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Ligiya Clark

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Ligiya Clark

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Taey x
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CONTEXTS

A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Charles
Stankievech
PAGE 76

Breathe with Me,


a Breath of Life:
Material Mysticism in
Clarice Lispector and
Lygia Clark
AFTERALL
AFTERALL PAGE 77 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
BREATHE WITH ME, A BREATH OF LIFE:
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

MATERIAL MYSTICISM IN CLARICE LISPECTOR


AND LYGIA CLARK1
Charles Stankievech
INHALE
Both born in 1920, writer Clarice Lispector and artist Lygia Clark
produced some of the most radical work of the twentieth century:
two oeuvres never touching but entwined like a Möbius loop,
their worlds shaped unto themselves yet breathing the same air.2
Surprisingly very little, almost nothing, has been written focussing
on a comparison between Clark and Lispector, compounding the
regrettable lack of a direct engagement or conversation during their
lifetime between the two key feminist figures in the Brazilian culture
of the mid-twentieth century.3 Perhaps it was their alternating
international sojourns that made them ships passing in the night,
or more likely, I imagine, the intense energy each possessed
prohibited them from meeting and spontaneously combusting.
Their shared context created a common foundational, historical
backdrop – both growing up, marrying and having children in
colonialist Brazil, the trauma of an optimistic nation in the early 1950s
sliding into a dictatorship in the following decade, an international
zeitgeist of psychedelic counter-culture in the 1960s, and a rise
in feminist discourse in the late 60s and early 70s. An equally
shared exceptional force emanates from their oeuvres: a material
mysticism as expressed in the recurrent themes of the rapture of
the instant, ritualistic celebrations of the body, and a strong desire
for the participation of the addressee in their work. While they both
PAGE 78

crafted numinous themes uniquely in their own fields, the result is


a sympathetic resonance, one that is best experienced by
meditating on the rhythm of breathing.4

Both forging a voice in their male dominated disciplines – Lispector’s


texts defining an écriture féminine as promoted by Hélène Cixous,
Clark inspiring the practice of participatory art (from relational
aesthetics to Art Therapy) – the two Brazilians participate in
a longer history of spiritual women writers. This tradition can be
traced back to the earliest writings attributed to women who were
themselves, like Lispector and Clark, practising a visionary rhetoric
as priestesses, poets and mystics. Enheduanna, a priestess from
ancient Mesopotamia (who wrote in the cuneiform script that
enchanted Lispector) is considered history’s first known author,
positioned right at the birth of the written word.5 After celebrating
Sappho’s fragmented collection, Western culture muted its
acknowledgment of female voices until they were marginally
resurrected in the work of thirteen-century Christian mystics –
a lineage including (far from exhaustively) Mary of Oignies, Marguerite
Porete, Marguerite d’Oingt, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila.6
The socio-economic dynamics of the thirteen-century upper
classes had created a surplus of unmarried women that bolstered
religious orders such as the Beguines. Existing in a unique scenario
of communal living with sustenance through nursing and the textile
industry, some of the Beguines offered the most important somatic
versions of mysticism through a combination of newly appreciated
courtly love metaphors, the primacy of participation in the ritual of
the Eucharist (the literal eating of Christ’s Body) and erotic ecstasy.7 Previous page:
AFTERALL

Lygia Clark, Hand Dialogue, 1966.


I do not wish, here, to entrap Lispector nor Clark within a Western Courtesy ‘The World of Lygia Clark’
Christian tradition in order to appreciate their work, but rather Cultural Association
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
to acknowledge how both women tapped into an underground
stream of mystical experience grounded in desire, the body and
ritual, continuously running throughout history, from pagan through
monotheistic religion.8 Such a powerful practice of redeeming the
body and the senses from a uniquely celebratory and feminine
position was an obvious challenge to orthodoxy. Marguerite Porete
(the most well-known beguine) was famously burned at the stake
in 1310 for heresy.9 The persecution transcended religious sects.
As Silvia Federici points out in Caliban and the Witch, the Inquisition
trials for heresy ‘provided the metaphysical and ideological scaffold
of the witch-hunt’.10

