The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, by Irene V. Small, has the ambition and potential to become a classic. Its starting point is the inflection forged by the work of Lygia Clark on the history of modernism, and its guiding thread is the discovery of the “organic line” in the mid-1950s. This line, which appears wherever two monochromatic planes juxtaposed on the same surface meet, transforms void into breath. Its discovery opened a whole realm of artistic possibilities, which Clark unfolded in her extensive experimentations. What this book explores are the countless reverberations of this organic line.

My commentary is divided into two parts. In the first part I analyze some of the book’s considerable virtues: its theoretical scope, its meticulous critical analyses, and its endeavor to rethink the history of modernism through an oeuvre from the periphery of Western capitalism. In the second part I problematize some of Small’s choices, which are symptomatic of certain biases in current-day academic studies: a particular type of cultural anachronism whereby issues external to the work discussed are projected onto its specific cultural and historical context.

The lengthy introduction to the book makes a decisive contribution to comparative studies between historically displaced modernisms. The organic line is what Small uses to guide her thinking about weak links and plagiotropic relations in modern and contemporary art histories. She does not endeavor simply to include Lygia Clark in the hegemonic history of modernism (which has already been done), but to reveal how Clark’s oeuvre and the articulations it suggests with other moments in modern art displace all forms of teleology and historical determinism. As Small explains, “I resist the tendency to chart a linear development that either culminates in or narrowly proceeds from Clark’s discovery in favor of fleshing out multiplicities that pertain to the organic line’s conditions of possibility and conceptual application. These are multiplicities that exceed the artist’s oeuvre and move backward and forward in time” (72).

Plagiotropic relations—a term borrowed from concrete poet Haroldo de Campos’s investigations into translation and from studies of botany—displace the anxiety of influence into a horizontal chain of artistic germinations spawned not through historical belonging but also through creative appropriation. The great merit of Small’s book is the critical density it lends to this plagiotropic movement. Nothing happens by chance, even if there are unexpected movements in which the critical and creative articulation of seemingly distant works results in their cross-fertilization, expanding how we understand the narratives of art history. Therefore, the organic line “allows us to conceptualize modernist art not as a Euclidean space marked by centers and peripheries, vertical traditions, and horizontal circumventions, but as a topological field of interactive, destabilizing tensions” (45).

Small also borrows mathematician René Thom’s concept of “catastrophe” to think about these horizontal fertilizations, in which an initially dysfunctional poetic gesture can produce “a radical and qualitative change in the system’s behavior” (49). This productive dysfunctionality is the reason why the organic dimension was so dear to Clark, yielding nondeterministic and qualitative leaps between cause and effect, creative gesture, and historical processes. In the relations spawned by the organic line, which both separates and composes, it “offers a paradigm of misalignment, rather than cohesion, that defamiliarizes the autonomy and self-evidence of subjects and works of art alike” (158).

In this respect, the proposed dialogue with the work of the Argentinian group Madi and the minimalist paintings of Frank Stella is fundamental. Certainly, they share the same interest in unfolding the articulations between geometric elements and external space and the dialogue between inside and outside of the picture plane. “Works penetrated by actual space are joined by articulated and multipanel paintings, moveable sculptures, irregularly shaped works in relief, canvases with both flat and built-up frames, even pieces that are little more than frames themselves” (107). However, Clark and Neo-Concrete artists in general explored their own quest for the subjective and expressive dimension of art beyond the “ultraformalist,” self-referential playoff between form and space. This was not about returning to the subject, but about searching for a fertilizing encounter among body, form, and space, transforming the spectator into an active coparticipant. This “experience–body” permeates all of Clark’s poetic language. According to Small, “Clark herself later noted that the conflation of the concrete and the geometric was a false affinity, one that could not fully account for her own appeal to the organic as a quality that involves entering or participating in that place, that space, of the picture” (172).

From here the organic line unfolds into new articulations: (i) with a feminine conception of creation, and (ii) with the “non-geometric” poetics of Roberto Burle-Marx and Jean Arp. Exploring the inversion highlighted by Clark between ovulation and fertilization—“in her process, she is fertilized and then ovulates” (63)—Small proposes an interesting displacement between discovery and invention, between a feminine way of unveiling and a masculine process of invention, of bringing and putting into sight. In a quote from Clark shortly before her death, we can see how this interpretative key works: “‘I, as a Woman—which must have been my weakness and my force—went more towards things that were no longer so visible, so touchable.” Building on this remark, Small continues: “An art history under the sign of the organic line attends to this conjunction of ‘weakness and force’” (345). As for the interaction with Arp and Burle-Marx, the connection between the nonmaking of the organic line and the autopoiesis of botanical life is brought forth. In words reminiscent of Clark, Arp explained in 1944 that “we want to produce like a plant produces fruit, and not reproduce” (172).

Now, we will enter the second part of this review. Throughout Small’s book, there is a noteworthy effort to bring Clark into current political and cultural debates. However, this often ends up forcing the organic line beyond what it can actually show. For example, bringing Clark into the debate concerning abstraction and raciality gives her a voice that, in my view, she does not have. While the discussion of race in the history of art is clearly pressing and pertinent, some of the artists and works that the book treats as political offshoots of the organic line seem arbitrary. For instance, I cannot see this discussion’s echoes in the interventions made by Frente 3 de Fevereiro in the streets and soccer stadiums of São Paulo. Instead, it seems to me that works by artists like Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro and Wagner Schwartz, with their open and subversive bodies, have more to do with this proliferous affiliation of Clark’s organic line.

The discussion in chapter two, which associates the organic line with John Cage’s musical silence, contains some original critical speculations but gains little from the inclusion of the racialized musical body in Julius Eastman’s performances. No doubt this discussion is of great interest to students of Cage, but it adds little, I feel, to considerations about Clark’s oeuvre. It might be worth pursuing some other alliances in the political ramifications of the organic line, such as the influence of care theory on the development of less normative and more experimental institutional practices, or the way in which critical and therapeutic issues reverberate in contemporary artistic processes that push back disciplinary boundaries and do not bow to the demands of the art market.

The long detour to discuss sexist and racist aspects in the work of architect Le Corbusier is another case in point. Given his influence on modern architecture, this discussion is clearly important. However, taken together with Clark’s work, a commentary on how the more fluid contours of Brazilian architecture deconstructed the orthodoxy of the Corbusian line would be more pertinent. This is certainly something that interfaces with the organic line. Indeed, Oscar Niemeyer’s sinuous ramps offer an original articulation between inside and outside, incorporating whoever enters and moves around the space into the architectural experience. The organic element and participation are thus put together in a very original way here.

Finally, bringing in a matter of personal interest, I am always surprised at how some of the best art critics and historians in the US tend to neglect Alexander Calder’s work. In her discussion of an exhibition at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Chile, Small focuses entirely on connections between Clark’s and Stella’s works. Yet besides them, as the photograph shows, there was a small mobile by Calder—so admired by the art critic Mario Pedrosa and so present on the Brazilian scene when the organic line emerged. There is, regrettably, not a single mention in the entire book of this artist, who gave life and movement to the line.

None of what I said above, to be clear, detracts from Small’s merit in dealing so meticulously and comprehensively with Lygia Clark’s organic line and its critical reverberations. To the contrary, the history of modern and contemporary art gains new and valuable interpretative insights, multiplying its geopolitical perspectives of analysis through some of the challenges, complications, and contentious issues that manifest themselves in Small’s study.