Nostalgia of the Body

Abstract

Shortly after Lygia Clark's death in 1988, I was asked to write her obituary, and, despite my initial acceptance, given immediately and without the slightest hesitation, Ifound it impossible to do. Once again asked to write a short critical article on her work five years later, and despite my feeling that, should Ifail to do so, I would somehow be shirking a duty, I cannot find a way of doing it. For the time being it is impossible to don my professional robes with regard to her and play the university scholar. That may come later, once my mourning is over and once I am able to abstract my imagination from the huge burst of laughter with which she would have greeted this notion. What I can do today, however, is provide a few memories of Lygia as I knew her. I am not in the habit of dwelling on the personalities of artists or on my personal relations with them, but, although her entire oeuvre aims in some way at the disappearance of the author, it seems justified to me in this case. I believe that Lygia lived her art like no one has ever done. Flash One: I met Lygia Clark for the first time in her studio apartment in the Citi des Arts, a building on the banks of the Seine where the City of Paris houses foreign artists. It was in 1968, shortly after the events of May, and she had just returned from the Venice Biennale, where she had represented Brazil. The excellent dossier ean Clay had devoted to her in Robho had not yet appeared, and I had no idea what I was going to find. The studio was filled with boxes of all sizes, and Lygia was visibly very depressed (depression for her assumed a monumental, oceanic character; it was not rare but abrupt, falling like a bag on her head and quite out of proportion to its apparent reason). Very quickly, however, I witnessed a kind of transfiguration: touched perhaps by my youth (I was sixteen), irritated no doubt by my respectful attitude (I had heard her spoken of too often as a great lady), Lygia began to show me her things, that is, to let me feel them, handle them, inhabit them. First what was scattered over the tables, then the contents of the boxes she began to open for me one by one. I saw, yes, I literally saw the dark specter of depression vanish in a matter of minutes: I think that was what sealed our friendship and later made me one of her most called-upon (and most faithful) resources at times when the figure of melancholy would again swoop down on her