Topology the historiography of interactivity:

Topology the historiography of interactivity:

Lygia Clark’s and Gabriel Orozco’s ‘endless sculptures’

Assimina Kaniari

University of Oxford

Lygia Clark’s work on the mobius strip has invited a number of responses both at the historical and historiographic level. Osthoff’s paper, for example, considers Clark’s work in the context of a group of ‘technologically’ minded artists, Clark’s mobius strip sculpture being illustrative of Clark’s ‘sensorial’ prejudice and suggestive of her placement at the centre of a tradition for interactive art before in fact the invention of interactivity.[1]

Ostoff’s criteria of classification for Clark’s work among other ‘technologically’ inspired works relies on a point about Clark’s interest in non-Euclidian space. The latter is used, in turn, as a justification for Clark’s ‘affinity’ for a number of technologically related art movements, the Bauhaus being perhaps the most prominent among all. Even though we may accept Ostoff’s historiographical positioning of Clark’s work as part of a series of technologically inspired works, in the context of Clark’s own interests in artifice, the sensorial and technologies of seeing, themes also at the core of Bauhaus experiments in vision and art practice, there is an implicit underlying historiographic thread in this classification which ties Clark to the Bauhaus but also to the work of other artists preoccupied with “endless” spaces such as Gabriel Orozco not restricted to the technological-sensorial.

Interactivity and the dynamic aspects implicit in Clark’s treatment of form are contained and related to a legacy which while may be seen to have conditioned her work remains invisible from the historiography which has so far attempted to place her work in a common ground shared by other 20^th century artists working with issues concerning science and technology. Even though the Bauhaus is a useful context it is not the beginning of the thread. In approaching the legacy of interactivity before the emergence of interactive art as a technologically embedded phenomenon one has to think in broader terms and perhaps outside the term ‘interactive’ itself. It is the preference for a “dynamic” understanding of form the theme which conditions Clark’s work and appropriation of the mobius strip, I would like to argue, a theme also which ties itself and Clark’s work with the historiographic beginnings of interactivity outside the realm of technological determinism and in a period of time which well preceded the context and experiments of the Bauhaus. To think about interactivity in this sense is to think about Clark’s and Orozco’s work in a ‘topological’ sense, the same way they thought through their work and preoccupation with “endless spaces”.

Writings on the ‘dynamic’ aspects of modern and avant-garde art form were produced from the 40s onwards by art theorists and historians of art not restricted to the Bauhaus context. Maholy-Nagy will agree, for example, with Rudolf Arnheim while both discussing aspects of the avant-garde art form, that the dynamic aspects of a work of art and the visualization of motion comprises a “graphically” embedded phenomenon involving three as opposed to two dimensions.

In discussing the dynamic properties intrinsic in art both Nagy and Arnheim however will be repeating Thompson’s principle of movement as an “irreducibly” graphic phenomenon, already expressed since 1917 and Thompson’s eloquent On Growth and Form, as a “diagram of forces.” While ‘topologically’ expressed, through the use of grids and outlines of shapes in their various stages of transformation, the phenomena which Thompson described in the book expressed biological facts. In the work of Orozco and Clark, topology and complex forms suggest not elements of a biological kind of facticity but comprise the artistic facts themselves.[2]

[1] S. Osthoff, ‘Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future,’ Leonardo, Vol. 30 (1997), pp. 279-289.

[2] Clark’s and Orozco’s sculptural ‘topologies’ have an earlier precursor in the important work of Max Bill. This piece is part of a broader research examining centers and periphery of ‘modernism’ in the work of 20^th century Latin American artists referencing science and technology.