20 Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema, 1958

Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema , 1958.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959–1964

MONICA AMOR

Another dream: in the inside which is the outside, a window and myself. Through this window I want to pass to the outside which is the inside for me. When I wake up, the window of my room is the one from my dream; the inside I was looking for is the space outside. —Lygia Clark, About the Act

Poet Ferreira Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-object” was published in December 1959 in a Sunday supplement to the Jornal de Brazil , a Rio de Janeiro–based newspaper that became a key instrument in the divulga - tion of neoconcretist art. 1 The essay, which radically broke with the pre - vailing emphasis on modernist pictorial identity, was a crucial conceptual tool for the emerging Brazilian avant-garde and fundamental to under - standing the experiments with space and the spectator in which Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica engaged between 1959 and 1964. While the works of these artists have been assessed primarily in terms of “viewer participation” and the recuperation of subjectivity, what was at stake during these years (1959–1964) was the dispersal of the classical structure of representation triggered by the neoconcrete group’s interest in the affec - tive dimension of the work of art. This was accomplished by the various formal and spatial reversals deployed in the works of this period, which dismissed pictorial projection as the foundation of artistic subjectivity. Gullar’s theoretical contributions and the intense artistic dialogue sus - tained between Clark and Oiticica opened up new venues of aesthetic investigation that profoundly upset the status of the art object as well as the subject of production and reception. In his “Theory of the Non-object,” Gullar argued that the dismissal of the frame and the binding relation with real space manifested in the work of Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin (whose works illustrate the article) index the destruction of fictional space and its metaphorical semantics. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau was similarly

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 mentioned as a model intervention in real space and quotidian life, areas of primary interest to Gullar and the neoconcretist artists concerned with abandoning the protected field of pictorial articulation. Written in close dialogue with the aesthetic investigations of Lygia Clark 2––who since the mid-1950s had been exploring the role of the frame in mediating between fictional and real space and the integration of space in supports that oscillated between paintings and reliefs––Gullar’s article concluded by defining the “non-object” as a “primary formulation.” The latter proposition revealed the idealist dimension of neoconcretist theory, which designated the nonobject as an event that appears as if for the first time, free of all significations not related to this coming into being of the work: a presentation instead of a representation, unmediated and free from conventions of use and language. This can be interpreted in the light of phenomenology’s idealism but must also be understood as a response, on the part of the neoconcretists, to the rigid categories of meaning and social interaction, manifested via the notion of art as prod - uct and bound formally to the limitations of Gestalt psychology. The latter was utilized by their rivals, the São Paulo–based concretist artists, as a tool of artistic production. Gullar’s essay was partly responding to concretist artist Waldemar Cordeiro’s 1956 essay “The Object,” which, following the postwar incar - nation of the constructivist model, posited art as a product. “The concept of productive art,” wrote Cordeiro, “is a mortal blow to idealism and emancipates art from the secondary and dependent condition to which it has been relegated.” 3 Concretists’ pictorial operations were thus informed by logic and objective knowledge (Gestalt theory, mathemati - cal composition, seriality, color theory) without truly engaging with the material implications of their positivist leanings. 4 For Gullar and the neo - concretists, concrete art’s instrumental approach to art, its ultimate and contradictory confinement to the safe enclosure of the pictorial plane, and its reliance on mechanical formulations of space were limitations. In a follow-up to his “Theory of the Non-object” entitled “Dialogue on the Non-object” (as its title indicates, it followed the format of an imagi - nary interview), Gullar proposed a revision of the conventions of art through a nonobject that evaded denomination and use. In contradis - tinction to Cordeiro, Gullar refuted the functionality of the object in favor of the indeterminacy of the nonobject. The nonobject bypassed the stagnant conventions of language and usage established between the object and the subject; it required no mediation; and, according to the existential idealism that informed neoconcretism’s investigations, its “signification [was] immanent to its own form.” Like language, Gullar explained, the work of art is part of a fabric of significations that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 renders familiar the opacity of things, and thus it dwells in the realm of representations. The “nonobject” instead was to be a “presentation,” without references to the functional signification that dictates our apprehension of objects. Gullar emphasized here that the nonobject’s background is real space and not the metaphorical field of abstract art, which still operated on the principle of representation (“metaphoric because space there symbolizes the space of the world, in the same way that the forms symbolize objects”). 5 In this way the “nonobject” coincides with the object: they both insert themselves directly onto space. But because the “nonobject” is determined by a permanent rebirth of form and space, it eludes the stagnant task of linguistic and visual representation handed down to traditional (art) objects. Also at stake was a theorization of the inter- medium quality of the nonobject that avoided identifiable pictorial and sculptural iterations and even questioned the concept of art. The con - tentious challenge of fully circumventing representation would prove to be an impossibility. In 1960, however, the ruptures proposed by the neo - concretists in the field of art opened up new avenues of investigation and revolutionary symbolic models of cultural and social meaning: It’s a rediscovery of the world: Colors, space, do not belong to this or that artistic language, but to the living and indeterminate expe - rience of man. To deal directly with these elements, outside the institutional frame of art, is to reformulate them as if for the first time. . . . The spectator is solicited to use the “non-object.” Mere contemplation is not enough to reveal the sense of the work—the spectator goes from contemplation to action. But what his action produces is the work itself, because that use, foreseen in the struc - ture of the work, is absorbed by it, revealed and incorporated into its signification. 6 The influence of Gullar’s essay on the experimental work of the Brazilian avant-garde of the period cannot be overstated. He ended his “Theory of the Non-object” with a footnote associating his position with the art of both Clark and Oiticica, and the latter was clearly vocal about embracing the term nonobject to qualify his work. 7 This triangulation, Clark/Gullar/Oiticica, allows us to understand the experimental leap performed by the artists’ work between 1959 and 1964. The dialogue sustained by Gullar’s theoretical template and Clark’s aesthetic investi - gations propelled Oiticica’s work off the wall and into the social space of the favelas (shantytowns), articulating, in passing, models of individual and collective identity, as well as aesthetic production, that still resonate in current attempts at sustaining nonobject practices.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Lygia Clark. Planes on Modulated Surface No. 1 , 1957.

