On Lygia Clark's Structuring the Self

In a review of the Lygia Clark retrospective organised by the Fundació Antoni Tapiès, Barcelona in 1997, the art historian Yve-Alain Bois wrote that he knew of no other artist whose oeuvre a curator would find more difficult to present. ¹

Curatorial involvement with Clark's work - a poetic dismantling of the object - was never a case of straightforward display of the artistic corpus. From the early 1960s on, Clark located her practice at the edge of art, considering her 'propositions' as dialogic works to be experienced physically. Amongst other pieces, these are the handcuff-like Moebius strips and the sensorial masks - works that came to take on seminal status within contemporary art, thanks largely to the Tapiès exhibition and Clark's inclusion in documenta X, also in 1997. However, the difficulties inherent in presenting Clark's work apply in particular to her last project, Estruturação do Self (Structuring the Self), which she undertook towards the end of her life, and worked on between 1976 and 1988. From a curatorial point of view, Bois threw down the gauntlet, pondering that 'perhaps documentation is all one can present concerning this last phase of her work - and even then the dilemma is not entirely resolved'. ²

Taking up the challenge, and pushing the curatorial involvement one step further still, Suely Rolnik - psychoanalyst, cultural critic and both friend and collaborator of Clark's - proposed a different way of accessing the artist's work in an exhibition she organised at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (2005) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006), under the title 'Lygia Clark: de l'oeuvre á l'événement' ('Lygia Clark: from the work to the event'). The exhibition was a presentation of Clark's work as a whole, reading it through its culmination in Estruturação do Self. The latter consisted in private sessions in which the artist would convey perceptual-sensorial experiences to clients, aiming at a treatment, which, as Rolnik suggests, would connect the aesthetic, the clinical and the political realms as an inseparable, existential force. In this way, according to Rolnik, far from being a variant of body art, Estruturação do Self opened up the resonating capacity of the body, in the attempt to create a new, aesthetic subjectivity in which the 'client' - as Clark called the participants of this proposition - would be open to become other and other in an endless process.

Going beyond questions of reconstruction and documentation, one of the central elements of Rolnik's exhibition was thus the seventy-odd DV-cam interviews she conducted, producing a testimony of each phase of Clark's work within the ambient climate of the time. The interviews provide a broader and historically situated context for viewing Clark's work. Among the people interviewed are students from the class she taught at the Sorbonne in the 1970s, researchers, artists, art historians, filmmakers, musicians, poets… - people who took part in the intense cultural projects of those years. Some of them were clients who in Estruturação do Self took part in a new artistic genre by involving themselves in the therapeutic-aesthetic experience proposed by the artist. There are also testimonies of prostitutes from her neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro (with whom she began this practice).

In this interview, Suely Rolnik talks about how the exhibition reconstituted the corporeal memory of Clark's propositions and creates a living archive of the cultural movements of the late 1960s in France and Brazil.

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Q: In order to think about how Lygia Clark's work calls upon entirely new modes of reception, you conducted numerous interviews for the exhibition, which, itself, weaves in and out of her art, her biographical sphere and the cultural contexts in which she worked. Similarly, despite the fact that Clark's work foregrounds the death of the author in a paradigmatic way, her persona seems very present when one reads about her work: this could be due to the way it invites you in - your own hands become the artist's hands, so to speak. So, to begin with, maybe I could ask you to talk about your friendship with Clark. It began when you were both in exile in Paris during the Brazilian dictatorship. It would be interesting to hear in which ways that context informed the making of the exhibition.

A: You managed to fit a lot of questions into one. Let's start from the end, with the point you suggest I start with: my meeting with Lygia. In effect, our meeting itself is highly revealing of the sorts of questions that arose in the 1960s and 70s - questions which my generation experienced with great intensity and which emerge at the very core of Lygia's work in a singular and particularly powerful way. Indeed, it was just that atmosphere that I sought to evoke in the project by making use of filmed interviews, an exhibition and a catalogue.

