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a discovery that will constantly mark the production
of form in Lygia Clark’s work.
An immediate reading led me to associate this
‘fall’ of Constructivism towards organic form with some
images in F.X. Archive that depict the demolition of
great religious monuments, with a heavy load of stone,
images of destruction with strong symbolic overtones
since their nature as a milestone, once constructed,
now destroyed, is maintained. At first that association
took us to the destroyed image of the monument of
the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Antequera, in the
province of Malaga, with its great smashed blocks of
stone scattered on the ground in a diagonal layout,
while to one side lay the main stone plinth. The meaning
was the same, the collapse of a tower, of a little heap
of stones aligned vertically. The fall of the tower, the
fall of the square left a trace in the air, organic lines,
curvilinear traces. The constructivist force of Clark’s
painting, in which the lines were rightly maintained
as straight lines, faithful to the generating principle
of the picture, gave rise to another interpretation. The
destructive gesture was also a constructivist gesture,
the point was not an opposition between the stony
and the organic, it was a conclusion, a constructed,
man-made discovery. And so, reviewing the abundant
iconography of these sacred monuments destroyed
at different moments of iconoclastic violence, we
found in the photo cycle that provides a detailed
illustration of the destruction of the monument in El
Cerro de los Ángeles, in Getafe, Madrid, in the exact
geographical centre of Spain, an image of workers
hauling on a rope tensed by the power of a mechanical
tractor with which they were trying to pull down the
Monument. It was in the tension of the rope that we
found an equivalent to the two aerial lines in Descoberta
da linha orgânica. Little did we imagine the set of
metonymies we were going to make between this
group of photographs and the work by Lygia Clark.
Arquitetura fantástica from some ruins of the
Monument on which a great iron beam transmuted
into an angel’s wing is poised against a drawing of
a starry space, with half-destroyed figures cut out
against the sky, while a soldier, with his rifle on his
shoulder, is watchful. Trepante with the lines of shadows
arranging themselves among the cracks in a great
heap of stones, rocky debris from the destroyed
Monument. Arquiteturas biológicas-estructuras vivas
with a group of workers tied together by ropes, baskets
and loose shirts (the same folds in the shirts and the
carved stone) which bind them to the Monument that
they are about to destroy with levers and drills. Pedra
e ar with the organic image of a heart of Jesus, torn
from among the emblems of the Monument, with some
bullet holes, the crown crushing the representation
of the entrails that are drawn in striations, also aureolas,
also striations of destruction. Máscaras sensoriais,
the face of an angel, detached from the Monument,
whose nose, eyes and mouth have been mutilated,
but which wears a more ecstatic expression precisely
because of that damage. Máscaras abismo, a phallic
shape corresponding to the head of Jesus that crowned
the Monument, whose features have been erased by
gunshots and blows, ‘the stones that have fallen on
it from above and the bullets that have pierced it from
below’, since the militias had used it for target practice.
It is this very image that we have printed on the packets
of condoms, which, at the entrance to Descoberta
da linha orgânica, can be filled with air or helium
and let fly, climbing on high.
It was in the second half of the nineteenth century
that the cult of the sacred heart of Jesus, oddly enough
an attempt by the French to purge Catholicism of
entrails, began to spread across Spain. The local clergy,
especially the Jesuits, were determined to make the
country a safe bastion. The idea of covering the national
territory with these spires, phallic monuments with
a sharp vertical elevation, placed on high ground
and hill tops to the astonishment of Christians and
people in general. The plan, brought into operation
from 1900, consisted of turning Spain into a Monument.
Indeed in many places the metonymy has reached
the word and it is understood that by adoring the
Monument one is in the presence of the sacred heart
of Jesus. The bull’s skin would thus be shot through in
a kind of topological acupuncture that would banish
the evils of a nation of nations in which secularism
and open hostility towards the Catholic Church were
on the increase. The Jesuit militia made great efforts
with these public monuments and crowned the highest
buildings in provincial cities with them, competed
with the factory chimneys where the industrial fabric
was being tentatively woven, adorned the highest
mountains and threw their shadow over the urban
masses of any city.
Symbolically, the consecration in Spain of the sacred
heart of Jesus caused much controversy among
a citizenry in search of self-government, already tired
of the religious and military guardians who seemed
bent on excluding the country from the new myth of
modernity. The events around this hideous sculpture,
its construction, its destruction and later reconstruction,
were what stirred the need to extend the idea of
the Monument throughout Spain over the twentieth
century. The monument business began in 1919 and
immediately became a national cause with the defence
of Christ’s precious vital bodily organ. It was erected
on the so-called Cerro de los Ángeles, a chapel in
Getafe dedicated to the Virgin of the same name,
near Madrid, which was considered the geographical
centre of Spain. The travellers who came to Madrid
from the south could see its silhouette from far off: that
was the intention, to symbolically occupy the magnetic
centre – not in the polar but in the obscurantist sense
– of the nation. A famous photograph of 1936 and the
corresponding film sequence – a firing squad shooting
at the Monument in the style of Goya’s Executions
of 3 May or rather, because of the perspective, of
Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian – bear
witness to the force of the iconoclastic event that led
to the nationalist-Catholic military coup on 18 July of
the same year. The suspicion that it was a theatrical
montage in the service of the anarchist revolutionary
cause has never been dispelled. Indeed the nationalist
variant of the photograph, abused by European
fascist propaganda, was indeed a photomontage in
which the silhouette of Jesus on top of the Monument
crumbled. A crude photomontage, it must be said,
since the cutout of the photograph left its traces by
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