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Oiticica’s artistic dialogue with Clark dates from 1957 when Oiticica ini - tiated his Met aesquem as, works on paper in which the artist covered the surface with tilting geometric shapes either painted or outlined with a strong color—black, red, and blue were favored. (Earlier both Oiticica and Clark participated in the first and second exhibitions of Rio de Janeiro’s Grupo Frente, in 1954 and 1955.) One can recognize in these works Oiticica’s interest in destabilizing the spatial conventions of concrete painting and its dependence on preconceived compositional structures, which were usually informed by Gestalt theory and mathematics. However the effect was graphic, and the visual problem of the figure-ground relation (rep - resentational space) was still present. Clark had already attacked the con - ventions of pictorial geometric abstraction in a group of pieces entitled Quebrada da moldura (Breaking the Frame ; 1954), which, by incorporat - ing the frame both through the use of color and by extending the com po - sition to the edge of the painting in a nonhierarchical fashion, indicated a move outside the frame and rendered the fictional space that it contained a fallacy. Foreseeing the entanglement with everyday space, Clark wrote regarding this dismissal of the frame, “When I break with the frame . . . pictorial space evaporates, 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.” 8 Indeed, Clark’s work would come to inhabit quotidian space and, later, ephemeral and precarious objects. In the struggle with the frame, the artist made note of the spatial line that divides frame from canvas, door from wall: In 1956, I found the relationship between this line (which was not graphic) and the lines of joining doors and frames, windows and materials which make up a floor, etc. . . . It was a space line, a fact which I would only come to understand later on. I took a job as an apprentice in a modeler’s workshop and began to make models in which this line became the graphic-spatial-module of a whole environment. 9 In 1957 Clark made the first in a series of works entitled Planos em superfície modulada (Planes on Modulated Surface ). This all-white “painting,” however, was not merely made of assembled wooden panels—in the manner of another series of related works, Superfícies moduladas (Modulated Surfaces ), begun in 1955. Rather, the line/space that Clark had perceived as separating canvas from frame, door from wall, acquired a more specific physicality as the artist purposefully left

