Lygia Clark & Romeo Gongora - Apsolut koji otkrivaju žudnja i smrt

Umjetnost kao bljuvanje živog iskustva koje potom gutaju drugi sudionici. Organska arhitektura i liječenje "pacijenata" predmetima. Kobasice napravljene od vlastite krvi - Krist je živa granica između mene, bolesti i drugih.


"Lygia Clark, from Object to Event


Suely RolnikHugely influential, Lygia Clark (1920–1988, Brazil), alongside Hélio Oiticica and others, produced in mid-twentieth century Brazilian Modernism a radical and singular territory between poetics and politics, distinct from the dominant Western European and North American models. Clark devoted herself to painting and sculpture throughout the first sixteen years of her artistic career. From 1963 until the end of her life, her work ceased to be limited to the creation of objects and rather realised itself in the relation between those experiencing the proposal and the world: the work becomes event. These various proposals implicated a specific sensible capacity of the body, namely, the way in which it is affected by the otherness of the world. Thus, it is impossible to present such works by only exhibiting the objects employed in these actions, or by exhibiting documentation of the processes, as these would be apprehended only in their exteriority, reified and emptied of their critical vitality.
Faced with this challenge, Suely Rolnik conceived a memory-building project in which the sensations experienced in Lygia Clark’s proposals might be activated, by shooting 65 interviews in Brazil, France and the US. The resulting concert of dissonant and heterogeneous voices sketches an outline of the unique sphere in which Lygia Clark’s research took place – as well as the cultural context of Brazil and France in which the artist’s concerns found their origin. The intention is that, by means of this living archive, the legacy of Lygia Clark and the issues that her unequalled work poses, might continue to feed critical dialogue and today’s artistic explorations.
I accept nothing from those who want to put a label on me. I only accept criticism from those who are willing to live with me through the sensibility and experience that led me to a painting or an attitude. - Lygia Clark
In 1968, following the retrospective of her work at the 34th Venice Biennale, Lygia Clark moved to Paris, where she found an environment suitable for her artistic explorations, far from the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. There she was frequently invited to carry out her proposals at meetings with friends from the local art circuit (artists, critics, curators, gallery owners and collectors). In this milieu, Clark developed a new phase in her work, turning now to group experiences. These were proposals that came to involve the sensible relationship with the other, mediated by objects created for this purpose. Positioned between the bodies on whose encounter its expressivity will depend, the object conjures up the vulnerability of each participant to the living presence of the other, without whom the work cannot happen.
In 1972, Clark was invited to give classes at the Sorbonne, at UFR d’Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l’Art de l’Université de Paris 1 (known as Saint Charles). Launched after May 1968 and embodying the ideas of the political and socio-cultural movement which emerged that year, the school was founded as an alternative to the conservative model of training that characterised Fine Arts schools, making it a space for freedom of artistic experimentation. Clark’s participation in this adventure broadened the influence that she already exerted over the artistic scene in Paris.
Clark began to create Structuring the Self (Estruturação do Self), in 1976, when she returned to Brazil for good. From her work with the Sorbonne students during her last years in Paris, the artist observed that the experience her objects summoned up in the encounter, collided with subjective barriers on the part of participants. She then felt the need to create a proposal that enabled this barrier to be crossed. The new focus of research intended to explore objects not only in their capacity to summon up the experience, but also in their capacity to bring its impossibilities to the fore – no longer here as a side effect of the work but as a core element. Dealing with these impossibilities became the aim of the new proposal, which took on an openly therapeutic dimension.
The work ceased to be collective and returned to a focus on individual experience as with her earlier experimental work, though now set in the context of a long-term, protected, lived relation with the artist. It took place in one-hour sessions, once to three times a week, for months or even years. Clark’s participants, ’clients‘, as she called them, came from the Rio de Janeiro cultural world of the day, except – and not coincidentally – visual arts and psychoanalysis. The objects that Clark used in her sessions, she referred to as ‘Objeto Relacional’ (‘Relational Object’). Many came from previous phases of her work, others were especially made. Some of her ‘Relational Objects’ received a specific title, such as Grandecolchão (Large Mattress), or Almofadas leve, pesada and leve-pesada (Light, Heavy and Light-Heavy Cushions). Others had no name or their name changed according to their use.
Lygia Clark practised Structuring the Self unflaggingly until 1981. She gradually reduced the number of ‘sessions’, partially abandoning the work from 1984 and then definitively in 1988. She died two months later. The high degree of refinement that this proposal represented within her overall project – placing the opening up of sensible capacities at its centre – was also what enabled its appropriation in the clinical field, especially for psychosis treatment: her ‘Relational Objects’ were successfully incorporated into therapeutic practice, especially in public mental health.
However, Structuring the Self should not be mistaken for its clinical applications, on pain of missing the rich and subtle complexity of this proposal, as well as the evolution of Clark’s unique artistic trajectory. The artist broke new ground with this work. Disregarding the boundaries of both art and clinical practice – independently of style, school or category – Clark created an unprecedented territory, driven by her restless investigative spirit." - Suely Rolnik

