101
11. Lygia Clark, “On the Act,” reprinted in Lygia Clark, Fundació Antoni Tapies, p. 164. 12. Ibid, 168. 13. lbid 14. Ibid, p.209. 15. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.5. 16. Lygia Clark, Lygia Clark, Fundació Antoni Tapies, p.206. 17. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 175. 18. Lygia Clark, Lygia Clark, Fundació Antoni Tapies, p. 165. 19. Mark Johnson, Op. Cit., p.207. 20. “It is around this time that Clark”, Yve-Alain Bois recounts, “dismiss(es) the art world, once and for all”. Not long ago he wrote: “It was 1973, and Lygia...asked me to be present for a visit from a museum curator who wanted to propose a retrospective exhibition of her work...Lygia categorically
rejected the idea of an exhibition, arguing that since 1968 all she had done was distance herself even further from the object – that her current work, in which the individual bodies of participants became a collective body in the forming of an ephemeral architecture. It no longer bore any relationship to art, particularly since the very notion of spectator was entirely banished from it”. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Lygia Clark: Introduction”, October #69, Summer 1994, p. 87. 21. These experiences, and Clark’s commitment to an undoing of structures, is clearly related to her and to other neo-concrete artists’ – like Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape – engagement with a “mobilizing space” that defied the Gestalt perception advocated by Concrete artists. It is worth noticing that by the same time, two other women artists, Gego in Venezuela and Eva Hesse in the United States, were also engaged in dissolving: the grid, seriality, and the search for a clear Gestalt that characterized prominent artistic movements in their respective countries. I am referring to
Kinetic art in Venezuela and Minimalism in the United States. 22. Carlos Basualdo. “Bodywise”, Future, Present, Past, La Biennale di Venezia, 1997, p.62. 23. Lygia Clark, Lygia Clark, Fundació Antoni Tapies, p. 292. 24. Ibid, p.266. 25. Paul Ricoeur, Op. Cit., p. 3. 26. Ibid, p.329. 27. I am indebted to Carlos Basualdo for his thoughts on the therapy as intimately related to Clark’s plastic practice.
Translation: Vincent Martin MÓNICA AMOR
Candidate in the Ph.D program of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She writes regularly on contemporary art.