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 a separation of half a centimeter between the panels that diagonally cut the resulting rectangular surface. The penetration of real space into the assembled sur - face would from then on, in all of Clark’s work, signal the porous relationship between inside and outside. She called the spatial division between the panels the “organic line,” in part to oppose the mechanical space of concrete art. The division not only revealed the graphic operation of spatial definition upon which geometric abstract painting was based to be obsolete but also led to the dismissal of all pictorial and sculp - tural support as farce. Ricardo Nascimento Fabbrini hints at a more complicated model of aesthetic production (and subjec - tivity) than the one suggested by Clark’s terminology and argues that her “organic line” was an opening celebrating incompleteness and with - drawing from the pretension of a totalizing logos: “Inserting the outside inside, [the organic line] breaks with the unity of its material foundation. Like an ellipse it is the realization of an absence which marks the impos - sibility of self-presence in representation, of a plenitude of presence.” 10 The infectious penetration of real space signified by the organic line would indeed hint at a suspension of presence in representation—prob - lematizing not only the concept of object as a stand-in for something else (an idea, a feeling, etc.) but the projective nature of representation in which the subject, in a gesture of dominance, recognizes itself in the object. By 1959, Oiticica had followed Clark into a radical questioning of the pictorial support and medium specificity. His works, produced during 1959 and 1960, aspired to overcome the plane, “that former element of representation,” because of its “a priori sense of a surface to be painted.” 11 For both artists the temporalization and spatialization of the pictorial structure was an important gesture toward the affective apprehension of the work. For Oiticica, however, color became the element that allowed him to escape the constraints of painting while remaining in dialogue with it. The temporalization of chroma allowed for a grounding of his disruptive experiments in the discourse of painting even as he destroyed painting’s conventions, structure, and support. If color revealed the quali - tative differences of “active color-light,” it also made painterly structure immanent: “there is no ‘a priori’ structure,” wrote Oiticica following one of neoconcretism’s dictums; “it constructs itself in the action of color-light.” 12 The monochromes that he painted in 1959, small square wooden plaques (30 x 30 cm) in a range of reds that shade into pink, yellow, and orange, conceived color as embodied rather than represented light. These small “paintings,” entitled Invenções (Inventions ), hung from walls but were

Amor | From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959 –1964 25

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 scattered throughout the room, punctuating cor - ners and the imaginary grid that Oiticica used as a point of reference, while hinting at the environ - mental and public dimensions that his work would soon acquire. In a diary entry of December 25, 1959, Oiticica quoted Mondrian: “there is no escape for the non-figurative artist; he must stay within his field and march toward the consequence of his art. This consequence brings us, in a future perhaps remote, toward the end of art as a thing separate of our surrounding environment.” 13 Was the 22-year-old Oiticica contemplating the possibility that the future to which Mondrian referred was the development-against-all-odds Brazil of the 1950s? No doubt, the massive urban reconfiguration, the democratic aspirations, and the industrialist policies of president Juscelino Kubitschek (in power from 1956 to 1961)—along with the con - struction of a new capital city, Brasilia, importing the latest urban stan - dards to the country’s remote plains—seemed to indicate as much. The last years of the decade were a time of political, economic, and cultural prosperity that coincided with intellectuals’ optimism for the constitu - tion of a stable public sphere and a solid civic foundation. This trans - lated into the utopian geometric-abstract enterprise of the concretists, who saw their work operating in dialogue with the industrialists’ efforts of the period, as well as into the relentless faith in modernity of the neo - concretists, for whom art was to become a participatory, potentially transformative event of aesthetic agency.

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The works executed in 1959 by Clark and Oiticica under the influence of the neoconcretist debates deployed a careful and fatal deconstruction of the pictorial support via the dismissal of the frame in Clark’s art and the use of shaped canvases in that of Oiticica. 14 The support, which, in modernist accounts of painting, asserted the flatness of the picture plane, ultimately came under systematic attack in both artistic practices. Clark’s Casulos (Cocoons ) pushed her preoccupations with the spatiotemporal dimension of the “organic line” further, coinciding with her fascination with the topological figure of the Möbius strip—a surface without front or back that travels freely from inside to outside and vice versa (and which had been introduced into the Brazilian artistic milieu by Max Bill). 15 These works, based on a lozenge surface measuring 42.5 x 42.5 centimeters, were

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Opposite: Hélio Oiticica. Inventions , 1959 –1962. Left: Lygia Clark. Cocoons , 1959.