"One of her most recognized interactive art pieces is Baba Antropofágica. This piece was inspired by a dream that Lygia Clark had about an anonymous substance that streamed out from her mouth. This experience was not a pleasurable one for Clark. She viewed it as the vomiting of a lived experience that, in turn, was swallowed by others. In a sense, Clark seemed to view this atrocity as a way of displaying its freedom."



Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future
Simone Osthoff

"...A similar sort of violence, moreover, was expressed in a much more strident way in the performances of some 1960s artists, such as the Messe pour un corps (Mass for a body) Michel Journiac organized on November 26, 1969 at the Daniel Templon Gallery in a co-production with the Martin Malburet Gallery. In celebrating the Eucharist with slices of a sausage made from his own blood, the artist effected a sacrilegious substitution evocative of the death of God and of the indomitability of the body, “an absolute that desire and death reveal.” (9). In this ritual form, the détournement of the Christ-like gesture took an eminently tragic turn.
This sacrificial form of sharing is to be found again in the collective events Lygia Clark organized as part of her art courses at the Sorbonne University in 1973. For her Anthropophagical Dribble, students held in their mouths colored spools they were asked to unwind slowly in order to cover the body of one of the participants, who was laying down on the ground. The gradual unfolding of the performance led to everyone becoming entangled together with this “dribble.” Another action performed the same year, Cannibalism, suggested that a student wear a suit with a stomach-level pouch filled with fruit. Blindfolded, all the people placed around him were to take a bite from the food then let it go and pick it up again.
With these two experiments, Lygia Clark was suggesting that giving and taking were not antinomic. “I am one huge mouth that swallows, devours, and grinds up everything,” she wrote. “I am a small body; I want to occupy the whole space of the world. . . . I give everything to the other, expecting in return his impressions after he has tried out all my offerings.”(10) From this perspective, what becomes apparent is “perseverance in its being,” which Spinoza named in his time the conatus. Taking up again this philosophical postulate, Frédéric Lordon states that “to exist is to be self-interested. An action has no other meaning than to be accomplished in the first person--that is to say, whatever its nature, and in particular when it takes the most oblatory forms, it is accomplished by an agent who, in committing therein his existential activity and acting through his own movement, necessarily acts relative to himself, that is to say, in the end for himself.”(11) Confronted with this conatus, the potlatch--giving, receiving, reciprocating--would have been the first attempt at the social level to repress the drive to seize and to hoard..." - Fabien Danesi

Romeo Gongora

I AM THE OTHER (2009)
This project consist on a series of experimental actions revisiting Lygia Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self”. Started at the end of seventies, “Estruturacao do Self” defines the last artistic phase of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.  For that project, she interacted for one hour with her “patients”, whom she met one on one three times a week, by using different objects on their bodies. She not only extensively commented on these therapies, but they where also recorded visually. For me, what comes out of these documents is a mystical aura surrounding the participants, and the intensity of Clark’s thoughts, highlighting the ambivalence of some concepts relating to art, as well as social sciences, like readymade, spectator, alienation, rationality, … During a residence at CoCA in Torun (Poland), I revisited and revised Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self” by doing a series of experimental actions for which I used tactics of appropriation, derivation, and reinterpretation. Also dealing with the local context of Torun, I have thus produced in-situ objects, and inhabitants of the city were involved in these “therapy” sessions. The process of realization of this project generated multiple layers of interconnecting questions, such as simultaneous movements of repulsion and attraction. Thus, an inner struggle was produced as I sought to define my artistic practice in relation to Clark’s; I attempted to become her, while needing to be myself. In addition, my relation with the participants during the sessions was suffused with physical manifestations of emotions such as love, joy, sensuality, anger, fear and humiliation; the work itself was circumscribed by shifting borders, opening a space for unresolved categorizations. Consenquently, “I am the Other” could be seen as a bad pastiche, but it also can be positioned as a sincere homage to Clark’s legacy. The project was made in collaboration with Center of Contemporary art - Torun (CoCA) and Conseil des Art du Canada. I wish to thank the participants and the staff of CoCA.