The Weaving of Printmaking and Sculpture in the Art of Lygia Pape
Crisp parallel lines cut across the soft natural lines of the wooden surface. Seemingly working against the grain, yet bringing forth new geometric and strangely sensual forms. A sense of allusion, and illusion; presenting two-dimensional structures and yet endowing them with a three-dimensionality, or a movement, that they have no right to possess. I never knew a line could dance.
Crisp parallel lines cut across the soft natural lines of the wooden surface. Seemingly working against the grain, yet bringing forth new geometric and strangely sensual forms. A sense of allusion, and illusion; presenting two-dimensional structures and yet endowing them with a three-dimensionality, or a movement, that they have no right to possess. I never knew a line could dance.
The arts of both painting and sculpture derived from one woman’s simple gesture in tracing a line around the shadow of another body.[1] This shared point of origin points to an intrinsic connection between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional arts that categorisations such as painting and sculpture would seem to draw a line between. There is a long history of sculptor’s employing drawing as a preparatory medium. However, artist Lygia Pape’s use of the two-dimensional form is by no means simply as a preliminary stage, ultimately intended to result in a sculptural work. Instead, it forms just one part of a multifaceted practice driven by the artists overwhelming concern with a play between line and light.
Lygia Pape (1927-2004) was a Brazilian artist and founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement. The breaking down of these art historical categories was one crucial objective for the Neo-Concretists, yet the notion of destruction was paradoxically viewed as a source of rejuvenation. In the Manifesto Neoconcreto (1959) it is written, that ‘viewing Mondrian as the demolisher of the surface plane and the line will be of no avail to us unless we envisage the new space that this destruction has created’.[2] The surface or basic plane is constructed and defined by vertical and horizontal lines; lines which are produced by (and act as evidence of) a force enacted by a bodily agent.[3] Rather than committing a negative act by forcing the line to traverse the plane, and thereby challenging the fundamental mainstays of painting, Mondrian proved himself to be a creator through this act of destruction. In the words of Carel Blotkamp, ‘the destruction of old forms was a condition for the creation of new, higher forms’.[4]
In Lygia Pape’s woodcut prints, which she collects under the title Tecelares (Weavers), a similarly destructive and yet positive act has been committed against the surface. The viewer initially expects the engraved lines to overrun their organic counterparts, and yet the result of these weaving lines is not violent. Instead there is a sense that Pape is in the process of creating new higher forms, which adopt a geometric aesthetic. The Neo-Concrete movement was heavily influenced by principles of Abstraction and Constructivism. As such it involved itself with, a ‘“geometric” vocabulary’, which they believed was ‘capable of assuming the expression of complex human realities’.[5] As I identified on my immediate encounter with Tecelares, the expressivity and sensuality placed within geometric forms seemed strange, not least for the use of woodcuts being more traditionally assigned to the gestural marks of the expressionists. Neither was it something I had ever consciously considered within my own practice. And yet it is successful; an interweaving of controlled human action and nature. Via a geometric manipulation of the line Pape excavates the wooden plate, in search of new spatial planes:
The moment I arrived at total white, I reached the end of my investigations. To me, it was as if two surfaces – spaces – were overlaid: a white one below and a black one on top. Peeling off black revealed white space and determined the conclusion of the unveiling.[6]
Wearing away the surface, Pape seeks to unveil a concealed white space, described by the artist as, ‘white – no colour – light – real space’.[7] She is ultimately concerned with the excavation of white from black; real from virtual space; of light from dark. In her Tecelares the hollowed out white spaces have been named “light-lines” which would also seem an apt description of her sculptural piece, Ttéia 1, C (Web) shown alongside the woodcuts in the recent exhibition Magnetized Space, at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
Instrumental strings echoing with a quivering, plucking pizzicato. Stunning, glistening lines of light that quite literally made me gasp and brought tears to my eyes. It brings to mind the recent display of the spun silk of the golden orb-weaver spiders at the V and A. The existence of both barely seems possible. Which came first, Ttéia or the Tecelares? I form an instant connection. With each I want to be wrapped in these lines and experience them fully. To nestle in them, as I see a spider has done; create an inner web within this greater woven space, and melt away into the light.
