Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Lygia Clark, 22 October- 21 December
1997, then travelled to Marseille, Le Musée d'Art Contemporain (16
January- 12 April 1998), Porto, Fundação Serralves (30 April- 28 June
1998), Brussels, Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts (24
August- 27 September 1998), Rio de Janeiro, Paço Imperial (8 December
1998- 28 February 1999)
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist
Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro
Private Collection, New York
Notes
Lygia Clark’s current retrospective exhibition at MoMA is entitled The
Abandonment of Art. Such a provocative title suggests it might be an
opportune moment in which to reconsider how significant the Bichos
series were within her trajectory beyond the so-called boundaries of
art.
The title of the exhibition refers to the idea of breaking the limits of
what might have then been acceptable to define as “art”. Lygia Clark’s
“radical leap”, as art critic Guy Brett described it, had not occurred,
as one could suspect, out of an absolute rupture from her previous
practice. In fact, it developed through a gradual and coherent process
of accumulative “steps” in which the Bichos could be considered as
perhaps the most significant stage within the overall transition.
While her career as an artist was initiated firmly within the field of
painting, her progression through the abstract geometric or
Neo-Constructivist tendencies, which were so influential within Latin
America during the course of the 1950s, took her to question the
relationship between the work and its frame, gradually incorporating the
latter within the former. Having bridged the borderline established by
the frame, Clark focused her attention on the dividing lines within the
composition itself. Her work also rejected any association with the
“craft” of painting—the individual brushstroke— preferring instead to
construct the “picture” out of separate panels, themselves painted
“industrially” through the prior application of spray-paint.
The series of works entitled Superfícies Moduladas brought with them the
interest in the line that divided one panel from the other: a negative
space which emerged from the gap between each panel. This “gap” she
entitled “the organic line” since in her opinion it was the key to the
perceptual possibilities offered by the overall disposition. A
subsequent series of works, the Contra Relevos, displaced the panels
away from the single plane of the painting, bringing the work out into
three-dimensional space. The Bichos are therefore the logical
consequence of this progression. Their innovative characteristic is that
the panels are not only linked by an organic line but, since this line
is now articulated, it determines the diverse possibilities of the
work’s disposition in space through the manipulation of the spectator.
For Clark, the process of asserting an ever increasing importance to
this line led the work to offer a more profound relationship with the
spectator, one which shifted from a purely perceptive to a participatory
character.
The significance that such a transition represented for the artist
herself is suggested by the very name she ascribed this new series of
works. While her denomination for previous series related to the
structures and objects of art— such as reliefs, surfaces and so forth—
the Bicho referred directly to the organic world, being the colloquial
Portuguese term for “animal”, “insect” or more generally “beast”. Clark
further associated the hinge, itself evolved from her notion of the
“organic line”, with a spinal cord that, as in the case of animals
themselves, allows for both movement and its restriction. This
association emerged from the realization that despite having determined
the constitutive parts of each Bicho, its eventual articulation would
always appear to Clark as a surprise, as if the object had a will of its
own.
Clark claimed that: “Each Bicho is an organic entity which is totally
revealed within the inner time of expression. It has affinities with the
mollusc and the shell. It is a living organism, an essentially active
work. Between you and it there is the establishing of a total, essential
interaction. In the relationship established between you and the Bicho
there is no passiveness, neither yours nor its.” Clark goes as far as to
suggest that: “In fact there is a dialogue in which the Bicho has very
well defined answers of its own for the spectator’s stimuli.”
The individual Bichos were often given their own subtitles, such as in
the present lot Bicho parafuso sem fim (Endless Thread) which, one can
only assume, emerged from the specific characteristics of the movement
this particular “specimen” allows. Bicho parafuso sem fim is, in fact,
unusual. Given its early date, 1960, it belongs to the very first
examples of Bichos. Its anodized golden color sets it apart from the
majority of other works in the series, and another of its most prominent
characteristics is the presence of articulated panels within panels. Art
historians may speculate here whether these cut-out elements might
provide a means of comparison between Clark’s early Bichos and the
sculptural work of her fellow Neo-Concrete colleagues, Franz Weissmann
and Amílcar de Castro, whose work explored the formal and spatial
possibilities of the fold and the cut.
Such a comparison however would require a fundamental revision of the
historiography of the movement itself. In the mid-1970s art historian
Ronaldo Brito concluded that the Neo-Concrete movement, within which
Lygia Clark was a leading figure, represented the peak and rupture of
the constructivist genealogy in Brazil. Brito saw these strands as two
independent and somewhat antagonistic forces within the art movement and
associated individual artists with each strand. Clark, together with
Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and one could add perhaps Ferreira Gullar
himself (not so much as the spokesman for Neo-Concrete group, but in his
role as a Neo-Concrete poet), were positioned within the disruptive
strand, while Weissmann and Castro were classified within the other. For
Brito, the disruptive strand took the Neo-Concrete tenets to their
extreme logic, arriving at the questioning of art itself.
In the case of Lygia Clark, the reciprocity that emerged with the Bicho
between viewer and object was fundamental for the direction her work
would take over the course of the following decades. Subsequent to the
Bicho, Clark would opt for ephemeral materials which by their own nature
would place far more importance on the relation established with the
“participator” than the object itself, leading to her more recent
association with the idea of dematerialization of art brought by
Conceptualism. Clark on the other hand, came to consider this “relation”
to have evolved into something closer to therapy than art, a fact that
the organizers of her current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York have chosen to emphasize, paraphrasing her words as a
process of “abandonment of art”.
