M29 David Medalla

MMMMMMM … Manifesto (a fragment) (1965)

In 1964 the Centre for Advanced Creative Study was founded in London by the avant-garde artists David Medalla (b. 1942), Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) and Marcello Salvadori (1928–2002), the art critics Christopher Walker and Guy Brett, and the curator Paul Keeler. Their interest lay in the crossovers between art and science, and they opened a space called Signals/London in which to showcase their experimental work, which had a special focus on kinetic art. They also produced the influential international journal Signals Newsbulletin, edited by Medalla, which featured critical essays, poetry, scientific studies and experimental art.

Medalla’s manifesto was published in the eighth issue of Signals, in June 1965, its witty utopianism revealing that there was a place for the imagination in both art and science. The same issue also featured scathing damnations of the war in Vietnam by the leading American thinkers Lewis Mumford and Robert Lowell. The magazine closed down soon after, yet the prescient ideas the Signals artists promoted in art and science, including Metzger’s auto-destructive art using corrosive and unstable materials, and Medalla’s participatory experiments in which the audience became part of the creative process, have had a huge impact on the trajectory of contemporary art, with Metzger and Medalla considered to be cultural pioneers in the post-modern age.

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MMMMMMM …
Manifesto
(a fragment)

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Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?

I dream of the day when I shall create sculptures that breathe, perspire, cough, laugh, yawn, smirk, wink, pant, dance, walk, crawl, … and move among people as shadows move among people … Sculptures that will retain a shadow’s secret dimensions without a shadow’s obsequious behaviour … Sculptures without hope, with waking and sleeping hours … Sculptures that, on certain seasons, will migrate en masse to the North Pole. Sculptures with a mirror’s translucency minus the memory of a mirror!

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Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?

I dream of the day when I shall go to the centre of the earth and in the earth’s core place a flower-sculpture … Not a lotus, nor a rose, nor a flower of metal, … nor yet a flower of ice and fire … But a mohole-flower, its petals curled like the crest of a tidal wave approaching the shore …

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Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?

I dream of a day when, from the capitals of the world, London Paris New York Madrid Rome, I shall release missile-sculptures … to fly – at nine times the speed of sound … to fall – slim as a stork on a square in Peking … bent, crushed – like a soldier’s boot after an explosion – on an airport in Ecuador … in splinters – on the fields of Omaha … A few – to cross inter-stellar space … accumulating, as they wing along, asteroids, meteorites, magnetic fields, interstellar germs … of a new life … on their way from our galaxy to the Spiral Nebula … Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

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David Medalla

London, 1965