Research sharing space #2: Lygia Clark and Neo-Concretism
- luisakarman
- Aug 3, 2020
- 13 min read
Lygia Clark was a Brazilian artist born in 1920, a key figure in Brazilian Modernism and a co-founder of the Neo-Concretist movement
She was known for her radical brand of creative rupture with traditional models of art, and subversion of notions of the 'artwork', the idea of the artistic authorship and the passive role of the viewer. My research on Clark was focused on how she promoted a reconfiguration of the language of abstraction, a mode of expression which her and many of her contemporaries explored in connection to Brazilian artistic histories and movements.
The photograph on the right is an installation shot of Lygia Clark's solo exhibition at Signals London in 1965. Sculptures from Clark's Bichos ('Critters' or 'Beasts') series are displayed across the foreground, while one of her Planos em superfície modulada ('Planes on modulated surface', figure 2) and Contra Relevo ('Counter Relief', figure 3) hang on the walls. Here, it is as if the illusion of three-dimensionality constructed on her canvases becomes fully realised into space, as geometric forms seem to crawl out of the constraints of the wall plane on to the gallery floor. This blurring of the demarcation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional form was part of Clark's interpretation of the language of geometric abstraction and of her experiments reshaping that lexicon.
In her work, this language is constantly manipulated and proven to be more malleable than its grand-narrative at the time suggested - a perspective that Clark and her contemporaries repeatedly questioned and considered to be crystallised and thus repeatedly questioned.
My research led me to understand how Clark reconfigured the language of geometric abstraction by reframing pictorial structures such as planes, from which she repeatedly breaks away in her experiments, and by subverting established modes of understanding art. The works described below - a small sample of her very prolific and varied trajectory - illustrate her progressive detachment from the constraining convention on which geometric abstraction seemed to rest according to its own mythology (meaning: this isn't exactly true to the core of the movement, but discourse created a myth around it that was widely disseminated and accepted as mainstream). Looking into them helped me elucidate how Clark problematised the separation between pictorial space and real space, between an object's inside and outside' and between mind and body. She saw correlation between interior and exterior and created many works that proposed a fusion of spectator and object.
As a key part of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, Lygia Clark was involved in a critical absorption and re-elaboration of European modernism that reactivated the Brazilian cultural paradigm of antropofagia ('anthropophagy'), created by poet Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s.
(note: if you want to get into Brazilian art, this concept would be a great place to start)
Antropofagia represents a strategy of cultural emancipation in which European legacies are ingested and transformed by means of a syncretic combination of elements derived from both local and foreign contexts (more on it here). There is a clear corporeal dimension to this concept, since it uses the metaphor of cannibalism, digestion or metabolisation to suggest a process that is organic and bodily. Many scholars discuss how this reconfiguration of geometric abstraction by the Neoconcretists in Brazil represented its translation into a locally specific language.
Simone Osthoff, for instance, argues here that this syncretic process fused a Western artistic canon that privileges vision and metaphysical knowledge, and Afro-Indigenous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete.
Clark's new take on European constructivist languages can be seen within this broader context, in connection to the ideas of her contemporaries Ferreira Gullar and Hélio Oiticica.
As I learned from Osthoff, Clark and her group questioned the rationalistic and impersonal postulates of concrete abstraction and proposed the translation of geometricity and notions of universal aesthetics directly into life and the body. In 1959, Gullar’s Neo-Concrete Manifesto claims that concrete art had been brought to a “dangerous rationalist exacerbation”, referring to the theories that consecrated the objectivity of science and mechanics, to which the São Paulo group Ruptura subscribed at the time.In Rio de Janeiro, Gullar and the Neoconcretists proposed a reinterpretation of geometric abstraction that recuperated the elements in Mondrian’s or Malevich’s works that would push against the constraints of their theorisation.
The Neoconcrete movement worked to go beyond the rationalism and mechanicism of theoretical definitions of these European avant-gardes to activate a transcendence of both the rational and the sensorial which they saw in the works of Malevich and Mondrian. In Clark’s work, for example, the Neoconcretists saw a return to the root of Mondrian’s thought, which went beyond the superficial understanding of his “geometrism” and, in the words of Oiticica, generated “insight into his most important lines of action, opening a new way for art". Gullar famously writes:
“It would be worthless to find in Mondrian the destroyer of surface, plan and line if we could not pay attention to the new space generated by such destruction”
(Gullar, Neo-concrete Manifesto, p. 55.)
