At the egg's edge: Lygia Clark's indiscretions

Abstract

This essay examines the way the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) revisits and reconstructs the scene of birth in works that invoke, directly or indirectly, the figure of the egg. It compares Clark's reconstructions in relation to Jacques Lacan's account of birth, the development of the individuated subject and the normative, patriarchal social relations that subject upholds. It argues that while Lacan's account entails the bracketing of the indistinct and sensuous materiality he refers to as the Real, Clark's works reclaim the Real, creating a very different experience of bearing and being born, and of doing it together in and as a sharing of fluids, membranes, openings/passageways, in and as haptic contact. Constituted by this kind of interpenetration and entanglement, the Real becomes a field of discovery within which the contact of indiscrete flesh, of inorganic and organic matter, is the starting point for re-experiencing and remaking sociality and new modes of life.