I was in exile in Paris, like some 30,000 other Brazilians at the time, after having been imprisoned in Brazil by the military dictatorship because of my countercultural lifestyle. Though the dictatorship itself was perfectly well aware of the movement's political power, and attacked it with the same violence it reserved for activists, its political dimension was recognised neither by Brazilian society nor by activists of the same generation. Moreover, the latter had the same image of the counterculture as had been constructed by the dictatorship and spread by the media - which presented it as an immoral, irresponsible and debauched form of life. At the time, in other words, there was a gulf between these two forms of resistance within one and the same generation. Thus, to be in-between the two meant not being comfortable anywhere: a micro-political malaise in the activist camp and a macro-political malaise in the countercultural camp. I felt a sort of certitude that counterculture was entirely political in the sense that - like any form of cultural action worthy of its name - it was about shattering bourgeois forms of existence lodged in the very heart of desire, concretely constructing other forms. But, at the time, it was impossible to elaborate this feeling theoretically, and especially to articulate the relation between micro- and macropolitics in order to overcome this abyss. I left Brazil very much worn out, partially due to my experience in prison, of course, but above all because of the difficulty in facing those problems that I was very involved with and the urgent task of producing meaning for which I was unable to find any interlocutors.

However, no sooner had I got to Paris than I found resonance and the possibility for articulating these very questions in the post-May '68 atmosphere, more specifically through meeting people like Pierre Clastres, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Lygia Clark, whom I met soon after I arrived in France. In Lygia, I discovered an active quest for the politics of the sensible and thus of desire and subjectivity, deploying a sort of entirely singular zone that was cut through at once by the political, the aesthetic and the clinical, and which had real potential to open up possibilities in the existence of all those who approached it. And reciprocally, Lygia was interested in the universe that I brought with me, particularly Deleuze's philosophy (I was attending his seminar in Vincennes ³ ), and above all through his collaboration with Guattari (she was very interested in the Anti-Oedipus when it came out in 1972). She also took a great interest in the clinical practice that was going on around Guattari and the whole experience of La Borde, ⁴ in which I became involved, as well as the International Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, which was shaking up the psychiatric field across Europe and changing how madness was seen. She thought that it might offer a possibility for understanding her own work and developing it theoretically. Retrospectively, I don't think she was wrong, and moreover what I found in that whole universe in response to my own questions - which helped increase their complexity - was very similar to what I had found in a different form in Lygia's work. At any rate, she asked me to do my thesis in Clinical Psychology at the University of Paris VII on the Structuring the Self - a practice she had undertaken after her return to Brazil a year earlier. She was very much alone in this radicalisation of her research, and was unable to find any interlocutors within the art world, and less still within the world of psychoanalysis. My doctoral dissertation was the first text that I wrote on Lygia. During the same period, I also collaborated with her on writing an article on Structuring the Self (the only one she ever wrote) for a little book on her work, which was published in Brazil at the time. ⁵

I later pursued this research on several occasions, above all in 1994 and then in 1997, when Catherine David invited me to documenta X to give two lectures, including one on Lygia, because she had devoted a space to some of the propositions that emerged from Lygia's 26 years of research involving the body of the receptor. At the same time, the Fundació Antoni Tapiès in Barcelona organised an itinerant retrospective in which Lygia's work was shown as a whole: for the first time, her later work was integrated as a part of her oeuvre, whereas until that time, only the first thirteen years of her trajectory - devoted to painting and sculpture - had been shown. Since those two exhibitions, held ten years after her death, this late portion of her trajectory has not only been recognised, but has been acknowledged as one of the seminal gestures of international contemporary art. It is increasingly the works from the experimental period, which are the most sought-after for the thirty-odd exhibitions, which, each year, feature her work all over the world. But at those exhibitions only the objects that were part of those actions are shown, or the actions themselves are re-enacted for a museum or biennial audience. At best, documents of these actions are exhibited - but also in this case the audience only has access to their exteriority, whereas the work can only be produced through the experience of the opening-up of the sensible, which took place by means of the device that she originally established in those propositions (which depended on her presence, silence, temporal continuity, micro-sensorial intimacy, etc.). In short, this part of the work was ultimately there, but it was as if it were represented by its own corpse, completely emptied of the very vitality that would give it its meaning and power of summoning up the receptor's particular sensory experience.