Clark seems to have indeed 'paid attention', as Gullar put it, to the potentials of spaces that came out of the destruction of such elements. This is evident in her 1954 Quebra da Moldura (‘Break of the Frame’, figure 4), in which the artist explores the role of the frame in mediating between fictional and real space. She extends the composition onto the frame, indicating a move beyond the limits of its edges, as if to question the arbitrary character of the delimitation of fictional space. Here, by repeating the composition on the ‘frame’, Clark seems to suggest that the repetition could be infinite, onto other frames and onto space. By putting into evidence the arbitrary and therefore mutable character of the frame as a distinction between pictorial and real spaces, the artist promotes the evaporation of that boundary – as she describes it: “the surface of that which was painting falls to the level of common things and this particular pictorial surface becomes somehow equivalent with that of this door or that wall” (quoted here). As cultural critic Suely Rolnik explains, the dissolution of the neutral zone representing the frame can also be seen as a disruption of the separation of the canvas from the exterior world, which according to Gullar served to buffer the disruptive power of art. As such, in questioning the pretended autonomy of pictorial space, Clark’s works begin to exceed their spatial boundaries and ‘spill over’ onto the social field.
Clark’s dismissal of the frame lays the ground for further experimentations with the limits of pictorial space in her series of Planos em superfície modulada (figure 5), in which the artist explored the three-dimensional possibilities of a flat surface through playing with lines, colour and geometric motifs. By arranging panels in different shades of grey, black and white, the artist creates the illusion of shadowing and propels the cuboid forms outside the picture plane. As this piece shows, the works demonstrate the overlap between the creation of fictive illusionistic space in painting and the properties of real space, such as depth and concreteness. Here, the edges of the cuboids are formed by the space left between panels (as seen in close-ups below, figs. 6a and 6b), allowing real space to penetrate the assembled surface, giving the empty space a physicality, or ‘fullness’, of its own. In doing so, the artist underlines the role of negative space in creating positive space and form. This understanding of the complementary nature of the relationship between positive and negative space developed into Clark’s understanding of the ‘full-void’, a concept that would inspire the making of her sculptures (we''ll get back to it later in the text).
Figures 6a and 6b: Close-up views of Lygia Clark, Planos em superfície modulada (not numbered), 1957, cardboard collage, 18 x 18 cm, Alison Jacques Gallery, London.
© “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association.
Clark’s idea of a permeability between the fictitious pictorial space of the canvas and real space motivates both her dismissal of the frame and the subsequent dismissal of the plane as a structural feature of representation. In 1960, she writes:
“The plane is a concept invented by man with a practical objective: to satisfy the need for balance… Demolishing the plane as support of expression is to gain awareness of unity as a living and organic whole.”
(quoted here)
Figures 7a and 7b: Lygia Clark, Casulo, 1959, paint on metal (left) and Casulo no. 2, 1959, enamel on aluminum (right) © “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association.
As Rolnik argues, with the discovery of the organic line, Clark had already extracted three-dimensionality from the two-dimensional plane in Planos em superfície modulada. She then moves on to “demolishing the plane”, working on the frontier between painting and sculpture. In Casulos (Cocoons, 1959, figures 7a and 7b), the artist breaks free of the flatness of traditional painting altogether, pushing her "preoccupations with the spatiotemporal dimension of the organic line" even further (quoting Amor on this). This series of folded metal sculptures, while still made to hang on walls, were built as multifaceted structures that forced viewers to move around to grasp the whole of its quasi-architectural attributes and discover both form and emptiness, the two in an oscillating tension.
Fig. 8: Lygia Clark, Bicho-Maquete (320) (Critter-Maquette 320), 1964, aluminium, variable/unconfirmed, Tate Collection © Tate
Art historian Monica Amor suggests these works introduced the folding of form into Clark’s work as a strategic operation of mediation between representational and actual space. It is possible to connect the break away from the frame to the wider Neoconcretist pursuit for organicism, which had motivated its rupture with Concretism in the first place. As evident in the quote above and suggested in the title ‘cocoons’, Clark saw the projection of geometric form into real space as an activation of it, a translation of them into living, corporeal thing. Indeed, this process would come to a climax with Clark’s series of polymorphic structures produced in the early 1960s, Bichos, which translates into creatures/critters. The works were metallic sculptures with moveable parts, meant to be manipulated by an active audience, all constructed in unique ways, each one potentially rearrangeable in different versions of itself.
