Brazilian History: Lygia Clark

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Lygia Clark’s work transcends her time and continues to become relevant in our post-modern world. Her work is recognized today as one of the founding bodies of Brazil and is important internationally. Her artistic path holds a position in the critical movement that changed the art world in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Clark’s work has continued to define our post-modern obsession with situation. Lygia Clark’s work transcends her time and continues to become relevant in our post-modern world. Her work is recognized today as one of the founding bodies of Brazil and is important internationally. Her artistic path holds a position in the critical movement that changed the art world in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Clark’s work has continued to define our post-modern obsession with situation. Lygia Clark’s path began in the 1940’s and her first sixteen years of work was dedicated to painting and sculpture and by the 1960’s she began to have an international presence. In 1963, Clark’s research led herto the creation of Caminhando (Walking) and with this work was an examination made for her work, Bichos (Beasts): while cutting a piece of paper, Lygia realized that the artwork was the experience of cutting that surface and not the relic that was left behind. This led to her artistic proposal: her viewers (called receivers and participants) would experience a present, not a before or after, and one without a defined space. The experience defined the work. This experience was created through the act of a joining of the body, the hand, the papers and the scissors. This simple notion changed the frontiers that enclosed the field of art during that time and allowed Clark to explore an unknown territory. This proposition began a new field of study. Th... ... middle of paper ... ...her students, she was able to closely follow the effects of her objects and procedures on the “subjectivity of the receivers”. Due to the extended period of time spent with a group of people, Clark was able to achieve a higher understanding of her proposition: the receivers were able to more freely evoke and verbalize their experience. The process was amplified by the availability of reoccurring sessions between the receivers and her objects and the presence of Clark herself in the experiences. Clark participated in the process. The major difficulty faced by her students was to free themselves of their “aesthetic experience and the poetic capacity they mobilized.” Clark then realized that “the subjective event presupposed and mobilized by her objects and dispositives as the condition of their expressivity” clashed with barriers Clark called the “memory of the body”.

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