to cure by classical Freudian psychoanalysis. Refocusing on the body through contact (although touch was still a psychoanalytical taboo) led Clark to explore issues typical of her time that today have become the subjects of new developments.

Two intuitions can be seen throughout her experimentation: first, a conception of the subject based on a bodily self whose skin, like an envelope, is the border; and second, a true cognitive unconscious, or an unconscious memory of the body, originating at the preverbal stage. In a 1992 seminar held in Rio de Janeiro, Wanderley noted that the objects Clark used “always had a film covering something inside. . . . Always that material and inner motion which produced a sensory feel, as though the sensory was not something superficial, but rather internal. . . . It reminds me a little of the body, too; our skin, motion. . . . There is a certain analogy with this thing that envelops people, but in a primitive way.”⁵

Indeed, Clark thought of the subject first and foremost in its corporeal dimension, as a surface that delimited an internal space. The objects she put into contact with the body were also conceived as following the model of envelope and container, acting as metaphors for the internal corporeal self on the outside of the body, offering a surface for projection and fantasizing. In Mário Carneiro’s film Memória do corpo (Memory of the body, 1984), a client of Clark’s describes his experience as follows: “Each time [things] moved over me, I was above all skin, above all a surface . . . . [And the surface] is the place where we are with the world . . . . I did not exist inside . . . . And suddenly, honey filled me, filled me inside.” The concept of a “Self-Skin” appeared in psychoanalytic thought shortly before the start of Clark’s therapeutic practice, in Anzieu’s famous text “Le Moi-Peau” (The skin ego) from 1974.⁶ By the 1960s psychoanalytic thinkers had already developed ideas of the self as a container, notably Winnicott in his concept of “holding” (the way a mother holds her child) and Esther Bick in her “Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968), both starting from a Freudian conception of the self as a psychic envelope supported by the bodily envelope.⁷ For Anzieu — though it is unclear if Clark has read his work when she was starting out — the skin ego is a containing envelope, like a bag, a screen, or a sieve. The subject constructs itself by basing itself on the body and on the object. The dimension of touch seems crucial in constructing a psychic envelope, but we must also consider the auditory, visual, and olfactory envelope (which Clark accomplished through her multisensory objects). Consequently, the therapy that arose from such thinking particularly stressed the model of the container and worked to unify the self and the body, in order to shore up a psychic envelope that was both receptive and flexible but also solid, and could contain internal objects and act as a shield against external forces that might threaten to overexcite.

In her treatment Clark also worked, in her own words, on “body memory . . . the affective memory . . . bringing experiences which the verbal aspect cannot detect.”⁸ This idea of the body’s unconscious memory has been the subject of a great deal of joint research between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, which only managed to pinpoint its existence in the late 1990s. Today we have identified “the implicit memory, which does not allow us to remember it, while the structures of explicit memory, which is indispensable for repression, only form after the age of two,” because “the hippocampus and the medial temporal cortex are not definitively formed.”⁹ The implicit memory is located in the amygdala, the emotion organ, and allows for “the return of the non-repressed by other paths than memory,” paths that Clark widely explored. Implicit memory is written in the body, and some see it as including “tastes, habits, ways of behaving, casts of mind.”¹⁰ So we could speak of a cognitive unconscious, according to the neuropsychologist Francis Eustache, in which implicit memory plays a central part, which could parallel the unconscious described by psychoanalysis.¹¹

In light of these fundamental intuitions and despite the unorthodox style of her treatment, Clark surely had her finger, so to speak, on major issues involving pathology and its therapies. Nevertheless, her borderline practice, on the edges of psychoanalysis (a boundary she continually played with in her life and her art), has never been recognized, despite the therapeutic success affirmed by Clark herself and the people she trained, such as Wanderley and Gina Ferreira, and despite her efforts to pass down her work so that it could endure.¹² Psychologists and psychoanalysts have held her practice at arm’s length, as has the art world, aside from the Brazilian critics Pedrosa and Frederico Morais.¹³ The Neo-Concretist theorist Ferreira Gullar was particularly critical of her last period, while most art historians, like Brett and Yve-Alain Bois, maintain that to them, she always remained an artist. Bois, who had been close to Clark since his adolescence, and whom she had directed to read Winnicott, remains reserved about her art therapy and suspends his judgment on what seems to him clearly not art but therapy.¹⁴

The psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik views Clark’s work as something between art and psychoanalysis, or a tension between the two — a hybrid that is neither psychoanalysis nor art.¹⁵ In a letter quoted by Rolnik, Clark explained, “I did not swap art for psychoanalysis. It just happened that in all my research I ended up doing what I do, which is not psychoanalysis. Since I asked for the spectator’s participation, which was in ’59, all of my work has demanded the spectator’s participation; my work has always been led toward experimentation by others, not only for my own experience.”¹⁶ Since Clark was always mistrustful of categories — or, as Fédida said, in a state of “insecurity” toward them — doubtless she might have agreed with Rolnik’s analysis. However, it seems that “on the path of her work,” she moved beyond both art and psychoanalysis, rather than creating a hybrid of the two.¹⁷ Indeed, her interests and intuitions on “the edges of psychoanalysis” went beyond the narrow confines of that field and met up with the more recent, still developing fields of the phenomenology of perception, the psychology of perception, the cognitive sciences, and even neuropsychoanalysis.¹⁸

With her endless explorations of the idea of borders, the inside and the outside, it is not surprising that Clark’s art, like her therapeutic practice, should be borderline, neither/nor, at the edges of art, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive sciences, both of its day and ahead of its time. Where art and therapy came together was doubtless in her desire for the gift, in an openness to others and the wish to help them express themselves. “I always thought it was fabulous to have given something of my art for someone to express themselves,” she confided to Oiticica.¹⁹ The whole of Clark’s life and art were turned toward the invention of a new way of being in good health, for herself and for others — not the health of normalcy or adaptation to the norm, but a kind of health that can be picked up implicitly through the borderline pathologies that interested her so much. Unlike research on power or submission, that type of individual health — an aesthetic but also a political project, never stable and always at the edges — was based on fundamental values of art, spontaneity, intuition, and the creative space.

This is the third and final section of an essay by Christine Macel 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: Lygia Clark: At the Border of Art appeared first on post.

In addition to Macel’s commentary, you can access installation views and the press release in MoMA’s comprehensive online exhibition history archive here.

It is not surprising that Clark’s artistic and existential quest, punctuated by personal crises and health problems, should lead her to undergo psychoanalysis, which she called “one of the most creative and mythological things” she had known.¹ In Paris from 1968 through 1976 she went through a new period of exploring herself and her work, where the boundaries between the two once again became porous.

Clark’s approach to psychoanalytic treatment, first with Daniel Lagache and then with Pierre Fédida, bred artistic work that was directly informed by psychoanalysis as she experienced it in her treatment and through her wide reading.² The period with Fédida (1972–76) seems to have been denser with respect to the treatment’s influence on her art. As the psychoanalyst told her, she felt that it was “time to build a space for language with her body” — on “the flip side of words,” as Fédida would later say³— that would translate into the evolution of her Objetos relacionais into Estruturação do self. Clark even identified the precise connections between her artistic experiments and the phases of her treatment.4 Starting in 1972, she taught a class called “The Gesture of Communication” at the Centre Saint Charles of the Sorbonne, Paris, with two three-hour sessions a week for some thirty students between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven in each group. This is also when she discovered the fundamentally therapeutic dimension of her work for the participants, with her most important propositions, such as Baba antropofágica(Anthropophagic slobber, 1973) and Canibalismo (Cannibalism, 1973), Rede de elástico (Elastic net, 1974), and Relaxação (Relaxation, 1974–75).