Heretic or witch: the labels used to suppress women historically


are also the roles that Lispector and Clark defiantly embraced.
Lispector, who was often called a witch by those who knew her, was
personally invited to speak at the First World Congress of Sorcery
in 1975; Clark was never officially accepted into the professional
community of psychoanalysis. Tellingly, both women resisted the
reliance on myth in their art, crafting instead a new language and
experience. Lispector used as epigraph to Água Viva a quote from
the artist Michel Seuphor: ‘There must be a kind of painting totally
free of the dependence on the figure – or object – which, like music,
illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth’; Clark, in
a documentary on her later work titled O Mundo de Lygia Clark,
states: ‘There is no more myth. This is an art of participation’.11
Unifying the religious, poetic, and philosophical – all while resisting
myth – Lispector and Clark established a new language of the
mystical through their meditation on the everyday.

PAGE 79
The scope of literary styles in Lispector’s oeuvre ranges from
newspaper writing (crônica) to short stories, from experimental
novels to children’s books. Within this diverse corpus, one could
single out three major novels as a mystical trinity that progressively,
and fittingly, deconstructs itself: The Passion According to G.H (1964,
henceforth Passion), Água Viva (1973, henceforth Água) and A Breath
of Life (1977, posthumous, henceforth Breath).12 All three can be seen
as streams of consciousness (either in monologue or dialogue form),
and are perhaps amongst the most personal of Lispector’s works
as they purposefully blur the boundary between confessional and
fiction. In a sense, they are less a literary genre and more a chimera
of philosophical feminism, something akin to the newly celebrated
categories of ficto-criticism or autotheory – modes of writing that
subvert the citational practices of the Western, male-dominated
philosophical canon by drawing from a web of embedded, lived
experiences within a process-based methodology.13 Furthermore,
the artistic vocations of the three protagonists tie the novels
together, establishing a conscious working through a methodology
of creation. In Passion, the narrator is a sculptress who falls into a
mystical encounter with a painting left by her maid, culminating in
the act of ingesting a cockroach. In Água, the narrator becomes
a painter (after an earlier manuscript composes her as a writer).
In the final posthumous work Breath, the method cannot resist
becoming recursive: Clarice the writer creates the character of an
Author who in turn creates a character who is a painter, who claims:
‘My ideal would be to paint a picture of a picture.’14 A Möbius loop
is formed: ‘a snake swallowing its own tail.’15
AFTERALL

As for the ‘narratives’ themselves, the first, Passion, embodies


the experimental form of a single meditation, recounting the
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

casual entering of a maid’s room and the spontaneous experience


of mystical revelation. While the narrative follows a realistic
description, the literary strategy of each chapter’s last sentence
being repeated as the first s entence o f t he f ollowing, s trings
together a continuous movement across the entire novel. An
incessant stream of consciousness pulls the reader further and
further into the void of a swirling vortex. The later novel, Água,
explodes any linear (or Euclidian geometric) representation of an
experience, into a formless novel: ‘Let me tell you: I am trying
to seize the fourth dimension.’16 Instead, tentacles out of the
depths of darkness grip the readers, pulling them apart:

As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots


of a rare tree, that’s how I write to you, and those roots as if
they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies
of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires
for fulfilment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a
creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and
needs the approval of God: that is creation.17

The single long build towards the climax of The Passion, as


expressed in the traditional arc of the novel, morphs into the
continuous rapture of Água Viva’s ebb and flow.

Without a singular character anchoring the drama, Água shifts from


third-person narrative into an intimate dialogue between the self
and an unorthodox second-person addressee. But is this ‘you’
the reader or another identity within the writer’s consciousness?
The didactic devotional style of the text recalls Porete’s unique
PAGE 80

