Away from the monumentalization of art. Women artists in Brazil and Italy

The paper focuses the work of three artists, Lygia Clark (1920-1988) from Brazil, Maria Lai (1919-2013) and Ketty La Rocca (1938-1976) from Italy, using the concept of “zeroing the artist” . They are women artists in very different time-space environments and contexts such as the Brazilian one of Neo-concretism for Clark (within a collective and collaborative environment) and the relatively 'solitary' Italian art environment for Lai and La Rocca. Nevertheless they developed artistic practices in which the artist's authorial role lost its centrality: the art work becomes an organic line and eye-body for Lygia Clark, an asemantic writing in the looms and woven books of Maria Lai, and finally the emptying of images for Ketty La Rocca. Away from the monumentalization of art as well as from abstraction and modernism, for Clark and Lai the works are 'living organisms', almost transitional objects to create / reiterate social bonds, in an era - from the 60s to the 80s both in Italy and in Brazil – of rapid and often culturally depleting processes of social modernization. In just a few years, Ketty La Rocca's brief and intense artistic life has gone from visual poetry and actions/performances in which the silent language of gestures denounces the inauthenticity of consumer society to a definite form of corrosion and crumbling of images, suggesting a radical rewriting of social life itself.