This evolution fits with the logic of Clark’s conception of art, influenced, of course, by the views of her time. Art had indeed appeared to her from the start as a personal therapy. Evoking the possibility of working in a clinic in 1971, she exclaimed in a letter to Oiticica, “For someone like me who made art in order to get out of the hospital, ending up there is incredible!”⁴ However, later that year, while alluding to her crises and the “sick child” within her, she recognized the regressive risk in the work, to which she had to react.⁵ “I was paying too much attention to this aspect of my work, which has to do with psychology or rather psychiatry in regression. . . . I will leave pathology to whoever is interested.”⁶

Furthermore, she was living in an atmosphere permeated with psychoanalysis, which questioned the very idea of normalcy. “Today everything is being fundamentally challenged, the anti-object, the anti-psychiatry, the anti-Oedipus, it is difficult to draw out the normality/pathology frontier,”⁷ she said, at a time when she was diving into many books on the topic. Though she had no academic background in the field, she read Herbert Marcuse — who, she said, was too difficult for her — as well as Félix Guattari,⁸ Laing (the pope of antipsychiatry),⁹ Groddeck,¹⁰ Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott,¹¹ Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and doubtless Didier Anzieu. Several of these readings inspired her work and led her to deepen her research in an increasingly urgent drive to move beyond the idea of the object or, in any case, to a process of “desubstantialization,” as Thierry Davila has shrewdly noted.¹²

Winnicott and Anzieu seem to be the two analytical thinkers who influenced Clark most profoundly — Winnicott certainly and Anzieu in all probability — and with striking conceptual proximity. Indeed, as of 1970 she titled some of her works “Structuring of the Self,” a term taken directly from Winnicott, and she would name the sensory objects she used in her later therapies in 1976 “relational objects” after his concept of the transitional object. A great observer of mother-child relationships and the transitional space they define, Winnicott developed the idea of the self as first and foremost corporeal, and stressed the importance of making art in order to remain in touch with the primitive self. In his 1971 book Playing and Reality(translated into French in 1975), he described the transitional object — teddy bear, piece of cloth, thread, etc. — which, like a bridge, helped move the child from the inside to the outside, from fusion with the mother to the “capacity to be alone.”¹³ Play, the fundamental cultural experience, is located in the potential space between the self and the outside, thanks to bodily experiences. That line of thought, which resonated with Clark’s experience in the 1960s, could not help but enthrall her, if only because it confirmed and helped to strengthen her own intuitions. Her Baba antropofágica act, designed with the Sorbonne students in 1973, seems to owe the most to Winnicott’s thought, using thread as the exemplar of the transitional object: “A person lies down on the floor. Around him young people who are kneeling down put different colored reels of thread in their mouths. . . .The thread comes out full of saliva.”¹⁴ This thread falls on the body of the person lying down and the group disperses to break up the drool-covered thread, in a dialectic between the inside and the outside, the self-space and the collective body.

In an unpublished note from 1972 conserved in the family archives, Clark also evokes her reading of an issue of Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, a magazine edited by J.-B. Pontalis, whose editorial board included Anzieu and André Green.¹⁵ Titled “Destins du cannibalisme” (Destinies of cannibalism), the issue included texts by Fédida, Anzieu, Masud Khan (a disciple of Winnicott), and Green, as well as Abraham and Torok. Anzieu described the oral fantasy of the group (“The group feeds us, the group eats us”), while Fédida, in his piece “Le Cannibale mélancolique” (The melancholy cannibal), analyzed the fantasy of incorporation from Klein’s theories. There is an undeniable correspondence between those texts and Clark’s act Canibalismo, in which “a group eats, blindfolded, from the belly of a young person lying down.” Clark took notes on Abraham and Torok’s essay “Introjecter-incorporer. Deuil ou mélancolie” (Introjection–incorporation: Mourning or melancholy), which captured her interest.¹⁶ She copied the following passage on the subject of the fantasy of incorporation: “Introducing into the body, retaining or expelling an object from it — in whole or in part — or a thing, acquiring, keeping, losing, just so many variations on a fantasy, which hold within them, in the exemplary form of appropriation (or feigned disappropriation) the mark of a fundamental intrapsychic situation: the one created by the reality of a loss suffered by the psyche.” Psychoanalysts note that the fantasy of incorporation avoids the painful effort of working through, and enacts a sort of magical healing by incorporation. It is precisely this “magic,” a term Guy Brett used in discussing Clark’s work, that she was trying to usher in with Canibalismo.¹⁷

