1964 / Mixed media / Artist: David Medalla

David Medalla (b. 1938) arrived in England in 1960. He edited Signals Newsbulletin, and with Paul Keeler co-directed Signals Gallery in London from 1964 to 1966. Both journal and gallery were important vehicles for the international avant-garde, especially South American artists like Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Page one of Signals Newsbulletin 1 (Aug 1964) served as a preview for their concerns. Medalla quoted articles by Benjamin Farrington on the evolution of technology and the Machine Age, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy on the inner life of objects and that man and not the market should be the reason for artistic production, Victor Vasarely and Piet Mondrian on the need for artists to work with other disciplines to create a better world, and Marcello Salvadori, Mies van der Rohe, and Yves Klein on the transformation of unconventional material to reveal new analogies between art and perception.

The September 1964 issue of Signals Newsbulletin included a two-page spread on Medalla’s bubble machines. His efforts to perfect Cloud Canyons, as he later called these and other forms of bubble machines, was a scientific challenge that involved more than a year’s worth of work. Comprised of boxes with chemical liquid that produced foam in response to a low electric current, the bubbles expanded into columns and slowly spread outside the structures. For Medalla, these bubbles presented a novel concept: that sculpture could at once be monumental and fleeting, something and nothing. Cloud Canyons illustrated the principle of aleatory growth. The expanding and continuously changing bubbles showed that sculpture need not be stable to create mass and form, and that forms produced by motorized kinetic art need not be rooted in rote movement. He invented a new kind of sculpture that continuously grew and expanded by spontaneously renewing itself. German auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger lauded these pioneering ideas behind Cloud Canyons as pathbreaking. Writing on Medalla’s seminal position in the art world in an essay for Signals 1, Metzger (1964, 8) pointed to how random activity demonstrated through the transformation of the artist’s material produced exemplary aesthetic content.

In his Mmmmmmm Manifesto of the following year, Medalla promised to create sculptures that would “breathe, perspire, cough, laugh, yawn, smile, wink, pant, dance, walk, crawl … and move among people …” This imaginative statement turned out to be prophetic. After his playful bubble, sand, and mud kinetic projects, he began using people’s bodies and movement and increasingly involved spectators. In what would later be called Participation Art, Medalla contributed to bridging the intellectual gap between viewer and artwork.