Lygia Clark
Mémoria do Corpo

Lygia Clark’s (*1920 †1988, Brazil) artistic trajectory began with an emphasis on visuality. From 1947 to the mid-1960s, she successively produced drawings, paintings and sculptures. Since her creation of "Caminhando" (Walking) in 1963, however, Clark’s work gradually shifted towards the investigation of corporeality and always involved the creation of interactive objects. This shift in artistic themes, materials and modes of operation happened simultaneously on four levels: through the progressive destabilisation of the art object, the systematic transformation of the spectator into an active creator, the dissipation of the traditional notion of author, and the gradual abandonment of the artistic milieu and its modes of production and consumption. Clark’s last proposal — a psychophysical therapy entitled "The structuring of the self" (1976-88) — was the culmination of a poetic and ethic move aimed at dismantling rigid separations between object and body, spectatorship and authorship, aesthetics and healing, art and not-art. If the military dictatorship ruling Brazil (1964-1985) during most of Clark’s career tortured and constrained, her works structured, healed and expanded ways and possibilities for art and for people.

Mémoria do Corpo (Memory of the Body) is a documentary film about Lygia Clark’s Structuring of the Self therapy. Clark presents the Relational Objects and applies them to the body of Paulo Sérgio Duarte, a Brazilian art critic.

Director: Mário Carneiro

Courtesy The Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”

Document media
Film, b&w, sound, 30:00 min

Issue date
1984

Tags
body object relation, desire, extended body, ritual, skin, therapy, touch