However, as Clark experienced psychoanalytical ideas first-hand, she continued to reflect on the risk of undergoing regression and of having her art veer into pathology. Her nuanced analysis is a testament both to deep reflection and to a distance that allowed her to experience up close the fantasies described by psychoanalysis without exposing her own issues. Fédida described how Clark conducted both her artistic research and her analysis with a critical eye toward psychoanalysts like Klein and Winnicott; she was only interested in their “movement-acts.”¹⁸

Reflecting on the relationships between art and pathology in the mid-1970s, Clark also criticized what she qualified as “fashionableness”: “— The artist living out his pathology in public, whether by burning her own body, like Gina Pane, or illustrating the object like an American who stretches out on the ground and considers himself ‘bridge.’ — The artist exposing his own pathology as a ‘work of art,’ which aroused a great scandal in the Venice Biennale when an artist hired a Mongoloid for this.”¹⁹ The idea of the object allowed her to deepen her critique against the artist using his or her own body as an object without moving beyond the subject-object dialectic. She thus challenges the artist’s romantic stance as embodied by Pane, “who still needs an object, even if she is the object, in order to deny it.”²⁰ It is precisely this crucial distinction she made in the early 1970s — between the subject who takes himself to be his own object and the subject who incorporates the object in order to make it disappear, thus becoming the object of his own sensations²¹ — that lies at the heart of the sensory environment Clark presented at the Venice Biennale in 1968, A casa é o corpo(The house is the body). In this installation viewers pushed through rubber bands into a dark room full of balls and strings through which they had to forge a path. Then in a second space filled with light, they found themselves in a tent, a sort of matrix space made of plastic with balls rolling on the ground. After a new dive into darkness with new balls and strings, they reached the exit, facing a fun house mirror. This progression through the installation allowed the viewer to experience a female internal state, in a process of generation and birth, as indicated by Clark’s subtitle: Penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão (Penetration, ovulation, germination, expulsion). However, one of the essential parts of this work, which marked a decisive break, was that it incorporated the viewer — him- or herself a whole being — into a living whole, dissolving the borders between subject and object. The human being thus became the “living structure of a biological and cellular architecture” in a fantasy of rebirth and fusion with an overarching vital principle.²²

This is the second section of an essay by Christine Macel 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: Lygia Clark: At the Border of Art appeared first on post.

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

Lygia Clark’s plan could have been to unify art and life, had she not already come to consider them inseparable parts of a whole. From the start, the artistic and philosophical dimensions of her work appear to be intimately intertwined, while each leap forward in her work was often followed by an existential crisis. More than any other modern artist, Clark resisted categories and divisions to such an extent that her work defies definitions. In the 1960s she put the body and perception at the heart of her undertaking, moving beyond the dichotomies of body/mind, subject/object, and individual/collective and subtly creating a way of being in the world that was part of the overall rhythm of things, wordlessly, in what she called a “mute thought.”¹ Her own artistic and philosophical struggles led her beyond objects toward the outside, in a desire to fuse with the other, the collective, and the all.

From the 1960s on, Clark’s work reflected her keen interest in psychoanalysis, including research that predated her own, from Freud to Georg Groddeck, as well as schools that were typical of her time. She situated herself within 1970s thought on psychiatric institutions, questioning ideas of normalcy and pathology both as part of her own analysis with Daniel Lagache and Pierre Fédida and in her reading, which was broader than one might imagine. Her experience of art as personal therapy and as “course of treatment,” together with her own thinking and the analysis she underwent, led her to redefine the very idea of art as a gift, a possibility of offering others a way of living differently, in a way that would be creative and free. Considering art a “field of being and events,” Clark inventively explored the body and consciousness, perception and memory, with astonishing prescience, anticipating the focus of today’s cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis, which sometimes come together as neuropsychoanalysis.

