#Army of two masks rios transparent series

2 (1912), which translates the moving human body into a set of linear picture planes. Its subject matter recalls two key works of European Modernism: Férnand Leger's drawing The Staircase (1913) - Clark would later study with Leger, and Marcel Duchamp's celebrated painting, Nude Descending the Staircase No.

#Army of two masks rios transparent series

It is part of a series of staircases painted around the same time Clark believed that they were the only memorable works she produced while she was still a student.

Clark saw her therapeutic practice as an 'abandonment of art', but recent accounts of her work have understood this not as a relinquishment of art in itself, but as a critique of art's institutional constraints, and as an embrace of the potential value of art as a social practice.Ĭomposition: Staircase is one of Clark's earliest works, completed while she was studying with the painter-turned-landscape-architect Roberto Burle Marx.

Clark's practice can be differentiated from the category of Body art, which typically implies a performance addressed to an audience in contrast, Clark's work entails an essentially private psycho-sensory experience that takes place inside the participant. The encounter with the art object was intended to give the participant a heightened sensory perception of their own form and its relationship with the surrounding environment.

The body was central to Clark's practice, but instead of simply depicting corporeal experience, Clark invited the participant to feel it.

This engendered a conceptual shift from audience as passive viewers to audience as active participants.

Clark pioneered a shift from the art object as something intended to be merely looked at, to the art object as something that demanded to be touched and physically interacted with, effectively requiring the body of the beholder to create or complete the work.

By positing the notion of the abstract painting as a 'quasi-body', Clark was able to imagine an interaction between viewer and artwork akin to a meeting of two bodies, thus emphasizing the viewer's embodied, sensorial and emotional response.

Through her pioneering efforts to arrive at a corporeal and 'organic' form Clark hoped to eliminate the perceived boundary between the artwork and the viewer's perceptual experience in relation to it. Clark believed that art should be experienced not just with the eyes, but as a total bodily encounter.