A Farewell to Arts

On Lygia Clark at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Lygia Clark, “Ping-pong”, 1966
Josef Albers, “Structural Constellation”, 1954
A central contributor to Neoconcretism and a key
ligament bridging modern art and the spectrum of non-
object-based practice and context art that followed,
Lygia Clark was among the most influential artists of
her generation. And yet, it was only this year that a
United States museum staged a major survey exhibi-
tion of her work. In part, this is due to Clark’s desire,
in the later part of her life, to depart from bourgeois
cultural institutions and their corresponding aesthetic
discourse, favoring an exploration of the therapeutic
potential of her work outside the art world per se.
Here, art historian Monica Amor considers “The
Abandonment of Art”, the presentation (organized
by Luis Pérez-Oramas and Connie Butler) of the late
Brazilian’s œuvre that was on view this summer at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Displaying nearly 300 works comprising draw-
ings, collages, paintings, objects, and propositions
ranging from the late 1940s to the early 1980s,
this exhibition of Lygia Clark at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York is the first in-depth
showing of her work in the United States. Fit-
tingly, and paradoxically, titled “The Abandon-
ment of Art”, the show unavoidably reinscribes
Clark’s work within the institution (and the
categories) of art despite her progressive rejection
of pictorial representation, representation tout
court, the mediums of painting and sculpture,
contemplative modes of viewership, the material
support of the work of art, and the institution of
art as a whole.
Indeed, as those familiar with Clark’s work
know, her mid-1950s geometric abstract paint-
ings led – through the incorporation of real space
materialized in the interstice between pictorial
support and frame – to a profound questioning
of the art object’s ontology, and ultimately, the
abandonment of its conventional categories. Her
first abstractions are from 1952 and reveal an artist
interested in linear and modular configurations,
as well as an overall treatment of the surface, that
indicate her exposure to geometric abstraction in
Paris in the early 1950s. Prominently featured in
the exhibition, these prismatic paintings prefig-
ure her interest in overlapping planes, modular-
ity, and spatial ambivalence; elements that she
literalizes in her reliefs and objects of the late
1950s and early 1960s. A set of gouaches from
1952–53, which delineate irregular configurations
of intersecting triangular planes, is positioned in
the exhibition next to a replica of a “Bicho” (Crit-
ter). The spiky morphology of these three-dimen-
sional works, the show suggests, is presciently
announced in these colorful works.
This section of the show, breathtaking in
the number of works assembled, meticulously
traces Clark’s investigations into the conventions
of painting. This inquiry involved a rejection
of the frame, theorized in 1958 by her close
colleague, Ferreira Gullar, in a text written by
the Brazilian poet on the occasion of an exhibit
of Clark’s works in São Paulo. There he wrote,
“When I break with the frame […] pictorial space
evaporates, the surface of what 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.”1
It was indeed architecture, a world of walls and
floors, which had encouraged the radicalization
of the organic line and Clark’s speedy move into
three-dimensional space. Two “Maquete para
interior” (Maquettes for Interior, 1955) on display
in the show attest to an interest in a synthesis of
the arts that looked to the example of Mondrian,
whom Clark revered. Elsewhere in the same gal-
lery a series of “Estruturas de caixas de fósforus”
(Matchbox Structures), produced almost ten years

256 reviews reviews 257

later, attest to Clark’s turn to the precarious. These
small modular configurations can be seen as
humble ripostes to the Architectons of Malevich,
whom Clark surely knew from photographs (a
drawing of one, captioned “Suprematist Architec-
ture”, illustrated Gullar’s seminal “Theory of the
Non-object” from 1959).
Architecture would remain a reference for
Clark as the transitional installation “A casa e o
corpo” (The House Is the Body, 1968), unfor-
tunately on view on a separate floor of the
museum, suggests. But before bidding a definite
farewell to the wall, Clark would dismantle the
concept of the plane as a container or reposi-
tory of representation. She accomplished this by
rejecting traditional composition (figure/ground
relations) and by privileging an allover modular-
ity defined through painted and incised lines. In
this subsequent series, “Superfície modulada”
(Modulated Surfaces, 1955–56), she continued to
work with wood (or plywood) and introduced
industrial paint applied with a spray gun. Despite
these industrial references, Clark was rejecting
the objectivist claims of most geometric abstrac-
tion. Instead, she was aiming for something she
called an “expressional” space – one that rejected
traditional subjective projection (the picture as a
representation of the artist’s feelings) – in favor
of painting existing in real space, making the
environment “expressive in itself”.
