Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema , 1958. 20 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 Grey Room 38, Winter 2010, pp. 20–37. © 2010 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 21 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 22 Grey Room 38 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. Amor | From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959 –1964 23 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. | | | | | 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.