Figures 9a and 9b: Lygia Clark, Bicho: O dentro é o fora (Critter: The Inside Is the Outside), 1963, stainless steel, 40.6 x 44.5 x 37.5cm. MoMA, New York. © MoMa (left) | Figure 10b: Lygia Clark holding Bicho: O dentro é o fora, 1963. Black and white exhibition print © “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association, Rio de Janeiro.
One of her Bichos, called O dentro é o fora (figures 9a and 9b), the title of which literally translates into ‘the inside is the outside’, reaffirms the aforementioned potentialities of the void, the ‘full-void’, in which emptiness and 'undefinition' constitute a space in themselves (source). As the artist writes, she wanted to “express space in and of itself, and not compose within it” (quoted by Rolnik here)
According to the artist, she called the work ‘creatures’ due to their “fundamentally organic characteristic” (read her Nostalgia of the Body here), including the resemblance she observed between the hinges connecting the planes and a dorsal spine. Therefore, it is as if, in Bichos, the potentiality of the fold as a strategy to manipulate pictorial and real spaces becomes fully realised, allowing the living form alluded to in Cocoons to break free from the constraints of the plane altogether. In the artist’s words, Bichos “fell, like real cocoons, from the wall to the floor” (quoted here). This almost poetic trajectory can be seen in the very structure of each Creature, which when folded flat can be perceived as merely geometrical and symmetrical, but when unfolded and refolded (figs. 10a/10b) reveals its unstable identity (quoting Amor).
Figures 10a and 10b: Lygia Clark, Bicho: máquina (Critter: Machine) shown opened and closed/flat, 1962, gilded metal with hinges, variable dimensions, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston © “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association, Rio de Janeiro.
This fluid nature of Bichos seems to be in stark contrast with its very precise structural qualities – it is this very assumption of a binary separation between structural precision and organicity which Clark questions and, in works such as these, renders arbitrary. As Rolnik infers, the use of precision-cut, polished metal, produced in series, takes us directly to the technological-industrial milieu, but produces the strange effect of revealing the life that pulsates in the most artificial of environments. She also observes that the movements of these sculptures are not mechanical as one would expect of a supposed solipsistic existence of the object, as they require the hand of the spectator and their bodily movement.
Bichos can also be seen as a progression from Casulos in terms of the viewing experiences designed by Clark in each of these series. If viewers were invited to be more active in their contemplation of Casulos by moving around to see it from different angles, this is taken even further with the manipulable nature of the Bichos, an experimentation proposed by Clark in which object nor spectator/participant may be passive. As she puts it (in Nostalgia of the Body), the “dialogue through which the Bichos react to the spectator’s stimulus” establishes an “existential integration” between the two in the work, which operates as a whole, as a “living organism”. In doing so, Clark begins to dissolve the physical and conceptual separation between subject and object. Through this participatory experience, the work not only takes the pictorial space into real space, but also realises in bodily terms the relation between work and spectator beyond the virtual nature of mere contemplation.
In light of this, it is possible to see an underlying thread running from her Planos em superfície modulada, through Casulos, to Bichos, all working to turning space into a “kind of time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action”.
In the first instance, the artists own manipulation of form creates different spaces, but progressively, in her interactive sculptures, it is the action of the spectator/participator that constructs spaces. The agency of each participant works to undermine established notions of authorship, putting into question the traditional understanding of the artist as creator, as well as shifting his/her dialogue with the object and spectator. Clark emphasised the importance of the experience of the participant over her own agency in creating the appearance of the object by calling her works ‘propositions’.
She stated that the role of the artist was to “give the participant an object that has no importance in itself and which will only take on such to the extent that the participant will act”.
Therefore, while it is relevant that Clark’s propositions were often inspired by her own experience in interacting with different objects, her ‘version’ of the work can be seen as one of many, since each interaction with the work creates a new and unique experience of it, both on a subjective and physical level.
The fusion between subject and object is carried on in Clark’s experiments with the Mobius strip, in direct dialogue with Max Bill’s Tripartite Unity. In Caminhando (Trailings, 1964, figure 11), the artist provides a paper Mobius strip and a series of instructions for the viewer to cut it longitudinally until the strips become too thin. Similarly to Bichos, the object keeps unravelling in response to the actions of the spectator/author, while the artist herself acts as an enabler of that experience (source). Here, as Rolnik says, the spectator’s participation in the work is not limited to reception, but achieves realization itself. It is significant that as Clark’s works break away from the plane as a support for representation, they come to be increasingly more dependent on the mobilization of the spectator’s body to exist.
According to Rolnik, this represents a turning point of Clark’s oeuvre in which she would seek strategies to awaken “the spectator’s vibrating body so that, freed from its prison of the visible, it could initiate itself to the experience of the empty-full”. In that sense, it is also possible to understand Clark’s mobilisation of the viewer’s body as part of a disruption of elements of the classical structure of representation/reception as a traditionally ocular-centric experience. In creating these experiences, Clark also attempts to undermine the elitist character of traditional interactions with art. In Nostalgia of the Body, she states that “Everyone is a creator. Art is not bourgeois mystification”. As historian Ana María León explains, behind Clark’s propositions of direct engagement was the aim to dismantle the elitist character of the art object by addressing a universal subject without requirements of education or background.
Some of Lygia Clark's Bichos: fig. 14a (left) Bicho de Bolso ('Pocket Creature'), 1966 | fig. 14b (middle) Bicho Pássaro do Espaço ('Creature Passing through Space'), 1960 | fig. 14c (right) Bicho Linear ('Linear Creature'), 1960
Clark’s trajectory can be seen as a narrative in which she conceives the object as a living entity, “migrating from the plane to the relief, from relief to space” and from there “to the spectator, the act, the body” (Rolnik). In this process, it is clear that the artist retained certain constructivist principles, such as the choice of objects reduced to their material essence, the importance given to the material’s properties, and the perception of structures generated through their action. However, her experimentations constantly pushed against Constructivism’s and even Neoconcretism’s postulates, aiming to mobilize the viewer’s body more and more, ultimately culminating in the psychological and sensorial focus of her later career, in detriment of the production of the ‘art object’ (Osthoff).
This was my research until now. There is a lot more to be said about Clark's later career in which she explored art as therapy and appropriated notions of psychoanalysis in interactive works. I'd also like to think about issues around the display of her work, as there is always an element of irony when the work of artists who envisioned them their pieces as interactive end up in museums to never be touched by viewers at all - I'll leave a link to one of her Bichos being moved around, too. I hope you enjoyed the read and feel as inspired by Clark as I do :)
View of “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988,” 2014. Works from the series “Bichos” (Beasts), 1960–66. Photo: Thomas Griesel.
References and further readings:
Images © “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association. Bicho in movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cq2OVD7dvA
Amor, Monica, ‘From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959-1964’, Grey Room, No. 38 (Winter 2010) - here
Adamou, Natasha, ‘Planes on Modulated Surface (Study)(56) Summary’, May 2016, Tate website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/clark-planes-on-modulated-surface-study-56-t13711 (last accessed 9th December 2018).
Butler, Cornelia H. and Luis Pérez-Oramas (eds.), Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2014), pp. 150-9.
Brett, Guy, ‘The Proposal of Lygia Clark’, in Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of 20th century art, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Carvajal, Rina, ‘The Experimental Exercise of Freedom’, in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, ed. by Rina Carvajal, Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), pp. 33-57.
Clark, Lygia and Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, in October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), pp. 85-109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778990 (last accessed 11th December 2018)
Gullar, Ferreira, ‘Manifesto Neoconcreto’/‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’, in Time & Place: Rio de Janeiro, 1956-1964, ed. by Paulo Venancio Filho and Annika Gunnarsson (Stockholm: Moderna museet; Gottingen: Steidl, 2008), pp. 53-59.
León, Ana María, ‘Lygia Clark: Between Spectator and Participant’, Thresholds No. 39, Inertia (2011), pp. 45-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43876529 (last accessed 11th December 2018)
Medalla, David. ‘Lygia Clark at Signals London: 27th May to 3rd July’, in Signals: newsbulletin of the Centre for the Advanced Creative Study (London, England), Vol. 1, no. 7 (April-May 1965), pp. 2-12.
Osthoff, Simone, ‘Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future’, Leonardo, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1997), pp. 279-289. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1576475 (last accessed 11th December 2018)
Rolnik, Suely, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, ed. by Rina Carvajal, Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), pp. 59-108.
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