Increasingly interested in the structural and
spatial aspects of her inquiry – a dismantling
of the frame and the pictorial plane – Clark bid
farewell to another pictorial element: color. She
turned to mostly black, white, and gray in works
that were influenced by Josef Albers’s “Structural
Constellations” (1949–60s), which she admired
but found limiting due to their conventional
258 reviews
presentation: a linear configuration centered in
an open space rather than a composition extend-
ing to the edge of the support. Again, contrary to
what Briony Fer suggests in her essay, Clark did
not see these actual works of Albers. The German
painter had participated in the 1957 São Paulo
Biennial but no “Structural Constellations” were
included.2 Instead, probably relying on available
reproductions, Clark focused on the ambivalent
“multidimensional” space generated by Albers’s
linear geometric constellations.
A series of mostly black-and-white paintings,
called “Planos em superfície modulada” (Planes in
Modulated Surface, 1957–58), were conceived first
as studies made of cut and pasted cardboard. The
exhibition features more than a hundred of these
displayed either on vitrines or in double-sized
Plexiglas panels set up perpendicularly to the wall.
The arrangement successfully gives the viewer a
sense of Clark’s restless pursue of this ambivalent,
multidimensional space she had recognized in
Albers’s constellations. In the same room where
these studies are shown, Clark’s more serene “Espa-
ços modulados” (Modulated Spaces) and “Uni-
dades” (Units) from 1958 (also conceived first on
cardboard) focus on the edge of the support. Here,
the overall structure of her previous works was
replaced by monochromatic supports surrounded
or intersected by the organic line (now called
“line-light” or “line-time”). This sunken line, as
if carved out of the surface, visually bisected or
inscribed the border of the quadrilateral modules
of the works, slightly altering the shape and size
of these otherwise materially identical supports,
and thus revealing the space of the work, as Clark
observed, as “a moment of the surrounding space.”
Clark’s most famous and mesmerizing works,
her groundbreaking Bichos, conceived in 1960,
made of folded and/or hinged geometric blades
that the viewer can manipulate, are featured
in the following gallery (however, only three
replicas are available to visitors). This beauti-
fully populated gallery signals a definite turn
to this surrounding space that preoccupied the
artist. On the walls though, one “Contrarelevo”
(Counter-relief) from 1959 and four “Casulos”
(Cocoons) from that same year demonstrate that
this literal incorporation of space was conceived
from within painting rather than sculpture.3 By
piling up two layers of wood (Counter-reliefs) in
lozenge-shaped supports and by opening up the
work through metal planes that unfold toward
the viewer (Cocoons), the artist materialized the
concept of “surface process” and the topologi-
cal looping between inside and outside of which
she wrote so much. These works, not sufficiently
highlighted in the exhibition, were a turn-
ing point for Clark but also for Neoconcretism
(1959–61) as a whole. It is around this time that
Gullar coins the term “non-object” to define the
artistic production of these artists. A detailed wall
text on these series (of which more examples
would have been welcome) could have helped
convey this struggle between mediums (painting,
sculpture, relief) with which the Brazilians, and
specially Clark, were engaged at the time.
The last segment of the show, devoted to
the interactive propositions in which the artist
engaged almost exclusively from 1966 on, is, as
I am sure everyone involved in the organiza-
tion of the exhibit expected, its most challeng-
ing and problematic. It is a much smaller space
than the others used and it almost feels like an
afterthought; one that encompasses half of Clark’s
trajectory. This section should have highlighted
more forcefully the role of the seminal “Camin-
hando” (Walking, 1963) – which consisted
simply in the action of making a Möbius strip
and cutting through it until a residual trail of
connected hoops of paper is produced by the
spectator-become-participant. This work indexed
Clark’s abandonment of the art object, the culmi-
nation of an ontological inquiry that had started
with the organic line, and the propositions that
followed, many of which were conceived during
courses taught by her at the Sorbonne (1972–75),
led to the nonverbal experimental therapy to
which she passionately dedicated herself from
1976 on. The latter, which she called “Structur-
ing of the Self”, reused many of the objects of
her propositions to, through touch, arrive at a
“preverbal image.”
