Re: <eyebeam><blast> the museological and the urban

[Carlos Basualdo <Cbasualdo@aol.com>]

A short note. A difference should be established between Clark's
"relational object" and the sensorial masks or globes that she used in
perfomatic situation before developing her therapy in the eighties. The
"relational objects" were supposed to be used in a therapeutic context
alone. The therapy represented a further investigation in Lygia's work
of the notion of "body-memory" but at that stage, she clearly stated
that she was not an artist anymore, but a non-artist. The therapy was a
non-verbal one and she developed it as a way of allowing "borderlines"
to be able to engage in a more orthodox psychoanalytic therapy
afterwards. There is very little written on this aspect of Clark's work,
but I would recommend the two articles on Lygia published in the second
issue of TRANS>arts.cultures.media -one of them by Suely Rolnik, the
Brazilian analyst who co-wrote with Clark her text on the "relational
objects." The second piece is mine, and my emphasis was put on the
possible relation between contemporary art and the notion of the cure in
Lygia's work.

All of the above in order to say that Lygia's notion of memory is an
embodied memory, maybe related to what we could call "know how." It is
not about data but about experience as lived experience -"vivencias' is
the untranslatable Portuguese word.  Mnemonics, it seems to be, relies
more on sheer information topologically inscribed. Which corresponds to
the traditional idea of the monument as something that is
architecturally related but stand in its place as a symbol of something
else. I think that the situationists were trying to rescue the
lived-memory of the city, and that is the reason why it was possible for
them to think of the "drift" as related to the analytic technique of
free association. Now, my point is: can we conceive of a anti-monumental
memory of the city and enhanced it through an art exhibition? The body
of the patient, according to Lygia, was an instable surface, activated
by lived- memories and interrumpted by holes. Isn't that a suitable
description for the urban? According to this rationale, curators -in
collaboration with architects and urban planners- could become some sort
of Clarkian analysts. 

I know that this is all very utopic.  But I also think that utopies are
the stuff that reality is made of.




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