It is not surprising, then, that her art, from the Objetos relacionais (Relational objects) of the 1960s to the therapeutic experience of Estruturação do self(Structuring of the self) in the 1970s and ’80s, elicited unease, misunderstanding, and even rejection, given how difficult it was to grasp the nature of her work as a “research” artist — which is how she defined herself in response to such uncertainties.² It is in these unexplored zones, at art’s edge, that Clark redefined the work of art, and the experience and perception of a work of art.

Many critics have observed the internal logic of Clark’s work, the way each stage of her research led to the next, often at the cost of a personal crisis, as if, animated by a life with powers of its own, she was the product of a generative process. Thus her art took a path from the two-dimensional paintings of the 1950s, through the three-dimensional Bichos (Critters) of 1960–63, to the “living” Objeto relacional, which related to the participant’s body, the body becoming a full-fledged part of the artwork. At that point a switchover happened to the “client”/participant’s body, which had become a medium for the object’s use. The organic dimension of the artwork itself was certainly connected to Brazilian culture and its strong interest in the body and living things, as well as to research in the 1950s, when Mário Pedrosa had introduced Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to the Brazilian Neo-Concretist group. Even more important for Clark was Pedrosa’s introduction of psychoanalysis and the works of Sigmund Freud. The model of art by institutionalized patients had also paved the way in the 1940s, when Nise da Silveira founded the Setor de Terapia Ocupacional (Occupational therapy section) at the Centro Psiquiátrico Pedro II (also known as Engenho de Dentro) in Rio de Janeiro, influenced by the thought of Carl Jung and with the participation of artists like Ivan Serpa, who would teach Clark’s close friend Hélio Oiticica.³

Given the pervasiveness of psychoanalysis in Clark’s milieu, with her Bichos — creatures animated by their own life, which could be manipulated as one chose — she managed to redefine art not as a static object but as what she termed a proposição (proposition), tied to the act of making something, an event taking place in the now. “The only thing that matters,” she wrote, “is the act-in-progress.”⁴ The viewer then becomes an author, or rather, the agent of a perception defined by the act. These intuitions represent a revolution that goes well beyond the field of art. Since the nineteenth century they had occupied physiology (Ernst Mach, Julius Bernstein) and in the 1940s were taken up by the phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty); today they flourish in the cognitive sciences, making agency a central concept tied to the self and perception.“⁵

Clark thus began to redefine notions of the object’s internality and externality, as well as of the relationship between subject and object. Several years later, in 1971, she wrote about her key work, the 1963 Bichos piece O dentro é o for a (The inside is the outside), which scrambles the essential idea of her work on boundaries — boundaries that are most often destroyed through a desire for nonseparation. Clark analyzed the piece using a psychoanalytical framework:

“I am reading an article by Groddeck which is called “On the human womb and its soul.” He makes the same fantasy about the soul that I was doing years ago. When the newborn baby opens its mouth and takes its first breath of air it is the soul which is coming into the body. I see that I am very close to Groddeck because in the Bicho O dentro é o fora it is the space of this Bichowhich I call my lung, an affective space.”⁶

The work is thus stamped with a fantasy feel linked to the body through its preverbal stage, where the border between oneself and the outside is inverted and the body becomes externalized, as though turning a glove inside out. This desire to redefine the subject in its relationship to the world, to abolish the borders between subject and object, culminated in the 1963 proposition Caminhando (Walking), an act that could be performed with a paper Möbius strip, cut so as to create a double ribbon. Because the cut end does not come back to the starting point, scissors make their path through thinner and thinner cuts until the object is held together by a thread. This proposition, according to Clark, brought the precarious and the whole together, helping one become aware of one’s own body while perceiving the totality of the world, in an instant that melds with eternity.⁷ Beyond providing an aesthetic revolution that dissolves the very idea of artwork, artist, and viewer, the experiment did not yet offer a course of treatment, but rather effected a meeting between the subject and his or her own boundaries. “The active subject meets his own precariousness,” Clark would write.⁸ It is striking to note that a year earlier, in 1962, and apparently unconnectedly, Jacques Lacan had used the image of the Möbius strip in his seminar: “Lacan had already completely cut the strip lengthwise, along a line midway through its width . . . to say that the subject is nothing more than a cut that ushers in the distinction between the inside and the outside.”⁹ Where the psychoanalyst focused on the idea of cutting apart the subject, Clark proposed an act that would allow one to experience the cutting apart as eternally replayed but never definitive, where the border becomes thin to the point of precariousness yet does not break.

