«Baba antropofágica», 1973
Lygia Clark



In collective works like «Túnel» or «Objetos relacionais,» Lygia Clark initiates psychic processes of exchange which transform the dichotomy of subject and object. In doing so, she follows the transgressive logic of «devouring» and «vomiting». The reception of «Baba antropofágica» («Cannibalistic Saliva») also relies on the documentary film «O mundo de Lygia Clark,» filmed by Eduardo Clark in 1973. But escaping this phantasmal staging of the body seems almost impossible: kneeling over a guinea-pig-like subject lying on the floor, a figure pulls from its mouth—like spiders do from their bodies—a spittle-drenched thread and spins a cocoon around the reclining figure. The precarious division of subject and object is eliminated by this thread-like weaving, with the gestural webbing of the passive subject completing the inversion of the internal and external. In the retrospective, these interactive aspects might have been what was most convincing. In contrast to Performance and Body Art, Lygia Clark understood herself to be an initiator of processes, and was most successful in this respect when her haptic attempts on orderings were targeted at inter-subjective body politics.
(Source: Petra Löffler, «Lygia Clark, The Inside is the Outside», http://members.magnet.at/springerin/d/springer_2/springer_2_62.htm)