The precarious condition of the art or the insufficiency of the work

Abstract

My objective with this article is not the artists considered vulnerable in terms of the possibility of participating in museographic collections. Nor do I intend to work with collections in conditions of fragility in terms of their protection and conservation. I aim to build paths for a theory of art based on the vulnerability of every body, including the work, permeated by the outside, by difference, by alterity. My intension is to analyze artistic works and texts since the 1960s to elaborate a certain critical poetics in contemporary times that, from the perspective of precariousness, presents alternatives to the logic of individuation – whether related to the work, the subject or the community. The term “precariousness” appeared in the speeches of artists in the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. I take as a starting point the thought and work of Lygia Clark who used the word in 1963, but I approach other productions from the 1970s, reaching the present day. I understand that the work of art in its precarious condition presents the uncertainty of the process, the failures of expression, the embarrassments of time, still displaying the marks and traces of materialities as a symptom of a permeable movement between exteriority and interiority that shows a decentering of the “I”.