During the 1960s this was the point she focused on in creating her Objetos sensoriais (Sensory objects), intended to be manipulated by the viewer-participant, which were grouped under the title Nostalgia do corpo (Nostalgia of the body). From 1966 on, the body became the main theater for perceptual and emotional experiences. In this period of great creativity, Clark designed sensory hoods that would allow wearers to experience scents, noises, or tactile sensations, and clothing that would influence motion, as well as breathing experiments and sensory books. Throughout these propositions she continued to work on articulating inner and outer space in which the object becomes a “body,” as in Pedra e ar (Stone and air, 1966) or Respire comigo (Breathe with me, 1966). She then specifically focused on perception beyond sight — notably touch — with Desenhe com o dedo (Draw with the finger, 1966), Livro sensorial (Sensorial book, 1966), and Luvas sensoriais(Sensorial gloves, 1968). In the watershed 1967 work Máscaras sensoriais (Sensory masks, 1967), participants wear a hood that obscures sight, perceiving smells and sounds while hugging a plastic bag and becoming aware of the boundaries between their bodies and external space. Through these experiments on the body and the self, Clark touched on the very nature of perception and its complexity. For her, “the driving part of the nervous system is engaged in the aesthetic process.”¹⁰ Intuitively she reconsidered perception at a somatosensory level — that is, at the level of the soma, which goes far deeper than touch or muscular sensation. As today’s neurosciences confirm, “There is no such thing as a pure perception of an object within a sensory channel, for instance, vision. . . . To perceive an object, visually or otherwise, the organism requires both specialized sensory signals andsignals from the adjustment of the body, which are necessary for perception to occur.”¹¹ Sight, smell, and hearing require the body to become involved in its deepest dimensions, down to the “nervous system,” which is made up of the internal or visceral environment, the proprioceptive or kinesthetic apparatus (which exists even when there is no motion), and the sense of touch at skin level.

In 1968, even before coming to Paris later in the year and being plunged into the climate of the times, when psychiatry (R. D. Laing) and the power of psychiatric institutions over the body (Michel Foucault) were being questioned, Clark designed a proposition that took the opposite tack from her previous ones by restricting the participant’s body movement. Camisa de força (Straitjacket), which can also be read as a political work in a Brazil under dictatorship, does not obstruct a single sense, such as sight, but inhibits the very freedom of motion, in a work that is “dramatic but beautiful.”¹² The viewer, arms tied, with counterweights of stones at each end, puts on the “jacket” and starts to move within the proposition’s diminished boundaries; it is as if, after aiming to dissolve boundaries, Clark were now redoubling the perception of them, seesawing between internalization and externalization.

Nostalgia do corpo finely sketches a progression in Clark’s work from the internal to the experience of a dialogue — in Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue of hands, 1966), O eu e o tu (The I and the you, 1967), Estruturas vivas (Live structures, 1969) — and then to Arquiteturas biológicas (Biological architectures, 1969), the fantasy of a collective body, which she would explore more thoroughly in the 1970s. Two or more participants, slipping their feet or hands into bags sewn on a plastic surface, cover each other or form a shared shelter. As Clark would later point out, these works arise from the fantasy of a shared body that does away with the boundaries between the self and the other. Here, we are seeing the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions come together so that the artwork, if we can still call it that, offers an experience of the self engaging the other in a dissolution of boundaries, even a fusion with the whole of the world.

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

The post Part 1: Lygia Clark: At the Border of Art appeared first on post.