The Mirror of Simple Souls, whose full title ‘Souls Who Are
Annihilated’, anticipates the dissolving identity of the writer that
matches the ‘formlessness’ of Água: ‘I am a little scared: scared of
surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown.
The next instant, do I make it? Or does it make itself? We make it
together with our breath.’18 The final novel in the trinity, A Breath
of Life propels this dialogue into a recursive relationship.19 It’s
uncertain whether a final draft of the novel would have recomposed
the character’s roles (as was the case in the final form of Água), but
it seems the content was too developed for Breath to deviate from
its strategy. One should also not underappreciate the fact that
Lispector knew this was her last work. Conflating further the planes
of fiction and life, the only posthumous editorial excision from the
manuscript – out of respect to the family – was a sentence by the
‘Author’ asking God to give her character cancer (the pathology
that concurrently took Clarice’s own life in 1977).20 The prologue
to Breath ends with the conventionalised retraction established
within medieval mystical texts.21 Recognising the limits of knowing,
Lispector humbly resigns: ‘May peace be upon us, upon you, and
upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful
forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last
I can rest.’22 Her fall from silence into the profane act of speech
articulates the limits of our bodies, and her failure is our falling in
love. We dive into The Passion, float in Água Viva and drown in
A Breath of Life.

EXHALE
Propelled by constant crises, Lygia Clark continually pushed the
AFTERALL

boundaries of her work, always questioning what role art plays


psychologically, politically and spiritually.23 One consistent strategy
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
throughout her life was her lucid and powerful writing: starting
with the co-authorship of the ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ in 1959,
through her dizzying prolific mid-career publications, and finally
as essential collected elements to her posthumous, retrospective
catalogues.24 One cannot approach Clark’s work bypassing her
own thinking on the work.25 Although participants can immediately
engage with the sensorial objects of her deeply perceptual and
somatic practice, this does not discount the carefully considered
cosmology and theories of subjectivity articulated in her letters,
essays, interviews and even a children’s story.26 Within such
a heterogenous field, rather than focussing on a particular historical
stage, a way to immerse oneself into Clark’s work is by following
the continual rise and fall of the breath – a rhythm in the shape of a
Möbius loop.27 The interior of our lungs inhales the exterior of the
atmosphere into the depths of our body only to exhale this same
air transformed by the alchemy of our interior: inside and outside
continually connected, constantly cycling with our breathing. We
need look no further than Clark’s early work using the form of
a Möbius loop to see this connection: ‘What strikes me in the “inside
and outside” sculpture is that it transforms my perception of myself,
of my body. It changes me. I am elastic, formless, without definite
physiognomy. Its lungs are mine. It’s the introjection of the cosmos . . .
Its internal space is an affective space.’28 From the beginning, Clark
connected the act of breathing with a non-Euclidian space that
turned itself inside out.

When forced to make a paradigmatic cut (as most are, including


Clark), she cut a paper Möbius loop.29 In 1963, Clark constructed
Walking, a proposition that requested the reader to take a Möbius

PAGE 81
loop and start cutting it in half along the grain of the surface as it turns
upon itself. In doing so, the reader-turned-participant proceeds to
iteratively cycle through the looping form never reaching the edge
of the paper, thus suggesting an infinite procedure. Composed by
a deceivingly simple gesture, Walking continues the avant-garde’s
spiritual obsession with the fourth dimension and non-Euclidian
geometry.30 It enacts diagrammatic thinking par excellence as
a response to Clark’s own proclaimed ‘Death of the Plane’ (1960):

To demolish the picture plane as a medium of expression


is to become aware of unity as a living whole . . . We plunge
into the totality of the cosmos; we are a part of this cosmos,
vulnerable on all sides – but one that has even ceased having
sides – high and low, left and right, front and back, and
ultimately, good and bad – so radically have concepts been
transformed. Contemporary humanity escapes the spiritual
laws of gravity. It learns to float in cosmic reality.31

The move from geometry to topology (as it did in physics) created


a new understanding of the cosmos for Clark. The Möbius loop, in
particular, opened a portal to the phantastic interdimensional: ‘more
than a surface less than a volume.’32 Such a new space provided an
escape plan (or ‘line of flight’) from the traditional forms of painting
and sculpture, while also importantly adding the fourth dimension of
temporality. ‘I am trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant
– now so fleeting that it’s already done because it’s already become
a new instant-now that’s also already gone,’ writes Lispector in
a line that could have easily escaped from Clark’s text ‘Concerning
AFTERALL

the Instant’ (1965).33


A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Crucially, the mathematical Möbius loop morphs into more existential


