From: "Regina Pinto" <reginapinto@arteonline.arq.br>
Date: March 29, 2006 6:58:40 AM PST
To: "christina mcphee" <christina112@earthlink.net>
Subject: The text again with a smal correction and the convenient
email adress to foward
Hello Christina,
Here is the text about Lygia Clark in English with new paragraphs.
I hope you
understand my English. If you judge convenient, forward it to
empyre list
In fact, for me , Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica were already
working with
"new medias", in 60's. They were very good friends and they always
were
exchanging information and comments about their work and about life
and
philosophy. You will discover this reading their letters.
Lygia Clark, was always opening new ways, concepts. Constantly
searching for
the meeting with the public she represented the new, the
revolution, the
transformation. I spent the year of 1993 researching at MAM (Museum of
Modern Art - Rio de Janeiro) - section of documentation), there I
read lots
and lots of texts and letters by the artist. It is impressive the
way that
her thought guesses the times we are living now. Also amazing is
that she
was completely rational about what she was doing.
Ferreira Gullar [A New Being at the Universe of Art. Cf. Documentation
Section of MAM - Rio de Janeiro, s/d, s/p, ms.] stated that the
estethics
experience of Lygia Clark has not parallel in Brazilian Art and
neither,
that he knew, in the contemporary art. The life and the artistic
adventure
of Lygia Clark, are completely interlinked. The artist, herself,
told that
it was impossible to distinguish were one started and the other
finished.
Since that the lived experiences -- sensory existences, feminine
existences
always went the fount that supplied her creativity.
The main question of Lygia Clark always was the INSIDE and the
OUTSIDE.
There is a text where she states that opening a basket she felt
that the
external form only existed in absolute relation with this emptiness
- "full
emptiness" and it was here that she asked for the first time if the
problem
of art and life would not be the only one. And, in every Lygia's
work, the
inside and the outside were always present and mistaking one with
the other.
That junction always is full, like the integration, sometimes
conflicting,
of the femininity and the maleness, of the private and f the
public, of the
individual and the collective, of the spirit and the body.
She started the "Animal" in 1959 and it was in this work that the
interactivity appeared. She always said that no one could know how
many
positions the "Animal" could do, only the "Animal" knew. It was
impossible
for her an attitude of passivity between we and the "Animal".
In the work "Walking" the work was not present, the new
"information" or
concept that the work contained was to show that the spectator is
that gave
sense to the work, it was the spectator who updated the work. What
Lygia
Clark was really judging was the Art itself, and she done it in a
totally
current way. Through the 'Ribbon of Moebius', where the inside is an
extension of the outside and vice-versa, she revealed all the
duplicities of
the virtual, present in the relationship between left and right,
inside and
outside. Contrasting with our established habits of space , the
'Ribbon of
Moebius' allows us to live the experience of a continuous space, a
topologic
space, the cyberspace(?, in 60's) where the opposite
configurations can be
felt in the same moment - the space of the art, the space of
virtuality.
Lygia Clark elaborated the " Clothing Body Clothing ", a series of
interactive clothing that tried to establish a contact between the
two sexes
through the man's discovery of himself in the woman, and vice-
versa. The
first of that series was called "I and You", and consisted of two
sets of
clothing linked with an umbilical cord. When opening the zippers of
their
partner's clothes, man and woman are surprised to find their own
body in the
partner's body. Clothes elaborated by Lygia had a function opposite
from
habitual clothes. Instead of covering and protecting the body, they
were
made to unveil it. The body transformed the individual's conscience
in face
/ mask imposed by the society. Clothes are a mediator between
society and
nature. With them, the social imposition of the "I" gives a place
to the
restrained nature. The individual as a social being also gives a
place to an
anonymous being. Hidden in the "Clothing Body Clothing", s/he
escapes from
the determination of the group. A thick plastic barrier encourages
the touch
and allows the individual to keep contact with other forces, normally
contained, especially those always found in the relationship man/
woman, the
contradictory forces of Love and Death, Eros and Thanatos.
During 1976 the artist drew up a list of the authors that had
interest for
her and she initiated telling that before she had read all about
psychoanalysis but that now she was reading all about anthropology,
all that
was related with the man in the sense of the myth. No, she did not
believed
in myths. The myth for her was the human being and her/his experiences
registered on the body. The artist deeply believed in rituals. For
me, one
of her works: "The House is the Body", made ten years before of this
affirmation marks exactly the beginning of her work with rituals.
It was,
with this work that she realized how she could use the
participation of the
spectator in the sense of creative creation. Before this the spectator
participated individually, each one with her/his "Animal", with her/
his
"Walking" or with one of the objects of the "Body Nostalgia", or at
most in
couple as in the "Clothing - Boding - Clothing". "The House is the
Body" was
a ludicrous tunnel-life, species of "ghost-train" [I do not know
the correct
name of this expression in English, in Portuguese it is "trem
fantasma" -
"ghost-train"] of amusement parks. In it, of course, would not come
in a
person at a time. Inside it, they should partition their emotions, the
public inside the labyrinth, stimulated by sounds, lights and tactile
sensations, should break their barriers and communicate in this
kind of
second birth. In this exploration / communication inside the poetic
labyrinth, the public would discovering that the house is the body:
articulation of the being and of the being in -- wall equal skin.
"The House
is the Body", offered a still essentially psychoanalytical view,
for being
connected to the birth and to the childbirth but at the same time,
we should
foresaw anthropological aspects in it.
The work of Lygia Clark was becoming more and more an experimental
exercise
to freedom. An attempt of unblock the other, Was this blockade erotic,
violent, social or of communication. With the relational objects
the artist
arrived to be transformed in an almost quack / shaman.
The "Anti-Edipus (1972) " by Deleuze-Guattari [ DELEUZE, Giles e
GUATTARI,
Felix . O Anti-Édipo. Rio de Janeiro, Imago Editora LTDA., 1976,
p p.
15-70.] ] has as subtitle capitalism and schizophrenia and always
put in
confront the therapeutic power and the social and economic power,
because
the power of the body always is in the sifts of the power matter.
In one of
her countless letters, Lygia Clark states to be reading the "Anti-
Edipus ".
Mere chance?
Lygia 's way in art always was the one of breaking with the
supports, she
started with the painting, the painting lost the frame, it turned
cocoon,
the cocoons fell to the ground, and turned animals, soon after the
walking,
a space without inside or outside. According to doctor Luiz Carlos
Wanderley
Soares, which worked with the artist, she would want to break with the
support of the subjectivity.
I agree with him. In "The House is the Body", for example, the trip
finishes
in a deforming mirror, a funs park mirror, this deformed image would
correspond to the space of the farce, which Guattari [GUATTARI,
Félix and
ROLNIK, Sueli. Micropolítica, "Cartografias do
Desejo" (Cartographies of the
Wish). Petrópolis, Vozes, 1986, ] said to be the appropriated space
for the
invention of a delirious subjectivity, the only that in a collision
with the
capitalist subjectivity, would do its collapse. While this does not
happen,
each one of us continues to be, to use the language of the computer
science,
an individual terminal that consumes subjectivity. Subjectivity
always built
by the social.
To know more about Lygia Clark search for texts by Suely Rolnik.
All best,
- rcp
***********************************************
Regina Célia Pinto
http://arteonline.arq.br/
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm