¿El arte cura?

Contemporary aesthetic practices operate with the fabric of reality as interferences that open up interstices of problematization and place the world in work. The singularity of a proposal lies in the part of reality in which it is inscribed and in the procedures of its inscription: the more subtle and precise these are, the greater its critical power and the greater the impact of its effects. This is the perspective in which Lygia Clark’s final and most radical work, Estruturação do self (Structuring of the Self), is focused. An experimental practice that is inscribed in the spectator’s subjectivity and, more broadly, in the dominant mode of subjectivation, the basis of the machine of homogenization that bears the name of “consensus”. It is in this essential mechanism of the production of reality in the contemporary that the artist’s proposal intervenes, reactivating in the spectator’s subjectivity the aesthetic function on which the creation in his relationship with the world depends. By placing subjectivity in work, Lygia Clark, in her own way, restores the critical and clinical power of art.

In February 2001, Suely Rolnik was invited to give a lecture at the MACBA in the context of the debates conducted under the heading Art, Madness and Cure, linked to the Zush Tecura and Prinzholm Collection: Lines on the Magic Pad exhibitions. The lecture was entitled “Does Art Cure?”.