and embodied work as a direct result of Clark’s own body undergoing
crisis and repair. After an accident that fractured her wrist and resulted
in the application of a poultice, a frustrated Clark ripped off the plastic
encapsulating the limb and exhaled into the bag to fill it like a pillow.
On top, she balanced a small stone.34 The simple gesture of holding
the bag necessitated squeezing the inflatable, resulting in the stone’s
magical rising and falling. Stone and Air was first created in 1966 but
continued to be used until the end of Clark life as she transitioned
to conducting therapeutic engagements.35 In an important pairing
created the same year, Breathe with Me, Clark externalises the lung
to create a rhythmic apparatus of breath. Using again readymade
objects, she took an underwater diving tube and inserted one
end of it into its other end, creating a hermetically sealed organ.
By stretching the accordion ribbed tube, a small amount of air
seeps in and out at the joint, the mouth of the tube, producing
a wheezing sound like breathing. It could be used as a meditative
device, breathing together with the apparatus, or psychologically
associated with one’s own lung as exteriorised. Clark herself said
of the work, ‘The first time I did it . . . the consciousness of my
breathing obsessed me for several stifling hours, at the same time
as an unknown energy seemed born in me . . . ’36

The powerful paradox in both works exudes from the contrast


between the ephemeral and organic act of breathing and the
objects’ industrial, plastic materiality. Thinkers such as Roland
Barthes mythologised plastic in the 1950s as a novel material full
of possibilities, and Clark celebrated such readymade objects
as ‘valueless’ – meaning accessible.37 However, the extreme
PAGE 82

difference between its quotidian reality and its psychic phantasy


cannot be understated. Clark imaginatively transubstantiated
‘colorless transparent plastic’ into ‘an ectoplasm that immaterially
binds bodies together’.38 Ectoplasm becomes the medium for the
medium as, with a characteristic coup, Clark sublates the term’s
dual biological and magical meaning. This pairing is inherent within
the problematics of breath for a visual and somatic artist. Clark
is not interested in air, but in breath – vessels and containment
being necessary to shape such immateriality. Breath naturally
connects people and their surroundings when inhaled in lungs
and as a therapeutic act when exhaled in plastic envelopes – be
they a relational object, a sensory mask or organic architecture.
After Breathe with Me, Clark started making masks that participants
wore to engage with their own bodies, the world around them
and other people.39 Moving from objects to play with, to second
skins to explore with, plastic mediates this ‘psychic plasticity’40 for
participants, providing an infra-sensory experience:

The moment the spectator wears the infra-sensory mask,


they isolate themselves from the world (after being already
situated in it) and in that introversion they lose contact with
reality and find within themselves a whole range of fantastic
experiences. It would be a way to find the breath of life.
Everything that is revealed through sensory sensations brings
them to a state equivalent to a drugged state. Would this
state be the immanence of the absolute? Would this loss of
apparent reality be the capture of another kind of reality?41
AFTERALL

The ‘breath of life’ – once an ancient mystical source of the soul –


manifests in the everyday as breathing into (or with) plastic.42 Both
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
Lygia Clark and Clarice Lispector translate the abstract language
of religion and mathematics, transmuting a traditional desire for the
Platonic ‘realm of forms’ or the afterlife of paradise, into a material
mysticism manifested through the breath in the here and now. In
her last novel A Breath of Life, Lispector creates the neologism
‘imanesença’ (‘immanescence’): a portmanteau fusing immanence
and transcendence. She uses it twice. The first time: ‘I’d rather have
stayed in the immanescence of the sacred Nothing.’ The second:
‘I’d rather have stayed in the immanescence of nature.’43 Clark
‘stayed in the immanescence’ through the simplicity of a stone
floating on plastic bag of breath, and Lispector with an egg lying
on a kitchen table:

In the morning in the kitchen on the table I see the egg . . . The
egg is a suspended thing. It has never landed. When it lands,
it is not what has landed. It was a thing under the egg. – I look
at the egg in the kitchen with superficial attention so as not to
break it. I take the utmost care not to understand it. Since it
is impossible to understand, I know that if I understand it this
is because I am making an error. Understanding is the proof
of making an error. Understanding it is not the way to see it.44

So much has been written about Clarice and Lygia, but each time
I return from an immersion in their actual words, their dark lucidity
and punctum make redundant any exegetical glossing. Their works
speak for themselves and my only desire is to put them into dialogue
with each other. I resign to silence with two last passages destined
to resonate with each other – and I hope with you the reader:

PAGE 83
L.C.: Every time I breathe, the rhythm comes out right, but
it’s almost an internal rhythm, totalized within the act. I have
become aware of my cosmic affective ‘lung.’ I’m entering
into the topological rhythm of the world . . . I feel the rockets
passed over my body without hurting me. My breath is the
cosmos, my lung is the cosmos.

C.L.: These instants passing through the air I breathe: in


fireworks they explode silently in space.45

1 The title is composed out of two titles of works by Clark (Breathe with Me,
1966) and Lispector (A Breath of Life, 1977). A version of this text was first
written in 2020 and published in Ala Roushan (ed.), BREATHLESS, Toronto:
Power Plant, 2021.
2 Note the structure of this essay follows a Möbius loop between body and
endnotes – self-intersecting.
3 Besides the very rare passing mention, footnote or association with larger
movements, like Neoconcretism, no direct comparison of the two biogra-
phies and bodies of work exists to my knowledge at the time of writing –
at least in English.
4 Sympathetic resonance is a phenomenon in physics when two bodies not
touching vibrate to the same frequency – one body’s vibration picked up by
the other due to a careful attunement, providing a feedback loop. Both Clark
and Lispector, while most known for their poetic vocabulary, were much
interested in mathematical and scientific language, such as the fourth dimen-
sion, the topology of Möbius loops and wireless communication.
5 In Água Viva, Lispector writes: ‘I am enchanted, seduced, transfixed by furtive
voices. The almost unintelligible cuneiform inscriptions speak of how to
conceive and give formulae about how to feed from the force of darkness.
They speak of naked and crawling females. And the solar eclipse causes
secret terror that nonetheless announces a splendor of heart.’ Clarice
Lispector, Água Viva (1973, trans. Stefan Tobler), New York: New Directions,
AFTERALL

2012, p.35. Clark wanted to return to a pre-modern anonymous art, where


perhaps patriarchy didn’t reign so exclusively under the ‘Name-of-the-Father’
(see the documentary O Mundo de Lygia Clark, dir. Eduardo Clark, 1973).
For the original proposition of Enheduanna as the first author in history, see
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

William W. Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968.
6 For an account of thirteenth-century mystics Mary of Oignies’s and
Marguerite d’Oingt’s somatic theology, see Caroline Walker Bynum,
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Marguerite Porete’s Le
Mirouer des simples âmes is one of Old French’s spiritual classics from
c.1300. Catherine of Siena, a saint from the fourteenth century, left us not
a Summa Theologica but a Dialogue between lover and Beloved. Teresa
of Ávila, who lived in the sixteenth century and is most popularly known, was
officially beatified and later memorialised in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque
sculpture capturing the moment of her penetrating ecstasy (c.1647–52, and
who Lispector was directly compared to when alive).
7 When speaking of d’Oingt, Bynum observes ‘the experiencing of Christ is
to “turn on,” so to speak, the bodily sense of the receiving mystic’ (C. W.
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, op. cit., p.192). Or as the poet and
mystic Hadewijch (c.1220) put it: ‘Then it was to me as if we were one without
difference’ (C. W. Bynum, ‘Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the
Thirteenth Century’, Women’s Studies, vol.11, no.1–2, 1984, p.180). And of
course, the much later and famous passage from St. Teresa: ‘In his hands
I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a
point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that
it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing
them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God.
The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive
was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to
lose it, now will one’s soul be content with anything less than God?’ (quoted in
both Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood),
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p.224, and Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley), London: Jonathan Cape, 1953, p.635).
It is important to note that while Bynum sketches out a hagiography of
women mystics that resists any simple essentialising of gender for a more
fluid understanding, the facticity of the body remains important, as evidence
in projection across boundaries: nuns associating with the body of Christ,
men feminised by their love for Christ.
8 A recent biography by Benjamin Moser frames Lispector’s life from prebirth
to burial, perhaps a little too eagerly and reductively, within a Jewish mys-
PAGE 84

tical tradition – though strictly in a male-defined discourse from zaddikim to


Spinoza. See B. Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Amy Hollywood (in Sensible
Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001) provides an interesting critique of the
engagement of twentieth-century philosophers with thirteenth-century
women mystics and the limits of Christianity, but the intention of this essay
is to explore an alternative thread of philosophical thinking and writing as
continued in Lispector and Clark. Including Islamic mysticism such as the Sufi
Rabia Al Basri would provide an interesting extension of this research but
is beyond the scope of this essay. See Sharon Faye Koren’s Forsaken:
the Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, Waltham, MA: Brandeis
University Press, 2011.
9 Porete crossed over from religious scholarship to more mainstream literature
in Canadian poet and Classics scholar Anne Carson’s Decreation – originally
an experimental opera (2001), then an academic meditation (2002), together
collected into a book (2006). See also the author’s own ‘Desire: The Moment
and Movement in Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls’, unpub-
lished, Trinity Western University, Langley Township, BC, 2000.
10 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004,
p.168. Before Federici, Simone de Beauvoir earlier proposed a Marxist,
feminist critique of witch-burning as an early modern subjugation of women
to usurp their medicinal knowledge and power in her last television interview.
S. de Beauvoir, interviewed by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, ‘Pourquoi je suis
une féministe’, 1975).
11 My emphasis in both.
12 In this mystical canon, I must add the early short story ‘The Egg and the
Chicken’ (1964), which renders the experience of the mystical in the everyday
in a way that is so unique to Lispector. In the only interview for television
she ever gave (released posthumously, 1977 on ‘Panorama’, TV2 Cultura),
Lispector claims this story as her favourite piece of writing that, until the end
of her life, remained a mystery even to herself (it was also the text she had
read at the First World Congress of Sorcery in Bogotá, 1975). I would also add
the little-known short story ‘Waters of the World’ (1971) as a minor epistle,
and finally, as a part of the apocrypha (in a John Donne-inspired inversion
of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’), the anti-mystical novel A via crucis de
corpo, which includes, among a cornucopia of sexual encounters, a mystical
AFTERALL

consummation between a typist and a being from Saturn named ‘Ixtlan’ (C.
Lispector, A via crucis do corpo, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Artenova, 1974, p.10).
There are of course early stories such as ‘Obsession’ (1941) and ‘The Imitation
of the Rose’ (1959–60), to name two, that directly engage religious and occult

A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry


ideas as content, but they are not mystical text in themselves. All the stories
are collected in C. Lispector, Complete Stories (trans. Katarina Dodson), New
York: New Directions Press, 2015.
13 ‘There is much I cannot tell you. I am not going to be autobiographical. I want
to be “bio.”’ C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.29.
14 Ibid., p.43.
15 Ibid., p.12.
16 Ibid., p.3. Lispector uses the metaphor of a photographic flash – the instant
– to explain the novel’s structure (Ibid., p.12). For a reflection on the organic
structure and performance of the text, see Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword’
in C. Lispector, The Stream of Life (trans. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. What Susan Best has
observed about Lygia Clark’s work following Gaston Bachelard’s concept of
time instead of Henri Bergson’s, could equally be gauged through Lispector’s
concept of the instant. S. Best, ‘Participation, Affect and the Body: Lygia
Clark’, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde, New York:
I. B. Tauris, 2011, p.55.
17 C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.13. Notably, Água Viva is slang in Portuguese
for jelly fish.
18 Ibid., p.3. For ‘formless’, see Georges Bataille, Robert Lebel, Isabelle
Waldberg, Alastair Brotchie and Iain White, ‘Critical Dictionary’,
Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related
Texts, London: Atlas Press, 1995, pp.51–52. Lispector also quotes the Vedas in
the epigraph to Apple in the Dark: ‘By entering into all things, he became what
has form and what is formless.’ C. Lispector, Apple in the Dark (1961, trans.
Gregory Rabassa) London: Haus Publishing, 2009, p.x.
19 Água Viva was first translated as The Stream of Life making the continuation
into A Breath of Life more obvious.
20 See Olga Borelli’s comments in the notes at the end of the novel, C. Lispector,
A Breath of Life: Pulsations (trans. Johnny Lorenz), New York: New Directions
Press, 2012, p.165.
21 For a contemporary example see also Bataille’s conclusion to Erotism: ‘But at
this point I should like to counsel my hearers the most extreme caution. I am
really speaking a dead language. This language, I believe, is the language of
philosophy. I will go so far as to say that in my opinion philosophy is also the
death of language. It is also sacrifice . . . I have cautioned you about language.
I must therefore caution you at the same time against my own words. Not that

