Lygia Clark: Between Spectator and Participant

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Lygia Clark

Between Spectator and Participant

Ana María León If I were younger, I would be in politics. I feel a bit too at ease, too integrated. Before, artists were marginalized. Now, we, the proposers, are too well placed in the world. We are able to live—just by proposing. There is a place for us in society. There is another type of person who prepares what will happen, other precursors. They, they continue to be marginalized in society. When there is a struggle with the police and I see, in Brazil, a seventeen-year-old killed (I put his photo on my wall, in my studio), I realize that he dug a place with his body for the generations that will succeed him. These young people have the same existential attitude as we, they unleash processes whose end they can’t see, they open a path whose exit is unknown. But society resists them, and kills them. It’s thus that they work all the more. What they try to force is perhaps more essential. They are incendiaries. It’s they who shake up the world. We, sometimes I wonder if we are not a bit domesticated. That annoys me. – Lygia Clark1 A photograph of the art work Abysmal Mask 1968 [Figure 1], presents an image of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark seemingly lost in a world of her own. The mask envelopes her face, her eyes are covered. Her hands hold the nylon sacking, delicately sensing its shape as it is filled by the air expelled from her lungs. She appears completely disconnected from her surroundings. But what are these surroundings? What is in the air, so to speak? Clark (1920–1988) is perhaps best known for her Beasts or Bichos (1960)—metallic sculptures with moveable parts, meant to be manipulated by an active audience. She started her career influenced by Constructivism, but soon became more interested in the actions prompted by objects rather than the objects themselves. Her later works focused on collective actions and personal therapy. It is only recently that her emphasis on agency has been included in broader discussions of participatory art. In Participation (2006), an anthology on the subject, art scholars Claire

Bishop and Hal Foster cite Clark’s collective propositions as precedents to contemporary participatory work.2 In this paper I will complicate these readings by contextualizing Clark’s work in the late 1960s, a period in Brazilian history in which the military increasingly gained control of the government. These political upheavals had a clear impact on the Brazilian art world. Argentinean art historian Andrea Giunta has argued that the first symptoms of this change can be seen with the transformation of the artist into a cultural figure, and the shift of the work of art from an abstract aesthetic expression to an engine for real political change.3 Clark’s artworks stand at the fulcrum of this development, as both a reaction to, and an escape from, a stifling political environment. First Moment: 1964 Following the period of rapid modernization that was promoted by president Juscelino Kubitschek in the 1950s—including the building of the famous new capital, Brasilia— the country fell into a period of instability. Kubitschek’s political rival succeeded him only to resign in a miscalculated political move, clearing the way for João Goulart— Kubitschek’s former vice president.4 The Brazilian military opposed Goulart’s left-wing policies, however, and took over the government in 1964, with General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco serving as President. Eager to affirm the legality of his presidency, Castelo Branco intended to serve the remainder of Goulart’s term, which ended in 1966, and then turn power over to a democratically elected president. In order to control the left-wing groups that had multiplied under previous administrations, congress vested Castelo Branco with increasing powers through a series of laws known as Institutional Act 1 (1964). IA-1 suspended dependency on other branches of government, suppressed the autonomy of local municipalities, and authorized the government to target political parties, labor organizers and church activist groups, and suspend the political rights of any citizen. This repression extended to the art world: because of art critic Ferreira Gullar’s visible involvement with a student leftist organization engaged in restoring popular art, the military police broke into his house and confiscated some of his belongings.5 The relationship between progressive and conservative cultural movements was, however, a complex one. As Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz has pointed out, the government used a conservative discourse to court the ruling elite into supporting a general 45


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