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and the organless body, following a logic of mutilations,
which Georges Bataille had already pointed out
as the set of mythological instruments required to
construct society. It is interesting, because here Bataille
was referring to these actions in an illuminist orbit,
above and beyond the fact that they were performed
in sacrifices to the Sun god or that some psychiatric
patients mutilate themselves after having stared
obsessively at the sun – here he has much to say about
the painting of Van Gogh. I am referring to the fact
that a positive, scientific if you like, spirit can be observed
in these sacrifices. The observation is appropriate
to the precise observations established by Guy Brett
between the work of Goya and that of Lygia Clark. In
the state where we find Descoberta da linha orgânica
we can go even further into that climate in which
Goya’s work, full of group magic, organic caprices
and castration of the senses is achieved in the
atmosphere of the Enlightenment, responding positively
to questions from that century, always trying to
illuminate the issues and terrors that tormented him.
Lygia Clark’s relation to Constructivism is maintained
in this sense and that is why her actions take the shape
of group therapies, community cures and scientific
ablations. The obsession of both artists with shutting
down the senses is simply a response to the need to
atrophy them, to broaden their field of action, to develop
them to their maximum potential. Far from trying to
hide the world, to escape from reality, those principles,
developed in parallel to those artists by the different
sciences of their respective historical times, aim to
present it and not just represent it. The famous Goya
adage ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’ is a
principle in psychoanalytic healing. And operating
on those very same monsters.
What follows from Guy Brett’s words swings between
dream and verborrhea, between rhetoric and communal
delirium. ‘Nevertheless, the artist suggested holding
a stone in her hand as “proof of reality” while the
inner demons were being set free.’ In a certain sense,
Lygia Clark’s idea seems to be that she was responding
to certain objections made by Lacan-Zizek to the
anti-oedipal interpretation of castration produced by
Deleuze-Guattari. According to the former, the idea
of the latter would be hidden in language, would
overfly the world on the surface without descending
into the Real and inexpressible world ‘of blood and
earth’. That second sense is clearly a reference to
Heideggerian nihilism. Zizek points to the same definition
when he tries to follow Vattimo in his definition of the
work of Gadamer, whom he accuses of enabling
the urbanisation of the province of nihilism only
because he decides to operate in the fantastic terrain
of language. ‘Fantastic’ where we suppose there is a
‘phantasm’. Habermas’s original recommendation went
beyond that, when he proposed an ‘urbanising work’
for hermeneutics he was referring precisely to the
limit it establishes in the consideration of languages,
myths, signs, stories and that real world ‘of blood
and earth’ ruled by Nothingness. That tension between
the specificity of the real and the abstractions of
languages is fundamental when it comes to defining
the phantasm that constructs the community. Because
they both agree – with Oedipus-against Oedipus, with
castration-in-erection, etc. – that it is a matter of making
Community of a Phantasm and Reality at the same
time. The discussion is important in terms of the work
of Lygia Clark – ‘My mouth opens, my jaw drops to
the floor; with my hands I try to keep back the dribble
that is running, to cut it off, bring it to a standstill, it
continues to run without stopping, I am a heap of
entrails. From within I now see from without, there
appears the figure of a man with his arm cut off,’
for example, cannot be structured around darkness
– where reality hides – without operating from within
language – the Phantasm –, from the frameworks of
a specific precision for language, understood as the
Enlightenment-Constructivism structure we have talked
about. Guattari proposes to open up the frame of
the world, to devastate Reality, to cannibalise it and
resuscitate it made multiple. When Zizek denies that
‘ecologists, feminists, pacifists and other social
movements can aspire to constructing a community’
without the pathological stain ‘of the rest which
has constructed our states: bourgeois democracy,
totalitarian nationalism, etc.’, he is only expressing a
vacuous paternalism, a direct descendent of the phallus
– Oedipus or castrated – on which he wants to turn a
single, unique and universal phantasm. The timeliness
of the work of Lygia Clark aspires to Reality by
understanding that the Phantasm is always communal.
In an apparently innocent text on art and
architecture from 1957, Lygia Clark says what organic
lines mean to her and puts forward, with clearly
constructivist ideas, what the constants of her work
will be. But it is in the final anecdote, in the family scene
described, that we find the most significant impulse
for what we have been trying to tell. ‘The artist will even
be able to investigate according to lines which I would
call “organic”, functional lines of doors, variations
of materials, fabrics, etc., to modulate the whole surface.
I am going to explain how I use those lines in my works
on show. The plastic problem is simply the “valuation
or devaluation” of that line. It was from that observation
that I found the relation between this line, which
I investigated in pictures, and functional architectural
lines. I set out to work “modulated surfaces” made
of plywood, first cut in different sizes and studied, trying
to integrate pieces of that real line with contrasting
colours. The models are insufficient to illustrate the
full problem because they only show a worked stretch,
when the solution should cover the whole room. The
artist must be careful, since human sensibility has
its limitations in the face of an excess of colour. My
experience is minimal, since in order to develop a
practical application of the idea, I should be working
with an architect and a sculptor (who would work in
my way of seeing, in a functional sense, planning
furniture, sculptures in the form of appliqués, etc.).
The key question of the colours would be resolved by
a psychologist, who would bear in mind the reactions
of the individual to certain chromatic harmonies.
The lines of variation of the materials themselves will
provide the artist with an opportunity of modulating
the whole surface of a floor, using that same line as a
graphic module for a composition. In fabrics, the artists
could base their work first on the width of the cloth,
use that line of variation not just to modulate but also
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