Lygia Clark

If there is an abiding characteristic in the products of Lygia Clark's 30 year artistic career, then it is the idea of the participation of the viewer. But last year's Documenta presented a picture of Clark's oeuvre that was innacurate, even misleading: the different elements that make up her work - masks, plastic bags, rubber tubes, gloves, jumpsuits - were consecrated on tables or hung from the wall and could not be manipulated by the public, thus losing all meaning.

Clark once remarked, in regard to her series of organic, aluminium works entitled Bichos (1960-63), how absurd she found the cult of the unique work. Rather, she considers the unlimited multiplication of her works on an industrial scale more desirable, since it facilitates the lowering of prices and, therefore, the acquisition of works of art. Bichos marks a point of inflection between the first stage of her trajectory, centred on geometric experiments inspired by Mondrian and Malevich, and her later production that attracted the attention of a small group of critics.

Since 1954, four years after arriving in Paris to study painting, Clark's work was based on shifting the relationship between artist, work and viewer. She attempted to escape both the notion of the artist as 'genius', and the supremacy granted to the object which implicitly forces the viewer into a role of passive contemplation. This notion, developed in a text entitled 'L'art, c'est le corps' (1973), continued a concern visible in the pictorial composition of her modulated surfaces and painted wooden buildings of the 50s and 60s. The Fundació Antoni Tápies gives a good account of this first period, which received a warmer critical reception at the time, though the two rooms may nevertheless be a bit too spotless and diaphanous.

The Clark that seems to have relevance to the contemporary eye, and naturally to the curators of this exhibition, is the Clark who submerges herself in the body in order to investigate intimate sensations. This recalls self-exploration that many women artists practiced in the 60s in order to recover their bodies from invasion by men. This is the Clark we see in A CASs e o corpo (The House is a Body, 1968) of which there is a replica in Barcelona. The piece consists of a tunnel through which one enters after removing one's shoes; children have been the most frequent explorers. Inside this womb-like space, different cubicles (cells, as Clark calls them) replete with threads, elastic strips, balloons, plastic bags that open as you pass to hit you in the face, all produce endless tactile sensations that, for the artist, connect the human being with the phases of birth: penetration, ovulation, germination and expulsion. In a letter written in 1969 to the art critic and philosopher Mario Pedrosa, Clark described this complex system: 'I have discovered that while the majority of present-day artists vomit their entrails in a grand process of solitary extroversion, I gulp down, I swallow more and more in a process of introversion, in order to finish ovulating one single ovule each time, which turns out to be sadly dramatic. Then I must begin again, to swallow, to delve into myself almost to the point of madness, to lay an egg, and this has less to do with invention than with being born. Madness? I don't know. I only know that my way of linking up to the world consists in being fertilised and then ovulating'. This is a problematic reflection that raises some doubts, especially in its assumption of the unfailing fertility of women - one can imagine the barbed reaction of a commentator such as Julia Kristeva.

The principal virtue of this show lies in its understanding of the participatory dimension of Clark's work. With this in mind, the curators (Manuel Borja-Villel, Nuria Enguita and Luciano Figueiredo) have made replicas of the jumpsuits, dust guards, masks, gloves and other utensils that Clark employed in order to combine sensorial exploration and therapy. The first floor of the Fundació Tápies was thus transformed into a laboratory of tactile, sensual experiments in which viewers could don masks and jumpsuits. Finally, it seems, Clark's notion has been realised: that the festive, healing qualities of art overcome the importance of the artistic object, and that art serve the people.