Engaging Bodies and Performing Freedom

Co-curated by Anglo-Brazilian art scholar Michael Asbury; artist and educator Sonia Boyce; and Whitechapel Gallery Director, Gilane Tawadros, the ongoing retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988) at Whitechapel Gallery spans the last two decades and the most innovative period of her career. The 1950s to the 1970s saw Clark rethinking the relationship between art, the object and the viewer, shifting away from a traditional focus on art as object to create interactive, experiential works that hinged on viewer participation.

The exhibition begins with early studies of staircases in a fractured cubist language, three maquettes of interior spaces from 1955 (Maquete para interior 1 and 2 and Construa voce Mesmo see Espaco para Viver) and two small stacked matchbox structures from 1964, which reveal her preoccupation with spatial dynamics and the use of line to connect spaces, rather than dissect them. Clark’s exploration of space and form stemmed from her interest in architecture and her exposure to European modernism, notably through her studies with Fernand Léger in Paris in the early 1950s. Inspired by Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, it was at this time she made several geometric compositions called Superficie Modulada (Modulates Surface, 1954-58), with increasingly reduced pictorial elements to explore how the viewer experiences lines, planes and colour.

The exhibition captures Clark’s radical journey, from her early spatial experiments to her later, immersive and performative practices, emphasising her pioneering role in expanding the limits of art beyond the visual to the experiential and therapeutic.

The late 1950s coincided with the rise of Brazil’s modern architectural movement, led principally by Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the new capital of Brasília (1956-60). The city’s bold, Brutalist architecture and its habitation by the expanding local population resonated with Clark’s evolving aesthetic and her central involvement in the Neo-Concrete movement which positioned her as a key figure in pushing Brazilian art towards a more human and tactile experience of abstraction.

As Clark was thinking increasingly of her art in terms of its audience she became friends with art critic Mário Pedrosa’s (1900–1981) who believed firmly in the value of art as “the experimental exercise of freedom”. Through interactive strategies of manipulation and involvement, she pushed increasingly to disband the commonly held opinion that art was an intellectual domain of the few. A key turning point in Clark’s career was her 1963 work Caminhando (Walking), which used a Möbius strip to explore the idea of continuous, limitless space. This participatory work allowed viewers to engage by cutting their own Möbius strips, emphasising art as an experiential rather than intellectual exercise. Increasingly, Clark’s work became a “proposition” that needed to be physically experienced, not just viewed. The central space of the exhibition is occupied by a large group of her Bichos (Critters) sculptures from the 1960s. Made from hinged metal pieces, these works were designed to be manipulated by viewers, lending them open-ended multiplicities of form.

In 1965-66, against the backdrop of Brazil’s increasingly dictatorial politics and the experience of breaking and healing her wrist after a car accident, Clark began to experiment with simple found materials, including tactile sensory books (Livro Sensorial), elastic bands (Dialogo de Maos), rocks on an inflated plastic bags (Pedra a ar) and flexible plastic tubes (Respire Comigo) to playfully create a physical dialogue between the viewer and the artwork. These sensorial objects, later called ‘relational objects’, became healing objects engaging the body. In 1967 Clark facilitated the performance O eu e o tu (The I and the You) in which two participants, connected by an umbilical-like tube and with their eyes covered, explored each other and the materials in their suits – foam, water and rubber, blurring the boundaries of gender and identity. The work placed an engaged and trust-based mutual exploration at the forefront of Clark’s concerns.

Clark’s group work developed during her second sojourn in Paris, where she travelled after widespread protests in Brazil in 1968 against an increasingly repressive military regime. In 1973 the artist created Rede de Elasticos (Elastic net), a web of elastic bands activated by a number of people. The elastic mesh, which viewers are invited to expand and play with and an accompanying video of an earlier performative act, show her final experiments to physically produce lines that allow bodies to connect so they may become a fused ‘collective body’.

The exhibition captures Clark’s radical journey, from her early spatial experiments to her later, immersive and performative practices, emphasising her pioneering role in expanding the limits of art beyond the visual to the experiential and therapeutic. Impelled by extravagant rhetoric about art’s ability to change the world, Clark profoundly changed how art could be perceived, proposing several strategies to maximise the transformative potential of viewer interaction.