The Brooklyn Rail

Experimenting with collage in the early 1950s, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark noticed that when she placed a framing mat next to a cardboard surface of the same color, a cleft of negative space appeared in the interstice between them. This perceptual phenomenon—what she would later call the “organic line”—can be found throughout everyday experience: in the slit between a door and its casement, in the seams of woven fabrics, in the crevices that separate the tiles of parquet flooring. It was initially received as an architectural concept that suggested new ways of integrating absence into modular arrangements of space. However, it would only acquire its full significance in painting series such as “Quebra da moldura” (1954) and “Planos em superfície modulada” (1957), where it exploded the distinction between the pictorial frame and its material support. Despite its epochal importance in the trajectory of modern art, the organic line has hitherto been excluded from official histories, which have tended to rely on categories like the grid, the monochrome, and the readymade. Irene Small’s new book asks us to use this missing landmark as a way of torquing received understandings of artistic modernism.

Spatial intervals between surfaces are not limited to their modernist expression, and have often been creatively harnessed by artists, as in the tradition of pendant painting. Yet, as Small argues, with Clark this negative space is raised to a principle of composition, altering our perception of what came before and after her. Through a series of attentive readings that reinterpret canonical modernists in the light of Clark’s discovery (Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier), as well as more speculative engagements with contemporary artists such as Adam Pendleton and Maria Eichhorn, Small establishes the organic line as a paradigm that ripples beyond and across art history, exceeding its original instantiation in Clark’s oeuvre.

In their most minimal iteration, painterly lines are graphic traces that carve, cleave, and delimit, introducing duality into a work or partitioning the representation of space. What Clark happened upon is different, however, because, in Small’s words, it is “a line devoid of a mark.” Effacing rather than elevating the intention of the artist, it is registered in the real time of the aesthetic experience of the beholder, who “activates” the work by pulling negativity into the sphere of meaning. To this extent, the organic line both pre-exists and outlasts the viewer’s encounter with it, pertaining to the real void between two abutting planes. The resulting tension between visual perception and material structure, or between activation and contingency, gives rise to the self-legislating quality of Clark’s abstractions, which disrupt hard and fast distinctions between where the work stops and the surrounding world begins.

There are precedents to Clark’s discovery, principal among which is the work of Mondrian, one of her idols. As Small explains in the introduction, it was after viewing a survey of Mondrian’s work at the Second São Paulo Bienal in 1953 that Clark was able to reconceive the surface of painting as a topological entity woven from fissures of negative space. And yet, for Mondrian, the plane was ultimately a pre-existing entity to be subdivided from edge to edge through the use of grids and repetition. By carving her lines directly into the material support, Clark transformed the surface of art from a natural or a priori medium into a fractured body that lives and breathes. In this way, the surface becomes both an element and a consequence of the composition, which is why Clark calls one of her most important painting series “Unidades,” the Portuguese word for both “unit” and “unity.” To borrow one of Clark’s own metaphors, if the art object is like an egg, we can only see what’s inside by cracking it open.

Gendered images of ovulation and parturition were, indeed, frequently employed by Clark as a vocabulary to describe the practice of art making. In a 1969 letter to Mário Pedrosa, she argued that artists typically “vomit themselves out in a process of great extroversion.” Her method, by contrast, assimilates the outside world and laboriously begets “one egg at a time.” The sequence of biological reproduction is here flipped on its head, for fertilization is said to precede ovulation, just as Clark had inverted the surface of Mondrian from presupposition into result. The artwork itself is not unmarked by this topsy-turvy temporality. In a late interview from 1986, Clark described her own work as “Cubist sculpture outside the Cubist era,” as if she had spawned “a child with the face of a great-great-grandfather.” The singular achievement of Small’s book is to have done justice to both the retroactive and anticipatory effects of Clark’s discovery, cementing the organic line as an unavoidable paradigm for anyone interested in art from the past, present, or future.