POETIC SHELTER
LYGIA CLARK, 1964
This one sits low. A few big black shapes, rounded, sorta like lily pads. And this piece here lifts up. Get down a little. Look underneath. There's this tiny dark space under there. Lygia Clark called it Poetic Shelter. Which is a pretty big name for five inches of headroom. The thing about Clark is she keeps making something, then gets suspicious of the thing she just made. First, paintings. Too flat. So she gets them off the wall. Then the Bichos. Which means critters in Portuguese. A bunch of metal plates joined with hinges, and you pick one up and it sort of flops and clanks around in your hands. Fold a piece over. Now it looks like one thing. Fold another piece. It becomes a different sculpture. There's no final version to get back to. So the shape isn't fixed. Problem solved. Sort of. Then, 1963, she hands you a strip of paper and some scissors. No metal. Just paper. She twists it into a loop, and you start cutting down the middle. When you come around again, you choose a side and keep going. Then choose again. And again. That's Caminhando. Walking. Eventually you're holding this long, mangled paper thing. Clark doesn't care about that part. The artwork was all those little choices you made getting there. The cutting. Which creates an awkward question. If the sculpture isn't the shape, and isn't the thing you're left holding either, what's left? And this is where a basket enters the story. An actual basket. Clark opens one and gets hung up on the empty part inside. The basket is the wicker and the hole in the middle. She calls it the empty-full. Basically what she's getting at is: don't ignore the part where there's nothing. Some metal gets cut. One part lifts five inches. That's basically all she did. But now there's an inside. A little patch of protected nothing. Five inches of air. Somehow, enough for a shelter.