|
By Jun Terra
Exploding Galaxies, The Art of David Medalla, a
monograph written by Guy Brett, the distinguished English art
historian was launched by Mark Fisher, M.P., Shadow Minister for the
Arts, in one of the function rooms at the House of Commons, on
Tuesday, December 5, 1995 at 10 a.m. before an invited corps of
journalists, art critics, teachers and art historians.
On the same day, at 6pm, another launch was held
for the general public at the Atrium Bookshop, on Cork Street,
London W1.
Guy Brett, former art critic of The London
Times, is known for his pioneering book on kinetic art, published in
the late sixties and his later books on the Brazilian artists,
Camargo and Helio Oiticica. Since leaving the Times, he has been a
roving international arts exhibition curator and an enthusiastic
promoter of some of the most innovative artists of our time
including Lygia Clark and David Medalla.
David Medalla was born in Manila in 1942.
Celebrated as a boy genius, he exhibited his paintings as a child
alongside the works of artists like Jose Joya, Nena Saguil, Hernando
Ocampo and Fernando Zobel (who would later champion the modernist
Spanish painters and set up a museum for them in one of the casas
colgadas or hanging houses in the city of Cuenca) in Lyd
Arguilla’s now legendary Philippine Art Gallery, the home of
modern art in Manila in the 1950s. Even then, Medalla already showed
a flair for experimentation. In his paintings, he incorporated sand,
eggshells and other mundane materials to increase their correlation
with and resonance in the real world.
The American poet Mark Doren heard of him and
together with the president of Columbia University in New York, John
Jonas, invited him to become a student at the university. There at
the age of 12, Medalla was the youngest student of Greek philosophy
under the tutelage of Professor Moses Hadas. It was also there
forged a close friendship with two brilliant students who would
become great actors and film icons: James Dean and Anthony Perkins.
Since the mid-60s, he has been based mainly in London, with
extensive sojourns in continental Europe, North, Central and South
America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Australasia. In the
last five years, he has been dividing his time between London and
New York, where he has been twice given the prestigious Artist of
the City of New York Award.
During the sixties, together with Paul Keeler,
he ran the legendary art gallery named Signals on Wignore Street. It
was the biggest venue in London for avant-garde and experimental
art. Apart from exhibiting works of established European artists
such as Naum Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, Tinguely, Yves Klein, etc, Signals
introduced to London some of the most exciting experimental artists
in the West, who, even then, were already establishing themselves as
major artists of the 20th century. Among them were: Takis Vasilakis,
Lygia Clark, Jesus Rafael Soto, Gerhard Von Graevnitz, Li Yuan Chia,
Mira Schendel, Otero, Kenneth and Mary Martin, etc.
Medalla also edited the bulletin of the gallery
aptly named, Signals, which immediately became a forum not only for
artistic but also for political, social and scientific ideas that
animated the era. The list of those who published works in Signals
includes some of the most revered names in the 20th century: the
poet, Pablo Neruda; the physicist JD Bernal whose name is identified
with crystallography and holograms; the scientist-philosopher,
Werner Heisenberg, the creator of the uncertainty theory in physics,
Gaston Bachelard. The American thinker Lewis Mumford, published his
epochal speech at the American Academy of Sciences condemning the
Vietnam war in the pages of Signals.
The art of David Medalla is diverse and always
evolving in form and in several directions that critics find him
difficult to pin down. In the 60s, he was famous for his kinetic
machines which included his mud machines and rice machines. But the
most famous work of this period is his bubble machine. It is
considered by many art historians and his artistic peers, and
predecessors as one of the most innovative works of our time and a
landmark in the history of art. The German artist, Gustav Metzger, a
pioneer of auto-destructive art, said of the bubble machine, “the
foam kinetics stand at the peak of the development that started at
the end of the last century, Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, Brancusi, Arp,
Calder and others produced theories that lead to Medalla.”
When the bubble machine was first exhibited at
Signals, its significance was immediately recognized by the the
artistic and scientific community. The father of modern art, Marcel
Duchamp made a multiple in tribute to the bubble machine and Medalla.
It was a silver medal erupting with bubble-like forms, which he
playfully called Medallic Objects. Werner Heisenberg sent a letter
to Medalla, praising his demonstration of the poetic interactions
between human-made technology and natural phenomena. JD Bernal
returned again and again to Signals to view the work.
In recent years, Medalla has pioneered several
directions in participation and performance art and has embarked on
a multitude of diverse but linked enquiries, forms, formats and
artistic activities that express a deeply coherent vision of the
world. Lavishly illustrated with color and black and white
photographs, Guy Brett’s monograph has done an excellent job in
clarifying the bewildering complexities of the art of David Medalla.
In her introduction to Brett’s monograph on
Medalla, the eminent American art historian, Dore Ashton, wrote:
“When I think of David Medalla, I think of him as one of the
authentic luftmenschen I have known. He comes with the wind, his
spirit is airborne, but every once in a while he alights like a
mythical bird, flutters about doing serious reconnaisance, then
departs, leaving a feather or two . . . a man of surpassing
imagination. Brett rightly sees Medalla as a bellwether—an
inexhaustible imaginative artist whose clamorous existence has made
its mark . . . Medalla’s oeuvre in various periods has
corresponded to significant way-stations on the well-travelled road
of 20th-century vanguard art.”
Throughout his career as an artist, Medalla has
maintained independence from the commercial, bureaucratic and
chauvinistic pressures of the art world, while being an active,
international creative force, encouraging other artists, creating
groups and exhibition spaces in the most unusual places, while
evolving his own art which strives towards the emergence of a new
kind of trans-national, transformative and polymorphic culture.
juntrr@yahoo.co.uk
|