made of one piece of metal cut and folded irregularly, opening up the pictorial sup - port toward the viewer. The Cocoons introduced the fold into Clark’s work as a strategic operation of mediation between representational and real space. Hung on the wall, they forced the viewer to look into them to dis - cover the airy thickness of the support, the disintegrating trajectory of the pictorial plane, and the oscillating tension between form and emptiness. Oiticica’s contemporaneous attack on the integrity of the pictorial sup - port, the Bilaterais (Bilaterals ) (1959) and Relevos espaciais (Spatial Reliefs ) (1960)—produced under the aegis of neoconcretism’s reception of Malevich, Mondrian, and Tatlin—also contributed to the picture plane’s disintegration. 16 The Bilaterals are irregular geometric surfaces painted in a range of whites that hang from the ceiling, thereby dispers - ing painting throughout real space. Composed of double-face panels and designed to be seen from various points of view, the Bilaterals sought to disrupt passive contemplation and trigger a multidimensional experi - ence. Without back or front, they announced the brightly painted, wooden Spatial Reliefs that, predicated on rectilinear shapes based on a combination of triangular and quadrilateral figures, deployed, like Clark’s Cocoons , an unfolding that allowed Oiticica to reconfigure the support and suspend the viewer’s habitual perception of painting. The Spatial Reliefs hung from the ceiling to instigate the apprehension of the disjunc - tive nature of the support, its layers and gaps that opened up the surface as if revealing the fictitious nature of painting, now irrigated and dis - membered by real space. No longer pictorial plane, neither painting nor sculpture, these pieces, as Oiticica himself indicated, could be defined only through Gullar’s notion of the nonobject: [S]ince the plane of the canvas began to function actively, it became necessary for a sense of time to enter as the principal new factor for nonrepresentation. Thus, the concept of the não-objeto (nonobject) was born, a term invented and explained by Ferreira Gullar, and more appropriate than painting, given that the structure was no longer unilateral (as in painting) but multidimensional. 17 Already by 1960 this plunge off the wall and into space was deemed by Oiticica necessary to redefine spectatorship and incorporate the viewer into the meaning of the work. 18 And in 1962 he commented on the need to reconsider spectator and pictorial support in tandem: An art based upon structural transformations always opposes the passive role of the support, and the conflict reaches a point

Amor | From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959 –1964 27

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 where there can be no evolution unless it is resolved. In reality, whoever represents upon something, will better represent “through” something. There is the intermediary between the sense of space and the struc - ture, and the spectator who receives the idea. Evidently, the creator needs the means with which to express himself, but the means should be direct, or better, will have to be so, to the extent that the expression is structural and abstract. 19 Oiticica’s antirepresentational stance must be understood in light of the Brazilian avant- garde’s rejection of the traditional modes of pictorial representation that had been favored by the national rhetoric of Brazilianness of the 1930s and 1940s. Prone to an iconography of the popular and the land, the modernism of that period was seen as stagnant. But this inquiry into the limits of representation had more profound implications. In their opening toward real space and their consideration of the spectator, the works of the neoconcretists initiated a profound questioning of the sta - tus of the object and the subject in conventional aesthetic practices, shat - tering the contemplative position of the viewer and the identity of the art object. The dialogue Clark and Oiticica initiated through the common structure of the fold positioned the viewing subject at the intersection of representational and real space. Against the “concept” and “idea” that structured the work as a privileged site of meaning, Gullar and the neo - concretist artists acknowledged the embeddedness of both the work and the spectator in a somatic and psychological matrix that took into account the work’s structural relationship to the here and now. As indi - cated in the manifesto of 1959, conceptualized mostly by Gullar but based on a careful analysis of Clark’s work, We consider the work of art neither a “machine” nor an “object,” but rather an almost-body, which is to say, a being whose reality is not exhausted in the external relationships between its elements; a being that, while not decomposable into parts through analysis, only deliv - ers itself up wholly through a direct, phenomenological approach .20 The manifesto was at pains to convey the reductivist nature of all art that limits itself to representing, to standing for something else (ratio - nality, objectivity, the nation, and so forth). Phenomenology seems to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Opposite, top: Hélio Oiticica. Bilateral , 1959. Opposite, bottom: Hélio Oiticica. Bilateral Equali , 1959 (hanging) and Untitled, White Series , 1959 (on wall). Left: Hélio Oiticica. Spatial Relief , 1960.

have provided these artists with the most appealing ter - minology with which to convey the affective space of the work of art: Rationalism strips art of all its autonomy, by substi - tuting notions of scientific objectivity for the irre - placeable qualities of the work of art. In this way the concepts of form, space, time, structure—which in the language of the arts are tied to an existential, emotional, affective meaning —are confused with the theoretical application science makes of them. 21 By 1960, despite Oiticica’s attentive theorization of color (as the quin - tessential pictorial element), these artists’ engagement with time and space (classical constructivist concerns that were taken to their ultimate consequences in their work), their opening up of the support of the work, and their embrace of Gullar’s notion of the nonobject led painting to an imminent collapse. Contra the modernist premises that had motivated these artists’ investigations, the full destruction of representational space triggered the impossibility of a pictorial ontology and its consequent “nonobjectification.” 22 What followed Clark’s and Oiticica’s attacks on the pictorial surface and later the institution of art was a critique of the classical scheme of representation and its mediatory relation between subject and object. The works that problematized the pictorial support and incorporated the fold as an operative strategy not only refuted the spatial conventions of representation but posited the nonobject (and its antinominalist premise) as an alternative mediating dimension between the subject and its envi - ronment . Against objectification and exteriorization, the works discussed above opened toward an affective space and a more fluid and pliant rela - tionship between inside and outside. In submitting the art object to a foundational doubt, Clark and Oiticica were attempting to undo the extreme objectification deployed by concrete art. With regard to the ini - tial assault on the pictorial support that her 1959 production embodied, Clark wrote, “The plane arbitrarily marks off the limits of a space, giving humanity an entirely false and rational idea of its own reality. From these are derived the opposing concepts of high and low, front and back— exactly what contributes to the destruction in humankind of the feeling of wholeness.” 23 To Clark, such wholeness implied a merging of subject and world. Against specular projection—the projection of the artist’s ego onto the surface of the painting where she or he sees her- or himself—and the consequent transcendence of this surface and this ego, Clark proposed

