Page 116 - ARTE!Brasileiros #56

ENGLISH VERSION IMAGE AND POWER

understanding about modern art in Brazil. Even one did not last very long either), but when I first to receive me thanks to both Jean Clay’s and
because, as Milliet says, “São Paulo is a city that bumped into Jean I was a teenager. Camargo’s kind words, and because she knew
has no memory, it is a voracious city. So a lot of that I was in Paris only in passing and would not
what was inside the houses, when the Art Deco Here is the whole anecdote, given as a little pester her long.
fashion came to pass, was discarded by families. In period piece: it was 1967, and I was in the French
addition, many of these houses were demolished, equivalent of tenth grade. I was living in the As she began showing me her things—letting me
and in them there were plaster panels, paintings beautiful city of Toulouse in the southwest of touch them, handle them, inhabit them under her
and stained glass windows from Graz. That’s why France and would come to Paris whenever I had guidance—I witnessed a kind of transfiguration.
this performance by Adolpho and Fulvia Leirner is so earned enough money from various small jobs to I literally saw her dark melancholy vanish, and I
important, to rescue this. And with this recognition, pay for the train ride—schoolchildren have a lot of always thought, in retrospect, that our friendship
many things have appeared, sometimes from people small vacations in France. I don’t quite know how was sealed during this long afternoon: by pure
who remember works and furniture that belonged to I had gotten this idea, but I wanted to become chance, being there at the right moment, I had
their grandparents and were lost around”. an artist, and I spent all my time dreaming about helped her ditch her depression.
my next trip to Paris, where I would visit as many
CentenarY lyGia clarK [paGEs 68 to 74] galleries and museums as possible. I would stay First there were the few things scattered on the
at my uncle and aunt’s place, but they would only tables—pebbles connected with small rubber
LYGIA CLARK BY see me at dinner, after which I would collapse, bands tied together, one or two pebbles at
having run around all day. Then there was a break
each end. Lygia showed me how to use those
YVE-ALAIN BOIS in this routine: I was invited to an evening party precarious assemblies: you pull a pebble or a
celebrating the grand opening of an art gallery— group of pebbles toward you and, at a given
In the context of the exhibition Lygia Clark the new branch of the Galerie Denise René on moment, always unpredictable, the mass at
(1920-1988) 100 years, at Pinakotheke the Left Bank, Boulevard Saint Germain, to be the other end of the elastic will follow, either
Cultural, arte!brasileiros publishes excerpts precise, right next to the gallery of Alexandre in a jump, as if moved by a spring, or dragging
from an essay by the French curator and art Lolas (representing Magritte and Fontana)—and feebly like a slug. It was the interaction between
historian, who recalls his coexistence with my uncle agreed to let me go, provided that Jean different forces that moved her—your own pulling,
the famous Brazilian artist Clay, whom he knew slightly, would be there to the extensibility of the elastic, and the weight
chaperone me. My uncle drove me to the gallery
of the pebbles—and the fact that the resulting
while I crossed my fingers in the car: Jean greeted immeasurable act cannot fail to be perceived as a
By yvE-alain Bois me, and as the youngest kid on the block I was phenomenological metaphor for the relationship
immediately welcomed by a whole roster of of your body with others in the world.
Yve-Alain Bois, currently a professor at Princeton, artists. Jean became a friend and I learned a great
in the United States, confesses in Some Latin deal from him (he also put me to work instantly: I Then she began to unpack the boxes and hand
Americans in Paris that Lygia Clark was one of his sold dozens of Robho issues in my provincial high me older things. One of the “objects” I remember
mentors, alongside the Mexican Mathias Goeritz. school). It was Jean who first told me about Lygia most vividly was her 1966 Diálogo de mãos,
In this text, he recounts his first intense encounter Clark and showed me photographs of her work. which she had devised with her soul mate, Hélio
with the Brazilian artist, when he was just 16 years He also gave me some of her texts to read, which Oiticica. This work, or rather “proposition,” as
old, in the bustling Paris of 1968. he had had translated in anticipation of a special she was already calling her works, consists of
The essay was prepared for the book that is being dossier on her in his journal (this would only come almost nothing, like many of her pieces—that is,
published by Pinakotheke Cultural on the occasion of out in late 1968). I was so intrigued by this body of it really is nothing if you do not use it: materially,
the exhibition at its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro: work that it prompted me to publish my very first it consists of a little Möbius strip made of an
Lygia Clark (1920-1988) 100 years, on display until article—a short (and, as can be imagined, very elastic medical bandage. Each of our right hands
October 9th. jejune) essay on Lygia that appeared in the March passed through one loop of the Möbius strip in
arte!brasileiros publishes here a reduced version 1968 issue of a Huguenot weekly called Réforme, opposite directions, and by joining our hands or
of these impressions. my father being a Protestant minister. (I apologize releasing them we experienced the resistance of
for using only Lygia’s first name from here on, as matter (for our gestures were restricted by the
*** this familiar mode of address for someone I knew limited elasticity of the cloth). If the “dialogue”
The following notes are shamelessly so well comes most naturally to me.) is continued long enough, the visual and tactile
impressionistic—subjective even—as they largely sensations seem to part company and a moment
draw on my memories of early encounters with The year 1968, remember, was a tumultuous one comes when the impression is born that the
several Latin American artists in Paris. In short, in France. High-school kids were just as politically hands are dancing by themselves, separated
this is no grand synthesis—the time is not yet ripe involved as college students, and I thought, as from the body. This moment can be extremely
for that, at least on my part—but rather something did everyone else of my generation, that we were perturbing, almost hallucinatory.
