Avant-garde Anticlass: overcoming plan, page and stage in Lygia Pape's poetics

Abstract

This article takes drawing exercises Lygia Pape gave to her design students as the point of departure for a review of her trajectory in the 1950s and 1960s that focuses on three different categories her work increasingly questioned as she expanded her media repertoire: plane (in her Concrete woodcuts), page (in her Neoconcrete books) and stage (in her ballets). By comprehending her questioning of the conventional stability of those three categories as facets of the same critical movement, I argue that the sense of cohesion of her work cannot be reduced to notions such as style or artistic language. Moreover, I elaborate on how this same critical movement relates to the environmental expansion of her work from the mid-1960s onwards.