In Lygia Pape’s sculptural works the importance of the individual’s phenomenological experience of the artwork, an essential element of the Neo-Concretist project, becomes apparent; as a sculptural piece the viewer can walk around the structure and view it from every angle. However, it is also Pape’s phenomenological definition of printmaking that brings the Tecelares beyond the two-dimensionality of the paper, and printmaking into the realm of conceptual art. This unusual employment of printmaking for conceptual means is made evident by the fact that Pape tended not to produce multiples. The reproductive possibilities of print, seen as perhaps the defining feature of the medium, did not interest her. Instead, Pape’s concern within the woodcut is with the structural capacity of the line. Ronald Brito writes that, ‘Consistent with her Constructivist theoretical premises, these woodcuts are really more constructed than carved’, positing the 3D plate itself, the artist’s action upon it, and the definition of space this creates at the heart of a categorically two-dimensional medium.[8]
Whilst unconcerned with reproducibility, it is a notion of repetition, more specifically the repetition of the line that confuses our perception in Ttéia. Circling and scrutinising the installation, lines of thread appear at once as constructed cuboids, then the next as lines of light, impossibly inscribed in mid-air. The construction of these light-lines concretises light itself, lending it a sculptural presence as it cuts through space, magnetizing the forms around it.[9] This magnetized space is the gap in-between that Pape is constantly in search of; the hollowed white space in the woodcut; the taught lines of golden light seemingly engraved from the darkness in Ttéia. The light-line bridges the gap between misleading categorisations, demonstrating that, ‘the structure in space is, at the same time, a linear construction’, a notion that encompasses Pape’s entire practice, irrespective of medium. [10]
Wolfgang Tillmans has stated that an exhibition of his work acts as an installation; in other words each piece comes together to be experienced as a whole. This is how we must come to view Lygia Pape’s practice. It is evident in each individual woodcut, where the destroyed or cut out spaces act to magnetize and draw together every form, but the Tecelares as a corpus also demand to be viewed as a whole and not as individual works. As Pape states, ‘my prints act as research’; as evidence of the obsessive exploration of a passage from light to dark, which also materialises in her Ttéia series. It is this passage that categorises Pape’s practice and not the categorisations of printmaking or sculpture, a point that the artist demonstrates in her insistence that the Tecelares be defined by this name, and not under the banner of printmaking.
Whilst Neo-Concretist art is devoid of all figurative associations, it is also the phenomenological presence of the body which underlines Pape’s practice. In his essay, Theory of the Non-Object Ferreira Gullar writes, ‘it is a transparent body in terms of phenomenological knowledge: while being entirely perceptible it leaves no trace. It is a pure appearance.’[11] The main aim of Neo-Concrete art was to bring art into everyday life; to demonstrate that everything is inseparable from the lived experiences of the body. I did not expect to be overwhelmed by the Magnetized Space exhibition, which I happened upon only by chance. But I was overwhelmed, so much so that I was inspired to write this essay, and in this exhibition as a whole I hope to demonstrate the influence Lygia Pape has had on my own practice, in the consideration of the light-line, along with the conceptual and sculptural possibilities of print, all of which are keenly centred on an interaction with the body.
[1] Pliny the Elder used the tale of the Corinthian maid Butades to describe the origins of painting and sculpture. Butades traced the outline of her departing lover’s shadow onto a wall in order to memorialise him, from which her Father then cast a relief of the silhouette. Thus the line lies at the very beginnings of 2D and 3D visual representation.
[2] Ferreira Gullar and others, ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) pp. 80-83 (p. 80).
[4] Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp (Reaktion Books Ltd., London: 1994) p. 15.
[5] Ferreira Gullar and others, ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) pp. 80-83 (p. 82).
[6] Lygia Pape, ‘Statement’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) p. 91.
[7] Lygia Pape, ‘Forty Neo-Concrete Woodcuts’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) pp. 88-90 (p. 89).
[8] Ronaldo Brito, ‘With Constructed Space’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) p. 95.
[9] This brings to mind another light installation that I saw at the Serpentine Gallery years before: Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone, from his solid light series. McCall deconstructs the cinematic image, projecting cones of light which cut through the space and demand to be experienced as sculptures, solid and yet hollow, as with Pape’s light-lines.
[11] Paulo Herkenhoff, ‘Lygia Pape: The Art of Passage’ in Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011) pp. 19-59(p. 22).
Lygia Pape, Ttéia 1, C (Web), Golden thread, installation view (2011)
Olivia Mills, Untitled, Lino print on photograph, installed on window (2012)
Bibliography
Books
- Blotkamp, Carel, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1994)
- Kandinsky, Wassily, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover Publications, 1979)
- Langer, Monika M., Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (London: Macmillan Press, 1989)
- Pape, Lygia, Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011)
- Saltzman, Lisa, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
- Ross, David A. And Peter Sellars (curated by), Bill Viola (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Paris: Flammarion, 1997)
- Tilmans, Wolfgang, Manual (Koln: Walther Konig, 2007)
- ‘Wolfgang Tillmans: Peter Halley in Conversation’, in Pressplay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2005) pp. 607-618
Websites
- Serpentine Gallery: Past Exhibitions (2012) <http://www.serpentinegallery.org/exhibitions/past/> [Accessed 12 April 2012]:
Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space: 7 December 2011 – 19 February 2012
<http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/12/lygia_pape.html>
Anthony McCall: 30 November 2007 – 3 February 2008
<http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2007/04/anthony_mccalldecember_2007_ja.html>
Opening Night:
