Worldling

That Gego made sculptures consisting of lines that are themselves the archive of movement is reminiscent of Henri Michaux’s poem which begins “In my spare time I teach a statue to walk.” Gego’s work is also committed to teaching a statue to walk, to do the impossible, to move the unmovable. Gego’s sculptures perform at the crossing of stillness and frenzy, clarity and chaos, settlement and migration. To think it differently, they are an adamant commitment to the ground of the figure itself, what Paul Carter suggests is the lining of lines. Lourdes Blanco writes that Reticularèa has a “virtual volume as rendered by line.” With the line, the simple, often dimensionless ideal of “the shortest distance between point A and point B” is challenged by allowing for a truly multiple account of how lines form space through perception. Gego not only subverts the assumption that lines will simplify the logic, she enriches the line, suggesting a movement that is not obvious until given relational reality, given form.

Gego’s lifelong commitment to worlding through line is surely intwined in the course her life took. This can best be adduced through her own words, where she claims her practice as “an autobiography of a line.” To take this literally, what Gego is suggesting is a line (graphy) within which the life (bio) of oneself (auto) is drawn, or vice versa that one’s life is the drawing of lines in space and time. Life lived on lines and lines emanating from life. For Gego, the line is always this double movement; it is migratory. It is the body (re)presented as pure movement and connection, and at the same time it is that which can remind the body perceiving it to unknowingly realize their own enmeshment in that vital movement. In this way, her work asks a remarkable question: how can we think the figure of the migrant as the ground just as the line itself has come to be understood as its own ground?