bond between the two. Clark said of her pieces, "What's important is the act of doing in the present; the artist is dissolved into the world." Stylistic periods During the early part of Clark's career, she focused on creating small monochromatic paintings which were done in black, gray, and white. During the 1960s, her work became more conceptual and she used soft objects that could be manipulated by the art spectator. Clark later moved on to co-found the Neo-Concrete movement, which was joined by fellow Brazilian Hélio Oiticica. In the late 1950s, Clark and some of her contemporaries broke away from the Concrete group to start the Neo-Concrete movement. They published their manifesto in 1959. Hélio Oiticica would soon join the group in the next year. The Neo-Concretists believed that art was a matter of the subject's experience in real time and space, but unlike the Minimalists in the U.S. who had some similar interests, Clark and the Neo-Concretists equated 'real space' with liveliness and the organic. In Clark’s writings, she articulates that an artwork should not be considered "a ‘machine’ nor an ‘object,’ but rather, an almost-body" which can only be made whole through viewer participation. Clark and Oiticica fused modern European geometric abstraction art with a Brazilian cultural flavor. The Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement borrowed their artistic ideas from Max Bill who was the director of the Ulm School of Design in Germany during the early 1950s. The Neo-Concretists were interested in how art could be used to "express complex human realities". They soon began making artworks the spectator could interact with physically, like Clark's Bichos (Critters), 1960–63, which are ingenious arrangements of hinged metal plates that can fold flat, or be unfolded into three dimensions and manipulated into many different configurations. Interacting with these works the spectator was meant to become more aware of his or her physical body and metaphysical existence. Viewer participation was essential for the artwork to be complete (in fact, Clark and Oiticica referred to the audience as "participants" rather than viewers. Clark described the exchange between viewer and Bicho as a dialogue between two living organisms. After the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état and the military dictatorship that took power in the fallout, a counterculture movement grew in response to the government's increasing scrutiny on the public. At this point in time, Institutional Act Number Five was enacted and artists were forced into exile