more like an autobiographical fragment. It was a going to change the world. There was of course
time, in the late 1960s, when postcolonialism was much talk about the possibility of a “revolutionary At that point of my visit, Lygia began to reminisce
still a nascent concept, even though the issues it art,” but thanks to the little I already knew about about the beginnings of the Neo-concrete movement
frames had already become pressing. That so many Lygia’s phenomenological conception of art, I in Brazil, and the deliberate attack she had plotted
geometric abstract artists from Latin America should could not accept the idea of an engagé art that left with Oiticica (whom I was never to meet) against
live in Paris then did not strike me as peculiar at the beholder in a state of passive consumption. geometric abstraction, the tradition in which
the time, perhaps because I did not yet know that Political art, in order to be efficient, had to allow both had been trained. She revealed to me the
New York had “stolen the idea of modern art,” to for a different role; I knew this much, but did importance of Max Bill to Brazilian art in the early
use Serge Guilbaut’s catchphrase. not quite know where to go from there. My own fifties, especially after his retrospective at the Museu
attempts—some later published by Jean Clay in de Arte Moderna of São Paulo in 1950, followed by
(...) Robho with the quite undeserved encouragement his being awarded the international sculpture prize
of Lygia—did not satisfy me. of the first Bienal of São Paulo in 1951: enthusiasts
But enough generalities. Let us now switch, as of Bill’s “Concrete Art” (as he called his production
promised, to the autobiographical mode—not It was after the rather dramatic summer of in which everything had to be planned by arithmetic
because I have any particular attraction to the 1968, very shortly after Russia’s intervention calculations) suddenly flooded the tiny Brazilian art
genre, but because I simply cannot disentangle in Czechoslovakia, that I first met Lygia—in the world, which until then had been rather resistant to
my thoughts about two artists and their studio apartment she had just obtained in the modern art. She gently led me to understand that her
particular “anxiety of influence” from my personal Cité des arts, in a hideous building on the banks 1966 Dialogue, this tiny piece of bandage that did not
interaction with them. One is Lygia Clark; the other of the Seine where the city of Paris lodges foreign look like much, in fact represented the conclusion of
is Mathias Goeritz. I met them long before my artists, in keeping with France’s pre–World War a long battle against Bill’s type of art. For the Möbius
intellectual and artistic tastes were fully formed— II dream of Paris as the center of the art world. strip had been one of the favorite geometric figures
in fact, they played a major role in my education She had just returned from the Venice Biennale, of the Swiss artist, who had planted its polished
and especially in my awareness of modern art in where she had represented Brazil with a major granite image in many sculpture gardens around the
Latin America. I have encountered many artists retrospective of her work that included early world. Bill had frozen the Möbius strip into an icon
in my life, but only those two ever functioned for things but also her various Máscaras sensoriais of the autonomy of the modernist art object; Lygia
me as mentors. I met them both through a journal and Roupa-corpo-roupa outfits of 1967, as well transformed it into the support for an experiment
called Robho, which was published in Paris in as the large installation/environment A casa é aimed at abolishing any idea of definite, closed
the late sixties (the title is an acronym; no one o corpo. The studio was filled with boxes of all identity. With Dialogue, a “sculptural” object is no
knows what it stands for). It was one of those little sizes, and Lygia was visibly depressed (apart longer sacred as autonomous and formally perfect,
avant-garde magazines that quickly disappear, from having to process a retrospective, always but rather the falsely symmetrical dialoguing hands
and it was edited by Jean Clay, a man who had somewhat traumatic for a mid-career artist, she become, as it were, autonomous performers.
considerable clout at the time as an art critic. had been thoroughly disgusted by the hype of
Years later, Jean and I would found a much more the Biennale. On top of that, she had just learned Needless to say, we talked a lot about abstract
serious and ponderous journal called Macula (this of the death of her ex-husband). She had agreed art that afternoon (notably about Mondrian,
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