At MoMA (and in the catalogue) this aban-
donment is reinscribed as performance: As
facilitators demonstrate to viewers how several of
the propositions and the relational (therapeutic)
objects operate.4 The catalogue, too, posits these
practices as the seed of what we call today artistic
social practices – a grave misunderstanding that
seems to ignore that Clark’s inquiry at this point
concerns subjectivity, individual and collective,
outside of what she perhaps naively saw as mere
social habits. Subjectivity was seen by Clark in
1963, triggered by “Walking”, as precarious and
unstable. This realization, and the crisis, or rather
collapse of mediums that the work signified, led
to a definite farewell to the art object (although
not the aesthetic dimensions of the object), its
spectatorial positions, and its institutions.5 To be
fair a total focus on the documentation of these
developments would have rendered the objects
used by Clark mere relics. Maybe a tighter link
(physical and conceptual) between the exhibition
space and the wealth of activities spearheaded by
reviews 259

Lygia Clark, “The Abandonment
of Art, 1948–1988”, MoMA, New
York, 2014, installation view
the education department (absolutely key in this
context), as well as an emphasis on public work-
shops and discussions incorporated into the exhi-
bition space, would have alleviated the feeling
that this work did not belong in the museum as
we know it. In the end, Clark’s œuvre was a crisis
of mediums and form as the repository of an idea.
This led her to a crisis of the subject of (tradi-
tional) expression and to the nonverbal forms
of therapy she developed – an abandonment, in
other words, of the certainties of representation
(art, language) and implicitly the institutions
through which it circulates.
monica amor
Lygia Clark, “The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988”, Museum
of Modern Art, New York, May 10–August 24, 2014.
Notes
1 Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Clark. Uma experiência radical
(1954–1958), Rio de Janeiro 1958, n.p.
2 IV Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna, exh. cat., São Paulo,
1957, p. 75.
260 reviews
3 In a letter to her friend Luiz de Almeida Cunha, a diplomat
and critic, of October 7, 1959, where Clark was at pains
to convey her artistic trajectory, she spoke of her 1959
reliefs as “made of cut wood and ‘piled up’ on top of each
other” – a technique that suggests the material and tech-
nical specificities of the “Contra-relevos”. The line-time
of the “Espaços modulados” and “Unidades”, she added
in this letter, “moves in these reliefs to the edge of the
surface.” She added: “I am one step away from sculpture,
but I’ll only go into it after exploring to the fullest what
the surface can give me.” Lygia Clark to Luiz de Almeida
Cunha, October 10, 1959, Archives of the Associação Cultu-
ral “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”.
4 Lygia Clark, “Relational Object”, in: Lygia Clark, exh. cat.,
Barcelona, 1998, pp. 319–327.
5 As famously recounted by Yve-Alain Bois, in 1973 Clark
rejected the idea of the exhibition when offered one by an
unidentified curator. He wrote: “Only one solution would
suit her: if the museum would pay her for a three-month
summer stay during which she could continue the ‘courses’
she was ‘giving’ at Saint Charles (a sinister warehouse
belonging to the University of Paris)”. Yve-Alain Bois,
“Nostalgia of the Body”, in: October, 69, Summer 1994, p. 87.
exit the Political
On the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice
“14th International Architecture
Exhibition”, Venice, 2014,
installation view
This year’s Venice architecture biennial certainly isn’t
suffering from an absence of theoretical framing. The
result of two years of detailed research, Rem Kool-
haas’s “Fundamentals” attempts to offer an antidote to
generic contemporary architecture.
Most prominent of the exhibition’s three com-
ponents is the Central Pavilion’s installation, which
proposes a refocusing on the elements of construction.
What to make of this multi-faceted empirical investi-
gation? And how exactly are these basics of building
derived? Edward Dimendberg, here, encounters a “big
data” problem, a positivist approach to material culture
and anonymous architecture — and ultimately, an
absence of any political argument.
It would be ungenerous to not acknowledge the
contributions of the 14th International Archi-
tecture Exhibition curated by Rem Koolhaas,
which opened the first week of June and is on
view until November 23. Constructing even the
smallest building is typically more expensive than
producing an artwork. Advertising and publicity
campaigns often masquerading as scholarship
have become a fact of life for culturally ambi-
tious architects seeking to edge out the competi-
tion and win commissions. Thanks to the efforts
of Koolhaas and his collaborators, these wind
machines have been silenced for six months, and
the Giardini and Arsenale have become sites of
investigation rather than the zero-sum games of
marketing and self-promotion that typify most
architectural exhibitions.
More than any other architect of his genera-
tion, Koolhaas has embraced the alternation
between monographic research projects and
building. His first (and still most brilliant) book
reviews 261