Notes Page 9

Lygia Clark

Notes from seminar 1st November Kim Charnley

Caminhando is Portuguese for Walking 

I selected this piece because it talks about a lot of themes in my own work.  I discovered it by being given a mobus strip at a workshop on Practice as Research to demonstrate (phenomenologically!) how we can learn/expand/investigate/feel/think…. Just about everything by creating a mobus strip and then cutting into it - again and again (a lived experience).

Clark calls the act a propostition which makes me think of expansive openendedness, it gives things a future, a potential.  The democratic nature of participatory proposition is interesting as is the access and the accompanying instructions. 

Walking is one method I’m using to research.  

She said this:

The first time I cut the caminhando I lived out a ritual. Which was very significant in itself.  And I wished for this same action to be lived out with the greatest possible intensity by the future participants: it is necessary for it to be purely gratuitous and for you not to try to know - while you are cutting - what you are going to cut and what you have already cut.

If I use a mobius strip for this experience it is because it breaks with our space conditioning, the concepts of right - left, averse-reverse etc.  It makes us to live the experience of limitless time and continuous space.

The walking only started to make sense to me once when I was travelling by train and I felt each fragment of the landscape as a wholeness in time,  a totality.

I think we are now the proponents and , through the proposition, there must be a thought and when the spectator expresses this proposition he is actually putting together the characteristics of the work of art at all times.

The object is no longer there to express any concept whatsoever but so that the spectator can reach more responsibility for his own self.

Is there an eventual product?  Is this cultural capital.   

It amuses me to note that I misspelt the title Caminohando.  Inserting mistakenly Camino  -the spanish word for path  -creeping in to the Portuguese Caminhando.  And blending it with hand.

Walking Hand or Hand of the Path (drawing walk or walking drawing - drawking!)

 art objects as separate to the person who makes them interests me, Clark reconnects them.

She is also described as dwelling in not only  the poetic and cognitive issues of the individual but also the collective   She thought deeply about lines, folds, time so discovering her was a confirmation that my enquiry is valid.  I was folding aeroplanes out of paper and losing faith.  What was the point? 

Then I found Lygia Clark and she returned my self belief.