Given this situation, I felt absolutely compelled to seek out strategies to communicate what was at play in these different practices. First of all, because her way of working dealt - in a subtle way, which proved effective in terms of effects - with this problematic field that had been so important to me since the 1960s in Brazil; and because I needed to carry out the project on the basis of what I had sketched out in my thesis - a kind of debt of gratitude with regard to Lygia and her work. But how is one to convey a work that is not visible, inasmuch as it is only produced in the sense-based experience of each individual viewer? It was at that point that I started envisaging the project of provoking a work of memory, and recording it cinematographically. What I was looking for in these interviews was not so much to conjure up the memory of the form of the different devices, actions and objects as they have been represented, as it was to provoke an immersion in the sensations lived in the experiences they enabled, but also to stimulate a work of elaboration through which these could become sayable, given that it was in the course of these experiences that the work itself actually 'happened'. These proposals implied a new mode of reception, whereby reception itself became not only a part of the work, but its essential element: a fine and powerful intervention into the impoverished state of reception, commonly known as the 'art system'.

In my opinion, this also explains why Lygia's persona was so present in her propositions, as you point out. Indeed, her experience of teaching at the Sorbonne revealed that her presence was essential. Having borne witness from close up for the first time to the experiences of her propositions' receptors - as a teacher she was with her students during a whole school semester - she came to understand that to reactivate this quality of aesthetic experience could not be taken for granted; that is, that it was impossible to presuppose the capacity of being affected by the forces of the objects and the device in which they were presented and, through this experience, by the forces of the everyday environment. She had to accompany them one by one if it was to be possible. This is what subsequently led her to creating Structuring the Self, where her own presence in fact becomes an essential component of the device, without which the work, strictly speaking, which takes place in the receptor's sensibility, just cannot unfold in anything like its plenitude.

To raise the question of intervening in the dominant politics of subjectivation and relations with the other was very much part of the spirit of the times; parts of the cultural milieu was steeped in it in various ways. That implied not restricting the interviews to those who had been directly linked with Lygia, with her life and her work, but also to produce a memory of the context in which her practice originated and found its conditions of possibility. Not to restate the facts, and particularly not the allegedly heroic aura, which would make them into a model to be imitated. The point was instead to actualise the sensations of the affirmation of particularly bold poetic potential in its critical spirit, creative imagination and freedom of the cultural and existential experimentation, which became possible in 1969-70 in Brazil because it was supported by a collective movement. I also wanted to make a certain reconstitution of the cultural movement of the same period in Paris, where the artist spent eight years beginning in 1968. In other words, I wanted to produce and transmit a body memory that this experience had affected and in which it was inscribed, in such a way that it might foster the reactivation of this potential in the present.

In short, I didn't want to record and archive the past but rather to intervene in the present. The former concerns the memory of the forms produced by a certain vital movement - what might be referred to as its carcasses. The latter concerns the memory of the vital movement itself, which can always be activated. The power of the vital movement of creation, which marked those years, was seriously wounded by the military dictatorship; like a protection measure, its memory was anaesthetised for it to be able to survive the wound, which engendered an undeniable impoverishment of Brazilian art production. Nevertheless, for several years now, there has been a whole movement amongst the new generations of artists in Brazil. But they only know about this past through the memory of its representations, and not through the memory of the power of artistic creation and what that kind of action opened up around it, in art as well as more broadly in everyday life. I wanted to contribute to reactivating this memory and making it accessible, because I knew that linking it with the movement in the present would allow it to be intensified; this was particularly true in the case of Lygia Clark's heritage. The Ministry of Culture in France lent its support to the project and, with Babette Mangolte, I filmed some thirty people in France and the United States and then, with Moustapha Barat, another forty people in Brazil. I was in the throes of making the films when Corinne Diserens, who at the time was director at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, proposed that we plan an exhibition on the basis of this material. Another challenge then arose: would it be possible to transmit this experience in the museological space itself? Was it even desirable to do so? And if so, how was it to be done?

Q: In organising the exhibition, you decided to accept this challenge through what one might call your curatorial intervention into the historical and artistic context of Clark's work - or perhaps better still, your production of an archive of narratives that supplement her work and make it transmittable. Were you able to find answers to these questions?