Amor | From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959 –1964 29

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Right: Hélio Oiticica with his B11 Box Bólide 09 , 1964. Opposite, top: Lygia Clark. The Inside and the Outside , 1963. Opposite, bottom: Lygia Clark. In Itself , from Beasts series, 1962. Various views.

the vulnerability of a nonrational space. In words that clearly evoke lessons learned from Malevich, she wrote, “We plunge into the totality of the cosmos,” a statement whose spatial resonance is opposed to the positionality that founds the mod - ern subject constituted in representation. 24

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Without an object to represent and in which the subject recognizes itself, Oiticica was left to deal with the persistent decenteredness of his Bolides (1963–1967)—boxes that the viewer manipulates and that are structured like small labyrinthine models with multiple openings, portals, win - dows, and compartments. Some are filled with a variety of materials encountered by the viewer. Mirrors, shells, meshes, and pigments undo the precision of the geometric box, and this in turn facilitates sensations of alterity and permutation. Other Bolides , or “Trans-objects,” as Oiticica also characterized these works, included glass vessels filled with pig - ment (an attempt to give body to color). Here, the various constitutive elements moved the artist away from a mode of production that he defined as “structures totally made by me” in which “there is a wish to objectify a subjective structural conception, which only realizes itself upon becoming concrete by the ‘making of the work.’” Instead, the “Trans-object” suggested an identification between conception (of the work) and found element (glass vessel) that dismantled the opposition between subject and object because “[the found object] already existed implicitly in the idea [of the work].” 25 An analogous structure of relay was the operative link among Clark’s Bichos (Beasts ) of 1960–1964, hinged polymorphic structures that viewers were asked to unfold to reveal unpredictable structures. Such experi - ments coalesced to weaken the stability of artist/spectator and art object. In the inconclusive explorations triggered by the Bolides and in the open and unpredictable quality of the Beasts , subjective projection was frus - trated. What Clark called the dialogue between her Beasts and the viewer who unfolded the various plaques of metal was illusory communication. The exchange was mostly predicated on an opaqueness that disturbed recognition. Folded flat, a Beast could be perceived as symmetrical and geometrical, but unfolded, folded, or refolded its identity was unstable and could not be apprehended or fixed, despite its structural precision. Clearly involved in a spatiotemporal deployment that challenged the geometric references of the work, the hinge allowed the Beasts to operate between two

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 opposing paradigms, the organic and the formless, which here com plemented each other. In the Cocoons , Spatial Reliefs , Bolides , and Beasts the appeal was to the repressed libidinal economy of geometric abstraction. “We might say,” critic Ronaldo Brito wrote, “that the proposal was to activate an intense circulation of the observer’s [or participant’s] desire, by means of a fight to break away from the conventions [of] work-spectator.” 26 In the opening of boundaries facilitated by the hinge, in the folding of arms and plaques prompted by the Beasts , in the disunifying compartments of the Bolides , and previously in the dispersing folds of the Cocoons and Spatial Reliefs , Clark and Oiticica posited a dissolution of the enclosed, fictitious space of painting and an inquiry into the status of the subject and the object of representation. An uncommon Beast from 1963, entitled O dentro é o fora (The Inside and the Outside ), was cut from a single sheet of tin instead of constructed out of articulated geometric planes. The cutout curvilinear pattern on the malleable metal allowed real space to penetrate the work, which was meant to be twisted by the viewer to emphasize its topological dynamics: no inside, no outside, no front, no back. Elastic and “deformable,” as Clark herself described it, the piece impressed her because it transformed the perception she had of herself and her body: “It changes me,” she wrote; “I am elastic, formless, without definite physiognomy . . . ‘Inside and outside’: a living being open to all possible transformations. Its internal space is an affective space.” And in the same text, she added, In a dialogue with my “inside and outside” work, an active subject encounters his or her own precariousness. No more than does the Beast , the subject no longer has a static physiognomy that is self- defining. The subject discovers the ephemeral in opposition to all types of crystallization. Space is now a kind of time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action . Subject and object become essen - tially identified within the act. 27 But, if, as Fabbrini observes, Clark’s organic line introduced an “absence,” “the impossibility of self-presence in representation,” the interstices and hinges of the Bolides and Beasts further disrupt the auton - omy and identification between the subject and object of representation.

