Lygia Clark and
Hélio Oiticica:
A Legacy of Interactivity
and Participation for a Telematic Future
by Simone Osthoff
Translating Geometric Abstraction into a Language of the Body
Clark and Oiticica questioned representation in art by examining ideas
inherited from modern avant-garde movements--Neoplasticism,
Constructivism, Suprematism and Concrete Art--that broke with mimesis
and assumptions of realism. In the late 1950s, they reframed modernist
notions of universal aesthetics by translating them directly into life
and the body. Weaving a web of relationships around the body's internal
and external spaces, they relayed a Modern European geometric abstract
tradition to Brazilian vernacular culture. This syncretic process fused
two very different traditions--a Western aesthetic canon that privileges
vision and metaphysical knowledge, and Afro-Indigenous oral traditions
in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is
profoundly concrete.
It must be noted that, in a true syncretic spirit, both traditions have
always coexisted in Brazilian society at large, but it was not until
Oiticica began working that this syncretism was methodically
investigated in the visual arts.
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