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I want to end upon a note of farce, but I have been trying to talk a language
that equals zero, a language equivalent to nothing at all, a language that
returns to silence.’ G. Bataille, Erotism, op. cit., pp.263–64.
22 Ibid., p.12.
23 In a manner similar to the apophatic strategy of definition in the negative,
there are as many attempts to define Clark’s work through negation as much
as through naming, i.e. it’s not art, not performance, not a Happening, not
dematerialised, not an object, not-psychoanalysis, etc. Even Clark herself
– always looking for a breakthrough after crisis – explained that there were
regressive phases in her work, as she continually re-evaluated her production
to move forwards while constantly re-appropriating her own old works (see,
for instance, the ‘Sensorial Objects’ that become ‘Relational Objects’ in a new
context).
24 For the purpose of creating a dialogue between Lispector and Clark, I’m
restricting the discussion to works from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s.
Leading up to this period, Clark’s writing begins with an imaginary letter to
Piet Mondrian, whom she calls a ‘mystic’, followed by several years of intense
investigation into the purpose of art with a rhetoric usually reserved for theo-
logical writing, as can be observed in the titles, and even more so in the prose
at times verging on poetry. See, for instance, ‘On Ritual’ (1960), ‘The Death of
the Plane’ (1960), ‘The Empty-Full’ (1960), ‘Poetics in Art, Religion, and Space-
time’ (1963–65) and ‘Concerning the Magic of the Object’ (1965).
25 As her collaborator and main interlocutor, Suely Rolnik put it: ‘Actually,
it was the artist herself who best found words to conceptualize her work.’
S. Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, in
The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz,
Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel, (ed. Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz), Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, p.98.
26 The one common genre both Lispector and Clark worked on was the chil-
dren’s story. In 1975, Clark wrote the little discussed and untranslated story
‘Meu Doce Rio’ (‘My Sweet River’): a flowing, surrealist fairy-tale with mor-
phing animals, virgins and ogres roaming an anthropomorphised landscape,
and where if the children ‘joined hands unifying all their bodies, the sensa-
tions multiplied’. L. Clark, Meu Doce Rio (1975), Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Paulo
Klabin, 1984, p.11 (author’s translation). Perhaps less intended for children and
more a transgressive product of her psychanalytic sessions, the fiction used
literary tropes to articulate the research exercises she was developing with
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her students at the Sorbonne – custom-made rituals such as saliva drooled


collectively over a body (Anthropophagic Drool, 1973) or a group cannibalistic
feast on another student’s body (Cannibalism, 1973).
27 A Möbius loop is a two-dimensional form that is twisted in three-dimensional
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

space creating a single surface. A Klein bottle is the analogue with a three-
dimensional volume twisted in fourth-dimensional space, but it’s difficult to
illustrate visually. One could argue Clark’s Stone and Air attempts to over-
come such an impossibility.
28 L. Clark, ‘1965: About the Act’, in L. Clark and Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Nostalgia of the
Body’, October, vol.69, Summer 1994, p.104.
29 It is unclear which one was created first – whether The Inside Is the Outside,
or Walking – as they are both dated 1963. I would posit the genesis of the two
works is intertwined: Walking resulting from the cutouts of paper templates
used in the series of Beasts (which included The Inside Is the Outside).
Temporality folds in on itself and we are left with the classic paradox of which
came first as expressed in the title of Lispector’s story: ‘The Egg [or] the
Chicken’ (1964).
30 For various avant-garde movements concerned with such scientific-math-
ematic theories, see Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983. The fourth dimension as understood by artists could be interpreted as
time in the relativistic space-time continuum or as a higher non-visible spatial
dimension. See also Lispector: ‘I studied mathematics, which is the madness
of reason – but now I want the plasma – I want to eat straight from the pla-
centa.’ C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.3.
31 L. Clark in L. Clark and Y.-A. Bois, ‘Nostalgia’, op. cit., pp.96–97.
32 The phrase is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) Clark read as we know from her letters
to Mário Pedrosa.
33 C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.3. Lispector describes her process as ‘trying
to photograph perfume.’ Ibid., p.47. One thinks here of Marcel Duchamp and
his passion for the fourth dimension and the exploration of the undescribed
as collected under the term the ‘infra-mince’ (‘infra-thin’) – something one
cannot define but can only give examples of, such as: ‘When the tobacco
smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it the two odors are married
by infra-thin.’ M. Duchamp, Collected Writings (ed. Michel Sanouillet and
Elmer Peterson), London: Thames & Hudson, 1975, p.194 (translation slightly
modified). Somewhat analogously, Clark recounts how she thought of the
interdimensional work Walking ‘while watching the smoke from my cigarette:
it was as though time itself were ceaselessly forging a path, annihilating itself,
remaking itself continuously… I already experienced that in love, in my ges-
PAGE 86