A: From the outset, I had several curatorial principles. First off, I wanted people to know that her investigations into objects and devices requiring the bodily experience of the receptor, which she developed over a twenty-six-year period, represents two-thirds of her production, whereas her painting and sculpture works, though better known, only account for the first thirteen years of her oeuvre. I also wanted to show that those twenty-six years were not a sort of undifferentiated magma of objects generically referred to as 'sensorial' or 'relational', but that they could be grouped into five phases, very distinct from one another, all of which had a series of proposals linked to the investigation of a certain question. In the course of each phase, new questions cropped up, leading Lygia to the next phase. It was in fact the artist herself who distinguished and designated them. And lastly, it was important to show that the questions she was dealing with through her experimental practices were already present in her investigations into painting and sculpture. To make that palpable to the audience, I arranged the work being shown from the end toward the beginning, and it was only toward the end of the exhibition space that one could discover her sculptural and painterly works. This gives an entirely different gaze on these works, one which could no longer be reduced to the perception of the form per se, but which is able to 'see' what Lygia sought to convey by the means of her formal strategies - and that can only be apprehended if one conjures up another capacity of the eye. In that way, one discovers that the works she proposed subsequently are in fact the deployment of this initial research: what she was working through with her corporeal propositions was always this double capacity of the senses, but this process was no more limited to the eye alone, as in her earlier works.

And then there were the filmed interviews: at the Pinacoteca, I placed them at three different spots in the exhibition - at the entrance, in the middle and at the far end of a room where two copies of each film were available for viewing by up to twelve people at a time. I wanted the films to instil the whole set of objects and documents with living memory in order to reconstitute their meaning, in other words, with the experience of those who took part in the actions and the context where they had taken place. I felt that it was only in this way that the dead-archive condition of these objects and documents could be overcome, making them instead into elements of living memory. My supposition was apparently borne out by the reception: in the exhibition at the Pinacoteca, the film room was always full, people stayed for a long time watching the interviews, and some - particularly younger people - spent the entire day, coming back every day for a week or more.

Q: I am very interested in your concept of the 'resonant body', because it goes beyond ideas of the liberation of desire (understood as a supposed essence), in order to formulate a new understanding of the body and its potentiality through the movement and construction. Could you briefly explain how you see the resonant body unfold in Clark's work - perhaps particularly in relation to Estruturação do Self?

A: In fact, the construction of the notion of the resonant body is inseparable from my research on Lygia Clark's work, especially her Structuring the Self. I pointed out this notion for the first time in 1987 in Sentimental Cartography, ⁶ which I wrote several years after Body Memory - my thesis focusing on the artist's last proposition. Lygia's experimental practices were often understood as polysensorial experiments, whose importance would rest on having surpassed the reduction of investigation down to the scope of the gaze. In my opinion, this interpretation may well be relevant for the sort of 'sensorial experiences' and 'bodily expression' practices which were widespread in the 1960s and 70s, but absolutely not for Lygia's propositions, which went well beyond this type of research. Though it is true that they also muster up all our sense organs, it is more in order to mobilise the two capacities that they embody as well as the unavoidable paradox that underscores their relationship.

The first capacity of the sensible corresponds to perception, which enables us to apprehend the world in its extensive dimension: as a cartography of forms that can be associated with available representations, projecting the latter onto the former in order to objectify them and give them meaning. This capacity, with which we are quite familiar, is thus associated with time, with the history of the subject and with language. With it emerge the clearly demarcated figures of subject and object, which establish between themselves a relationship of exteriority. It is this capacity of the sensible that enables us to maintain the current map of representations, in such a way that we are able to move about in a known landscape, where things remain in their places, with a minimum amount of stability. The second capacity, which, because of historical repression, is less familiar to us, enables us to apprehend the world in its intensive dimension: as a diagram of forces that affect us and are present in our bodies in the form of sensations. Exercising this capacity is linked neither to the history of the subject nor to language and thus what is apprehended is neither interpreted nor charged with meaning. Through this capacity, the other is a malleable multiplicity of forces which pulse through our sensebased texture, thus becoming a part of ourselves; the other thus acquires a living existence that runs through our bodies, integrating its sensible texture and pushing us toward a becoming-other. In this case, the figures of subject and object dissolve - as does everything that separates our bodies from the world. It is this second capacity of all our sense organs together that I refer to as the 'resonant body'. It is the whole body which has the power to be receptive to the forces of its otherness, to be vulnerable to them.

The resonance of the body and the capacity of perception have a paradoxical relationship, because they are modes of apprehension of reality that follow utterly distinct and mutually irreducible logics. It is the tension of this paradox that mobilises and drives the power of the creative imagination - that is, of thought - inasmuch as the new sensations that are embodied in our sense-based texture need to be expressed, something which is not possible through our available representations. In that way, they provoke a crisis in our references; and the discomfort to which that leads compels us to invent new forms of expression. Thus we integrate in ourselves the signs sent out by the world and, through the expression of their effects in our bodies, they become new elements of our existential territories, which are thus transformed. In this operation a map of shared references is re-established with new shapes. Driven by the tension of this paradox, we are continuously forced to think/create. The exercise of thinking/creating thus has a power of interference in reality and of participation in the orientation of its fate, thus constituting an essential tool of transformation of the subjective and objective landscape.

