Jane and Lygia: Relational Ontologies and Liminal Identities in a Blocked World

In 1969, Lygia Clark wrote a letter to Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa confessing that, while watching a documentary on TV, she had identified herself in another animal – a scorpion:

This self-identification with a scorpion reminds us that when Clark created her Bichos (Critters) sculptures from 1960 onwards, she was not only alluding to formal correspondences between her foldable, pointed and almost tentacular metal pieces and animals such as spiders, butterflies and other insects, but perhaps examining the possible ontological transpositions between object- and animal-hood, between art and non-art.²

As demonstrated by JCAF’s exhibition title, Liminal Identities in the Global South, Clark was interested in the in-between states of space, body, existence, time, as enunciated in the title and gestures of her 1954 painting, Descoberta da Linha Orgânica (Discovery of the Organic line), an interest that became central to her work.

Although the painting presents black outlines, the organic line that Clark refers to has not been painted, but is constituted by the space between the central plan of the work and what might seem to be its “frame”. The organic line appears once one plan is put within another. It is not tangible or visible. It is not a self-determined line, but an associated one, demonstrating how, in Clark’s work, every ontological approach is a relational one.

Departing from a relational ontology,³ in Clark’s topology, the organic line is a transmutation of the edge: once the limits of one surface encounter another body’s boundary, their previous limits become the inside of their now linked body, making an organic line emerge. Thus, “organic” is not an adjective referring to what could be a “natural” formal aspect of the line, but rather a direct allusion to the roots of the word “organic”, affiliated to the meaning of the body’s organs, things or substances that exist only inside a body, in connection to it.

Fostering a poetics based on a liaison ethics, at the end of the 1960s Clark goes beyond her initially participatory sculptures to propose relational objects, dispositifs for establishing relations between people; between people and materials or particular space-times; or even in-between a person and her own self. Although they may cover the entire body, these relational objects do not behave as segregational structures: on the contrary, they are contact and even contamination devices.

Exhibited in Liminal Identities in the Global South, Lygia Clark’s Sensorial Masks (1967) were created not to isolate our body from the world, but to catalyse senses such as sight, smell and hearing, spreading the intricate connections between the self and the other to the point that – as happens with the “glasses” in Dialogue, Goggles (1968), designed to put people in straight connection through gazing – one can experience the sensation of blurring body and identity boundaries and merging into another. As Clark states when reflecting on her scorpion-hood, the Sensorial Masks and the Relational Objects act from “pore to pore, from fur to fur, from sweat to sweat”.

Clark’s relational ontology is approximated, in Liminal Identities in the Global South, to Jane Alexander’s Harbinger in correctional uniform (2006), a life-size sculpture that merges aspects of an antelope’s body with characteristics of a human one, performing a “humanimal”. Within the confrontation between the works of the Brazilian and the South African artist, one can access not only the grotesque, melancholic, eschatological and traumatised dimensions of Alexander’s figuration of humans but, in the opposite direction, get a glimpse of how her work may also be inviting us to unfold and complexify our understanding of what defines humanity as a social and ontological condition.

While Clark creates relational dispositifs, Alexander presents identities that are already related, ontologically merged: one cannot separate animal-hood and humanity in the corpus of her work. Modelling the bodies of her figures, Alexander sometimes also adds  horns, bones and other elements from real animals to create her sculptures, which not only allude to humanimals, but in fact give birth to them in our imagination and, moreover, due to the naturalism of the artist’s installations, in our body memory.

The intensity of Alexander’s work can be linked to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of allegories in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), where he defines the allegorical as an aesthetic category that differs from the theological dimension of symbolisation. Allegorisation, explains Benjamin, is not a symbolisation method, but a dialectical one.

“As Clark states when reflecting on her scorpion-hood, the Sensorial Masks and the Relational Objects act from ‘pore to pore, from fur to fur, from sweat to sweat’.”

With no perspective of redemption since The Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and, therefore, in a state of immanence and present-ness, history (seen from the baroque perspective) holds only to itself and thus approaches the idea of ​​nature. The form of this history is historicity itself as a form, in a kind of metalanguage that is produced autophagically, devouring and redevouring its own symbols.

The allegory, which for this reason Benjamin would claim to be a “strange combination of history and nature,”⁴ is the linguistic modus operandi of this autophagy. Through allegorisation, the symbols and perspectives of a given context are rearranged, allowing new interpretations to emerge, producing historicity in the midst of the absolute immanence of history.