tures.’ L. Clark in L. Clark and Y.-A. Bois, ‘Nostalgia’, op. cit., p.100.
34 For a description of the genesis of the work (and other early pieces), see the
text by one of Clark’s earliest supporters Guy Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: The border-
line between art life’, Third Text, vol.1, no.1, 1987, p.79.
35 In the documentary Memória do Corpo (Memory of the Body, dir. Mario
Carneiro, 1984), Clark affectionally tells the viewer about Stone and Air:
‘I consider it the purest and best.’
36 Quoted in G. Brett, ‘Lygia Clark’, op. cit., p.79.
37 See Roland Barthes’s exhibition review ‘Plastic’, in Mythologies (1957, trans.
Richard Howard), New York: Hill and Wang, 2012, pp.97–99. Clark’s descriptor
‘valueless’ is mentioned in G. Brett, ‘Lygia Clark’, op. cit., p.79.
38 Letter from Clark to Hélio Oiticica, ‘26.10.1968’, in L. Clark and H. Oiticica,
Cartas, 1964–1974, Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1996. Translation the author’s.
39 A few examples: Sensorial (1967), The I and the You (1967) and Abyssal Mask
(1968). While Clark’s masks created fantastical experiences, they were made
at the same time as the political revolts in Brazil and the student protests in
Paris, and out of the same material as the gas masks used by police forces
in both countries. Just as in the past Clark’s poetics resonated with the polit-
ical, today’s pandemic politics surrounding respiratory masks can be read
through her Sensorial Masks, mediating our personal interiors with the world’s
exterior.
40 I borrow the term ‘plasticité psychique’ from Georges Didi-Huberman’s
‘Breath and Hallucinations’ – which discusses Clark’s psychoanalysts, Daniel
Lagache and Pierre Fédida – in Gestes d’air et de pierre. Corps, parole,
souffle, image, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2005, p.27.
41 L. Clark, in Lygia Clark, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Paris: Réunion des Musées
Nationaux, 1997, p.219. Thanks to Filipa Ramos for help translating passages
from Portuguese.
42 Nephesh [‫ ]ׁשֶפֶנ‬is the Hebrew word that describes man as God breathed
life into him, Genesis 2:7: ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’
In Vedic writing ‘breath of life’ or Prāna is not limited to animals but extends
to inanimate objects as well. See Arthur H. Ewing, ‘Hindu Conception of the
Functions of Breath – A Study in Early Hindu Psycho-Physics’, Journal of the
American Oriental Society, vol.22, 1901, pp.249–308.
43 C. Lispector, A Breath of Life, op. cit., pp.18 and 130.
44 C. Lispector, ‘The Egg and the Chicken’, op. cit., pp.276–77.
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45 L. Clark, ‘November 1, 1963’, in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–


1988, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014, p.163; C. Lispector, Água, op.
cit., p.3.
Lygia Clark, Abyss Mask, 1968. Courtesy
‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural
Association
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A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
PAGE 89
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Clarice Lispector, Interior de gruta, 1975,


oil on wood, 30.7 x 56cm © Paulo Gurgel
Valente

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