Amor | From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959 –1964 31

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Lygia Clark. Trailing , 1964.

Instead, Clark aspired to a subject/object identification within the act that amounted, as she described it, to dissolution and uncertainty. One of the most forceful postwar critiques of logocentrism, of the impossibil - ity of self-presence in representation, mobilizes a terminology that was dear to Clark during the late 1950s and early 1960s. To articulate a lack of origin at the heart of experience, thought, and representation, to underline the fictitious unity and protected interiority of the mind, Jacques Derrida proposed—in a section of his seminal treatise Of Grammatology entitled “The Outside I+s the Inside”—to think the trace, which articulates the relationship with the other, as the difference that allows meaning. In Derrida’s semiotic analysis, the trace is the mark of the absence of the referent, of that about which we speak, but also the absent signified, since one word (sign, meaning) always leads us to another. At stake is a topological understanding of the structure of mean - ing in which “the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible” (usually thought of as the inside) “would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form”; that is, writing, image, representation (conceived as the outside). Without a trace “retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear.” To further illustrate this operation in which difference is “the formation of form” and that which allows the articulation of speech and writing (as well as the more metaphysical pairings that concern aesthetic practice such as “the sensible and the intelligible,” “expression and content”), Derrida titled the last part of this chapter “The Hinge” (“La brisure”). He recalls, via the “voice” of Roger Laporte, that “hinge” might be the single word that designates “dif - ference and articulation.” Crack and joint at the same time, this spacing (the place of the hinge), also called “interval,” allows “differences to appear in a chain of significations”; it articulates differences (including space and time) as well as the field of the entity that is not a presence but an articulation of differences. At the same time, the ambiguity of spac - ing, the hinge as absence and in-betweenness, is “the unperceived, the nonpresent, and the nonconscious,” Derrida writes, adding that spacing is also “the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside.” 28 This key operation—the “undermining of an ontology” via a relationship with its exteriority, via the interdependence between inside and outside—is what Derrida’s conceptual hinge so pre - cisely figures forth. Clark’s material hinges, in a gesture deeply rooted in her productive dialogue with constructivism, facilitated a move outside the object to ini - tiate what she called propositions, actions in which she used precarious objects as mediators of ephemeral events that explored the psychic and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 somatic dimensions of the subject. Her Caminhando (Trailing ) of 1964, produced by various cuts on a Möbius strip made of paper, was to be a frontal attack on structure and sculpture—symbolized by the heroic granite, brass, and marble sculptures of that topological figure made since the 1930s by Max Bill. Against the rigidness of these concrete mon - uments, which betrayed the spatiotemporal ambivalences of the Möbius strip, Clark aspired to a fusion of object and subject through the imma - nent act—a suggestion that ended in an entanglement of strips of paper, with no beginning or end, no form, no shape. For the artist, only the act, the temporality of the gesture that shook the subject of social habit, counted. But the resulting formless interlacings of paper were an index of the insurmountable impossibility of communicating self-presence, affect, perception. The work/gesture embodied, if anything, the dispersal of subject and object, the total relinquishing of mastery and center, and it asserted the end of expressive or representational aesthetic projection in Clark’s oeuvre. The following year Clark wrote “About the Act,” an essay that estab - lished the topological parameters within which the artist’s post-object work would be deployed. Here, phenomenology was not to deliver the subject of presence but the vulnerable and contingent body of percep - tion, a body which achieved a sense of “fullness” that “had the taste of death” and that she justified in terms of a complementary difference referred to as “full-void”: “this totality of the interior with the exterior I’ve spoken of so often.” 29 A mutual emphasis on the continuous desta - bilization of the body as a fixed entity and on the ephemeral opened up the field of the precarious not only as a paradigm of production but also as a conceptual principle to understand the instability of the self, the uncertainty of the Cartesian cogito shaken by this topological relation - ship between inside and outside: “I am pumped up by others. Perception so powerful that I feel myself torn up from my roots. Unstable in space. I feel as though I were in the process of disintegrating. To live perception, to be perception.” 30 The following lines insist on this lack of sync between self, work, and perception that contradicts what in the same text Clark calls an identification of subject and object within the act: “Who is the Beast —myself? I become an abstract existence. I sink in real depths, without connection to my work—which looks at me from a dis - tance and from outside myself. ‘Is it I who did that?’ Upheavals. A hys - terical sense of leaking. Only a thread holds me fast.” Previously, in a diary entry from October 28, 1963, Clark had asked herself, how can I feel that I am a total unity if precariousness, permanent movement, is the essence of my work, and has therefore become

