Today I will be discussing the Brazilian Neoconcretist artist Lygia
Clark’s series called “Bichos” which she began making in 1965. Just for a bit
of background information, Neoconcretism was a movement beginning in the 1950s
in Rio de Janeiro in response to the Sao Paolo Concretism group. For the
Neoconcretists, the Sao Paolo movement focused too much on the theoretical and
dogmatic aspects of geometric abstract art whereas their own focus was to
restore a sense of expression in the production of art objects, or as they are
sometimes called, instruments.
Clark’s Bichos
have been translated to English as animal, beast or critter. They are composed
of metal plates that are hinged together to create a mutable polymorphous
sculpture, which can be held in the viewer’s hands. Its original design was
such that it instructed the viewer to play with the Bicho by folding it to
create new forms. For my essay, I was interested to see how we might approach
the Bichos as having a certain agency as well as occupying a body. Some of the
questions I want to ask are: What would we discover if we were to set aside
what we already think we understand about the subjectivity of objects and of
animals? What would a democratic, a more egalitarian, encounter between human
and thing look like? If we were to consider technologies and objects as having
bodies, how might this change the ways in which we approach the world as well
as ourselves as humans?
The argument
that I would like to put forward is that the Bicho is a subjective agent that
behaves as an equal participant in the encounter between itself and the viewer.
In such a meeting, wherein the viewer takes hold of the Bicho’s metallic limbs
and moves them, she too is moved as a function of the distinct limitations of
the physical structure of the given Bicho.
I begin my
argument by exploring Bill Brown’s notion of the “thing” which he distinguishes
from the object. For Brown, we don’t see objects, or as he puts it, we see
through objects because of their cultural associations with a particular
function. It is only when an object fails to function for humans and is rendered
obsolete or inoperable that it asserts itself as an agential thing. Brown
explains how a thing is a description of a subject-object relationship. In this
way, a thing is born through its encounter with a viewer. While the Bicho may
initially signify as a work of art, especially in the context of a gallery, the
permission to touch it and play with it destabilizes the look-but-don’t-touch
rule. In this sense, it stops being a typical artwork and asserts itself as a
participant in the encounter, as a thing.
I go on to
discuss how this encounter can be repeated again and again because of the multitude
of forms that the Bicho can claim. In her discussion of the Bichos, Briony Fer argues
that this kind of variability is dependent on the Bicho’s sensitivity to its
surroundings and to the hands that manipulate it.
What I want
to draw out here is the performability that is inherent in such an encounter.
What I find particularly interesting here are the ways in which the subject
also moves as she moves the Bicho. What I mean by this is that the joints of
that particular Bicho dictate the subject’s physical disposition. In this way,
there is a sort of harmonious dance that occurs when a viewer moves a Bicho and
a Bicho consequently moves the viewer.
In another
aspect that is crucial to my argument, I make use of Derrida’s text “The Animal
That Therefore I Am”. In this context, I first discuss Derrida’s return to
Genesis to recount how God instructs Adam to name the animals. Derrida explains
that this power is a privilege reserved for man alone. Clark names her
sculptures beasts, animals or critters but does not provide any further
specification, only tells us that they belong to this category. Because of the
polymorphic and mutable nature of the Bichos, they can never resemble a
specific animal long enough to be named after it. In this way, by refraining
from specifying the Bichos more acutely, Clark decidedly does not participate
in the violence inherent in the human methods of ordering living things into a
hierarchy. Instead of subjugating her Bichos to the dominating power described
by Derrida, by titling her work in this way, as well as facilitating a
respectful exchange between the human subject and the Bicho, Clark draws
attention to the human as animal as well as to the animal as subject.
I briefly
discuss Donna Haraway’s section on critters in her book When Species Meet. Interestingly enough, Haraway equates the
critter with the thing. For Haraway however, things are material and specific.
Alternatively, I suggest that the very quality that makes an object a thing is
its inability to be specific, its abstractness. In the case of the Bichos, this
is twofold: firstly, it is not specific because of its changeable and ever-changing
form and secondly, because it is named a critter and not anything more
descriptive or concrete. Haraway also proposes that things never function alone
but are compound and interact with other things in the world. If this is true
then things function as a component that contributes to a larger assemblage of
active agents. In other words, the thing collaborates with the viewer in order
to come into its thingness and to create an encounter that challenges the
hierarchy of bodies, whether animal, thing or human.
The last
section of my essay discusses the recent curatorial decisions and exhibition
strategies of the Bichos in the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery called “Adventures
of the Black Square”. In this show, the Bichos are shown on a plinth inside a
clear display case. By enclosing the critter in this way, its ability to
interact with the viewer is so compromised that its previous generative
potential to produce meaning and to move the viewer as the viewer moves it is
utterly lost and rendered sterile. The ability to play with the Bicho is vital
not only to the viewer’s conception of it as thing, as animal, but also to the
animation of it as an agent in motion.
Image from: https://historiasdasartes.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/23-bicho-de-bolso-lygia-clark.jpg
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