What Benjamin reveals in his seminal essay is that allegories arise through the fragmentation of meanings that could seem eternal and unambiguous: they are decontextualised and recontextualised to compose allegories. Once allegorists disintegrate, crop, recompose and merge meanings and images, they are able to transform them ontologically without needing to refer to God or to another suprahistorical instance. As demiurges of immanence, their gestures concentrate, in their violence, the force of death and the rebirth of the senses and, as such, of history. For this reason, while representations can replace the presence of what they aim to represent, allegories, by contrast, are the very institution of what is made present only through the allegorical procedure.

Alexander’s presentation, at a life-size scale, of images and situations that inhabit our memories and fabulations, has the power of instituting meanings while making them public – sharing them through artworks, exhibitions, books etc. More than commenting on history, through her works she is effectively producing historicisation. Her humanimals now inhabit our world; we coexist with them. We can even be them.

Besides the allegorical approach to the anthropomorphic animals/zoomorphic humans and the social and political situations in which they are presented through her installations, Alexander’s relational ontology between humanity and animality also finds interesting and productive echoes in Amerindian perspectivism. Theoretically circumscribed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (who departed from work, studies and apprenticeship with Amazonian indigenous people), perspectivism highlights a “multinaturalist” understanding of the world. While Judeo-Christian cultures usually experience multiculturalism – regimes of a univocal nature, whose variations are of an interpretative, representational order (relativism) – some Amerindian cultures are based on multi-naturalism: a world of multiple natures. As Viveiros de Castro points out, in Amerindian perspectivism, in the face of natural pluralism there is, however, a single culture, that of humanity: “the common reference to all beings in nature is not man as a species, but humanity as a condition.”⁵

Connected by the same humanity culture, different states of being can easily keep interpenetrating one another. Because, for Amazonian peoples, “the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but rather humanity,” one can conclude that “animals have a human, sociocultural inner aspect that is ‘disguised’ by an ostensible bestial bodily form.”⁶ It is a cosmological and ontological perspective whose radical relationality engenders a deeply ethical approach to Otherness, reminding us that within difference – and even strangeness – there is a common existential background.

“Alexander’s presentation, at a life-size scale, of images and situations that inhabit our memories and fabulations, has the power of instituting meanings while making them public…”

Although, from this Amazonian perspective, humanity is a shared condition between different forms of being, what Western – and, in particular, European – agency in the world’s history shows us is that – as Alexander denounces in her work – due to racism and its socio-political violence and economic interests, millions of people had their humanity denied through slavery, Nazism, apartheid, etc.

While the animalisation and the monsterisation of humans have produced the worst, ongoing tragedies of humanity, in Clark’s identification with a scorpion and Alexander’s animalisation of humans, one catches a glimpse of the ethical urges of our time.

The “inhumanity of the white man” is, in turn, how Frantz Fanon⁷ described the way racism has dehumanised not only Black, but also white people, the ones who in fact acted without humanity while killing, enslaving, torturing, etc.

Addressing the absence of humanity in whiteness, therefore, is also a possible approach to Alexander’s work, whose poetic and political images – such as her quasi-canonical Butcher Boys (1985), three animalised white men – convey the urgency of racialising white people in order to engender a critical perception of whiteness so that it can assume its responsibility towards the past and its commitment to an anti-racist, repaired and retaken future.

In this sense, it is important to note that both Clark and Alexander are white women (as am I) and that, therefore, their (and also my) perspectives on the organic line, on relational ontologies or human-animal interrelations can be racially scrutinised. This means that their works’ relation to difference and liminality – the right to ambiguity, to enter and leave the condition of both humanity and animality, object and nonobject etc – is based on the privilege of being able to move, to change, to choose, the privilege of being able to blur ontological and social limits while, at the same time, nurturing Otherness and strangeness in a way that perfectly serves cognitive capitalism, “devou[ring] worlds and therefore feast[ing] on difference.”⁸

In our blocked world of brutal boundaries, with masses of terrorised refugees wandering without homes, with wars and unprecedented violence against women, transgender, Indigenous and Black people in countries such as Brazil and South Africa, Clark and Alexander’s works represented in the JCAF exhibition demand critical reflection on who has the right to hold and to experience liminal identities without being targeted by colonial, white, state and masculine violence that recognises no limits at all.