Q: How would you posit Clark's work in relation to the movement, or moment, of Tropicália? I am wondering if there is a décalage between her practice and the way it is usually placed in this context. On the one hand, she was part of the scene and took part in its publications and exhibitions, and her work converged with the way that Hélio Oiticica ushered in new art forms with a participatory, playful and 'almost-artistic' character. You have also stated that her work proposes an anthropophagic model of subjectivity, which you also consider a central idea to Tropicália. But on the other hand, there are many perspectives that do not seem to match Clark's project: Tropicália's folklore, its hopes for a countercultural use of the culture industry, its re-definition of national identity in a certain way, and perhaps above all - bearing in mind how Clark's works were 'rites without myth' - its blatant use of 'the myth of miscegenation'. Does this come down to a difference between populist and non-populist attitudes? After all, Clark's work would never be interpreted as a 'glorification of bananas', as Oiticica despaired about the way Tropicália became trivialised by mass media. ⁷

A: Lygia's work has always been identified with Tropicalism. However, in my opinion, it is crucial to point out the distance between Lygia Clark's thinking poetics and those of Tropicalism, particularly now that it is becoming known outside of Brazil through the itinerant exhibition organised by Carlos Basualdo, which includes her work. ⁸ Actually, the best way to show and to problematise this distance is through a comment made by Lygia herself, and generously told by Caetano Veloso, in the course of the interview that I filmed with the Brazilian musician (who was in fact one of the leading figures of Tropicalism). He recalls his first meeting with the artist at her place in Paris in 1969. She had invited him one evening with Dedé, his wife at the time, and two other Brazilian friends. At one point, she put a tablecloth on the floor to make a sort of picnic dinner, and right in the middle of the cloth she placed an empty bottle of Coca-Cola with a plastic rose inside. And she said to him:

I am paying you this romantic homage in order to receive you, because
a plastic rose in a Coca-Cola bottle is like Pop art that's romantic,
like the things you Tropicalists do, even though they are very powerful
and interesting. I don't identify at all with that sort of thing because
I am classical, and am only interested in classical things, that is, in
timeless things, because everything romantic depends on information
from a certain period. Your songs talk about things that resonate with
people, because people live in the nowadays and they know what they're
about, and that's the very hallmark of romantic art, which needs to have
a direct relationship with that it is referring to.

How is one to interpret those remarks? Perhaps what is romantic is to establish a certain cartography of meaning (myth) as an absolute reference, to only move about on the single dimension of forms and its representations, whereas what interested Lygia was to explore the action of creation on the current forms which shake them up, and the generation of new forms that result from it (rites?) - in other words, what interested her was the 'event'. It is there that the work (oeuvre) in the true sense of the word, is to be found. What Lygia was tackling through her artistic research was not in effect the forms of the representations of her time, but rather the access to the forces that agitate them and drive them to create others: 'timeless things' in the sense of the time of the current moment, in order to accede to temporality in the sense of becoming. In other words, she targeted the bodily experience of the intensive (the resonant body), beyond the identification stuck on the extensive, in order to accompany the process of a world in transformation. This was perhaps what she considered essential. At any rate, it is in that respect that one cannot, and will never be able to reduce her production to being elements of a cartography of representations of Brazil, be it generic or dated, such as 'the glorification of bananas' or the 'myth of miscegenation'.

But on that basis, couldn't we say that Lygia's practice is otherly inscribed in its time period, as a response to the politics of the sensible that goes hand-in-hand with the cultural capitalism that was establishing itself at that time? Whatever the answer to that may be, the fact remains that Lygia cannot be associated with Tropicalism as such. The rich creative and critical movement that emerged on the Brazilian scene during that period cannot be reduced to Tropicalism - it includes Tropicalism, of course, but also people like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oticica in art, Julio Bressane in film, José Celso Martínez in theatre and countless others. Tropicalism, through its inner strength and its distribution through the media, was perhaps the best-known expression, and contributed to support this fairly generalised countercultural freedom. Even someone like Oiticica was only closely tied to Tropicalism at the very beginning; in fact, Caetano points out in the same interview that Hélio took his distance from him because he considered his return to the song and the abandonment of experimentalism to be petty-bourgeois. According to Caetano, Hélio had no patience for this turn because for him what mattered was an overall attitude, and he had the impression that Caetano himself was moving toward a petty-bourgeois attitude. Thus, the trivialisation of Tropicalism that annoyed Hélio was not only the effect of his incorporation by the mass media. In short, one must be careful not to throw everything into one huge indifferentiated magma. In fact, what made that period so rich was the potential of highly singular practices borne up by this collective freedom of invention that subsequently the dictatorship wounded and reduced to silence (especially from 1968 onwards, with the intensification of state terrorism).

