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VISUAL ART
Lygia Clark
Among the most beautiful and dramatic works in the exhibition, "Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988," were the "Bichos" (critters)-large, metal, hingedplane, transformable sculptures that invite the viewer to rearrange them into various shapes. It's the first time in the MoMA's history that three-dimensional artworks have gone on display without barriers to viewers. About these curious creatures created in 1960, Clark wrote, "[Jackson] Pollock has his ritual, but it only serves for him to express himself, while the Bichos offer ritual to the viewer as the first experience."
With over 300 pieces that survey the Brazilian painter, sculptor and performance artist's phases in abstraction, Neo-Concretism and an "abandonment of art," this exhibition represents the first North American retrospective of work by Clark (1920-1988). It also newly reconsiders her oeuvre in light of her self-termed "nonart within art" after 1966, and her abandonment of art after 1976, in favour of psychotherapy research and practice. With the exhibition's title, the curators signal the destabilizing, radical shifts inherent in Clark's work-and it does seem as though the artist's winding path constitutes a series of reversals or abandonments: of painting, of the art object per se and eventually of art altogether for therapeutic practice, and finally, the abandonment of therapy itself, for a return to art. The exhibition diminishes conventional divisions between media and explores instead the development of Clark's artistic ideas.
The "activation" sought by Clark through her "Bichos" can be traced both forward and back in her work. Drawing on her early architectural training and motivated by Mondrian's aspiration to seek in painting a dynamic, spiritual geometry beyond the symbolic, romantic or immediately mimetic, Clark took the concerns of her fellow Neo-Concretists...