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 mine also. . . . I am crying over the fixed which has no meaning anymore, instead of accepting the precarious in the greatest joy, as a concept of existence. 31 A proposition of 1966 titled Di álogo de m ãos (Hand Dialogue ), made by Clark in collaboration with Oiticica, summarizes the complex aesthetic propositions that these artists developed and the contradictory philosophical implications of these explorations. The proposition, which required two participants, one wrist of each penetrating the two loops of an elastic Möbius strip, again bid farewell to the con - structivist object produced by the subject of rationality and presence—a crisis progressively manifested in the intense rapport that Clark and Oiticica’s work shared during these years. Once inside the loop the hands’ twisting produced a feeling of inevitability and of irresolution. This dialogue rendered expression mute and delivered the immanent act of self-presence so dear to phenomenology and the logic of representa - tion as a pointless struggle of the hands. In the poignant words of two critics: “If the ‘dialogue’ is continued long enough, a moment comes when the impression is born that the hands are carrying out a kind of autonomous dance and that, in their false symmetry, they are separated from the body.” 32 In their critique of representation motivated by a rejection of the art object as a rational structure, Clark and Oiticica eroded aesthetic subjec - tive projection and the principle of certitude (self-presence) that founds the logic of representation but also the experiential basis of the neocon - crete project. Consequently, the subject of production and reception was perilously repositioned instead of salvaged by the phenomenological reduction they sought so hard to achieve. The next years were devoted to further exploring the ramifications of this demise in paths that took the artists in radically different directions. We see this in the bodily disper - sals of Clark’s propositions (which concluded in her nonverbal relational therapy) and in the social and environmental explorations of Oiticica’s Parangoles . For both, this move outside the work, but also beyond the self, was also a return to the inside and the world of affect, a spasm that in the end knew no beyond but only the spacing of the interval, the hinge, the fold.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 Lygia Clark in collaboration with Hélio Oiticica. Hand Dialogue, 1966.

Notes This essay is dedicated to Maya.

1. Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do não-objeto,” Suplemento dominical, Jornal de Brasil (SDJB ), 19–20 December 1959. All citations from Gullar’s text in this essay are my own transla - tions from the Portuguese. For a complete English translation, please see Ferreira Gullar, “Theory of the Non-object,” trans. Michael Asbury, in Cosmopolitan Modernisms , ed. Kobena Mercer (London, Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 170–173. In this volume, see also Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: Cosmopolitanism at a Local Level and a Canonical Provincialism,” 174–189. 2. Gullar, who wrote the first study of Clark’s work in 1958, called her pictorial exper - iments of 1954–1958 a “radical experience” and set out to map the artist’s growing dissatisfaction with the conventional pictorial support used by her concretist colleagues. This seminal essay, the blueprint for further analyses of the artist’s paintings of the period, had already advanced many of the preoccupations of the neoconcretist artists by the time of their first exhibition and accompanying manifesto. See Ferreira Gullar, “Lygia Clark: Uma experiência radical,” in Lygia Clark (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980), 7–12. 3. Waldemar Cordeiro, “O objeto” (1956), in Projeto constructivo brasilero na arte. 1950–1962 , ed. Aracy Amaral (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: MEC-Funarte, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Secretaria da Cultura, Ciencia e Tecnologia do Estado de São Paulo, and Pinacoteca do Estado, 1977), 74. All citations from Amaral’s volume are my own translations from the Portuguese. 4. For an excellent analysis of the differences between concretism and neoconcretism, see Ronaldo Brito, “Vértice e ruptura do projeto constructivo brasileiro,” in Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto constructivo brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985). 5. Ferreira Gullar, “Diálogo sobre o não-objeto” (1960), in Projeto constructivo brasilero , ed. Amaral, 92. 6. Gullar, “Diálogo sobre o não-objeto,” 93–94. 7. Vera Martins, “Oiticica: Transformação dialéctica da pintura,” SDJB , 20–21 May 1961. 8. Clark as cited in Gullar, “Uma experiência radical,” 9. 9. Lygia Clark, “Lygia Clark and the Concrete Expressional Space” (1959), in Lygia Clark , exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999), 83. 10. Ricardo Nascimiento Fabbrini, O espaço de Lygia Clark (São Paulo: Atlas, 1994), 41. My translation. 11. Hélio Oiticica, “Color, Time, and Structure” (1960), in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color , exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2007), 205. 12. Hélio Oiticica, “Novembro 1959,” in Aspiro ao grande labirinto (AAGL ) (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986), 17. Citations from AAGL are my translations from the Portuguese. 13. Oiticica, “Natal 1959,” in AAGL , 17. 14. On the neoconcretist debates and their development prior to the first exhibition of neoconcrete art, as well as on the scission between the concrete artists of São Paulo and those of Rio de Janeiro (later to constitute the neoconcrete movement), see Maria Aimée Chaguri Gallerani, Concretismo e neoconcretismo nas artes plásticas: A Vanguarda con - strutiva brasilera nos anos cinquenta e inicio dos sessenta (São Paulo: Pontifica Universidade, 1991), 126–135.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 15. In 1950 Bill had an exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea of MAM, São Paulo, and the following year his Tripartite Unit (1947–1948) was awarded the first prize of the first São Paulo Biennial. This stainless steel work revisited Bill’s ongoing interests in topology and the continuous surface of the Möbius strip. Bill’s rigorous version of concrete art, his multifaceted personality as sculptor, graphic designer, and painter, and his development of a mathematical art imbued with the discourse of rationalism and harmony enticed those young Brazilian artists already interested in geometric abstrac - tion to consider concrete art the only visual model that would allow them to leap into modernity. 16. The Tate catalogue for Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color dates the Spatial Reliefs to 1960. Earlier publications date them to 1959. 17. Oiticica, “Color, Time, and Structure,” 206. 18. Hélio Oiticica, “2 de Setembro de 1960,” in AAGL , 21. Referring to the organiza - tion of planes in works that break with rectangular supports, Oiticica speaks of a dimen - sion that is not only physical “but of a dimension that is completed in the relationship of the work with the spectator.” 19. Hélio Oiticica, “Support,” in Hélio Oiticica , exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume; Rio de Janeiro: Projeto Hélio Oiticica; Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992), 59. 20. “1959: Neo-concretist Manifesto” (1959), October 69 (Summer 1994): 93; emphasis in original. Originally published as “Manifesto Neoconcreto” in SDJB , the manifesto was signed by Amilcar de Castro, Ferreira Gullar, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanudis. 21. “1959: Neo-concretist Manifesto,” 92; emphasis added. 22. “The painting of our century,” Oiticica wrote in June 1960, “passes through a dis - integration of its previous characteristics and assumes others to the point where we can’t call certain works painting. A main characteristic of that interrelationship of painting with other works is the destruction of representational space and its consequent nonobjectification.” Hélio Oiticica, “Junho 1960,” in AAGL , 19. 23. Lygia Clark, “1960: Death of the Plane,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 96. 24. Clark, “1960,” 96. 25. Hélio Oiticica, “Bolides, October 29, 1963,” in Hélio Oiticica (1992), 67. Following the inaugural work of Gullar, theorization about the concept of object as an alternative to conventional categories of painting and sculpture was pervasive during the 1960s in the Brazilian artistic milieu. See Daisy Valle Machado Peccinini, Objecto na arte: Brasil anos ’60 (São Paulo: Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, 1978). But by 1968 Oiticica criti - cizes the tendency, in the Brazilian context, to think of the object as a new artistic cate - gory. Its role, mostly conceptual, was to debunk painting and sculpture and rethink the problem of representation, to open artistic creation toward action on the environment. Of the various approaches to the object in Brazilian contemporary art, he celebrates artist Rogéiro Duarte’s formulation of the Probjeto, “which refers to ‘open’ propositions made by artists . . . ,” infinite possibilities contained in the various propositions that facilitate “vivencias.” See Hélio Oiticica, “O objeto—Instancias do problema do objeto,” Revista GAM , no. 15 (February 1968): 26–27. The translation is mine. A reprint is available in Machado Peccinini, Objecto na arte , 97–98. 26. Brito, “Vértice e ruptura do projeto constructivo brasileiro,“ 112. 27. Lygia Clark, “1965: About the Act,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 104; emphasis in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.20 by guest on 28 September 2021 original. 28. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 62, 65–66, 68, 70. 29. Clark, “1965: About the Act,” 104. 30. Clark, “1965: About the Act,” 103; emphasis in original. 31. Lygia Clark, “October 28th, 1963,” in Lygia Clark (1999), 168. 32. Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, “Part Object,” in Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997), 160.

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