Q: Today, we can see how aesthetic subjectivity is the battlefield of cognitive or cultural capitalism, and at the same time how the critical paradigm of contemporary art is typically based on a political-institutional rationality (rather than on existential or perceptual-sensorial experience). Lygia Clark's work escapes both of these antipodes and points to a different conception of art's whole condition of possibility. Does the poetic power of Clark's work signify a route that postmodern art did not take?

A: That is a really interesting question and deserves much more space than we can devote to it here. Let me just sketch out a couple of lines in response. First of all, it should be kept in mind that it was at the most violent moment of the dictatorship that Lygia left Brazil to move to 1968 Paris. Eight years later she left France when the neo-liberalist establishment became a fact there and, at the same time, the dictatorship in Brazil was beginning to fall apart. Let's not forget that the post-'68 depression in France, like the movement of the 'democratic' opening-up of the Brazilian dictatorship, were to a large extent the result of the arrival of cognitive capitalism. If one looks at the regime from the point of view of the politics of subjectivation which it put into place, one might say that the pimping of the flexible subjectivity that had been established by the movements between 1960 and 1970, especially the power of creation (what you refer to as an 'aesthetic subjectivity'), was still more perverse in those countries living under a dictatorship, given the use that was made of a particularly powerful experimental past in Brazil, but also and above all that it used to its advantage the wound that had marked this power through state terrorism. The new regime was received as something capable of delivering the power of creation from its comatose state in order to heal it and invite it to manifest itself once again in full experimental freedom. However, it is exactly at the time of this shift that Lygia Clark set up Structuring the Self. One might say that the artist treated, thanks to this therapy in favour of poetics, the invisible - but no less deep - wounds linked to the inscription of the trauma of the dictatorship in the experience of the resonant body of many artists of the time. But it must be acknowledged, too, that in reactivating their aesthetic subjectivity at the very moment when finance capital was also beginning to do so, she also prepared them to resist the perverse instrumentalisation of the process that was on the horizon by exorcising the phantasms inscribed in the body's memory that had been born in its wounds. For those who wanted to accompany her, she thus created the conditions for (re)acquiring their ability to sustain themselves in the paradox and to deal with the void of meaning which it produced in order to preserve the vitality of the creative imagination which is summoned up by this fragility; they were thus better prepared to prevent if from being pimped by market forces. One might say that it had to do with aesthetic experience in the strongest sense of the term, whose reactivation by the work of Structuring the Self was an interference in the state of reception which became more and more impoverished from that period onwards - a symptom of the politics of subjectivation of cognitive capitalism in the institutional field of art. But this reactivation was also an act which was at the same time therapeutic and political, one which went beyond the borders of the realm of art and threw its supposed autonomy into crisis. It was this power of her work that I wanted to reactivate in the contemporary context with the exhibition that I organised.

In this sense, Lygia's work effectively indicates a very interesting vector of answers to the problems which arise in the realm of art today, which is ever more coveted (and undermined) by the pimping done by business and cities, which have found in it a privileged source for the extraction of the surplus value of symbolic power - resulting in an intensification of the power of seduction of their respective logos, and thus of commercial power. Like a visionary, she created a subtle alternative to this dire fate of artistic practice today. Of course, that doesn't mean that we have to redo Lygia Clark. Her devices belong to her time; on the other hand, what remains very valid today is the question that the inheritance of their poetic power allows us to ask: how is the political power inherent in artistic action - its power to establish possibles - to be reactivated today?

Suely Rolnik's answers translated by Stephen Wright.

This essay is published as Afterall's contribution to 'What is bare life?', the second leitmotif of documenta 12 magazines, a collective editorial project linking over 90 periodicals worldwide.

- Lars Bang Larsen & Suely Rolnik