Where to get cured? Sanatoriums, hospitals, dusty divans... or perhaps in the plaza, amidst the social fullness of civic activity, beneath the light of the midday sun? Because if, in the first instance, it may be thought that modernity has limited the problem of healing, transforming illness into mere technicality, a closer look almost forces us to conclude that the contrary has taken place: cultural malaise is indivisible from personal trauma, since we cannot continue to conceive of the psyche's structures as isolated from larger mass movements. The dark secret of psychoanalysis is everything but subjective, and, like currency, circulates from hand to hand, giving the holder a momentary and completely consensual passion.					These are works which clearly presuppose a subject, which in turn is made evident to itself through its own contemplation. It is art whose objective is to criticize the notion of presence - and I am referring here specifically to a great portion of art which is supposedly critical with respect to the traditional conceptions of identity, understood in every sense of the word - and which ends up, paradoxically, being supported by presence, thereby indirectly reinforcing it.        The case of Lygia Clark (1) is a very different one. Lygia began her career as a concrete artist and, towards the end of her career, the logical development of her investigation led her to formulate the bases for a therapy with objects.
	Now, if illness - once dispersed into the social sphere - is multiplied, if it in itself becomes a multiplicity and drags us within it, it is also logical that we multiply the treatments, the techniques of healing, the political, sentimental, and anthropological recipes. The role that contemporary art occupies in this scenario is a curious one. Attracted by the logic of modernity, it cannot resist offering itself to the social sphere as a promise of healing. And if the intention of healing implies, above all, a diagnosis of the illness, perhaps it can be said that the chief problem resides in questions linked to representation for a sector of the contemporary art world. Today, many artists attempt to put forward certain discursive contents by means of the use of specific formal strategies. This is art which is structured like language, a reflexive language, which serves as a means of representing a subject before itself.					The relational objects, as they were called, were intended to produce, once applied periodically to the bodies of "patients," a series of psychic changes, the physical sensation of relief, the cessation of blocks, in sum, a freeing, albeit temporary, of the habitual constrictions of their respective psychic structures. This was not, obviously, a case of conventional therapy. In the first place, it did not include language, or rather, it did not include language in its representative role, the reflexive language in which a subject makes himself present to himself - the language of the Cartesian cogito. This therapy did not promote the establishment of rational, adaptive, or behavioral patterns; what it healed in this case was not at all the verbalization of some original trauma, but rather a programmed encounter with the non-identical: the placeless place of a body whose limits are those of the world.

 

 

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