Signals

Title Signals
Location London
Publisher Centre for Advanced Creative Study; Signals Gallery
Periodicity Bi-monthly
ISSN N/A
URL Signals Worldcat
Published Since 1964-1966
Indexed Holdings 1964-1966
Tags

Accessed

The Library of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; The Library of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Periodical's Overview

“This is the first number of Signalz, the monthly news bulletin of the Centre for Advanced Creative Study. Signalz will contain news items on the activities of the Centre, documentation and critical studies on the Centre's artists, as well as original writings by the artists themselves. From time to time Signalz shall also publish pamphlets and books of experimental prose and poetry.

We hope to expand and increase our pages in the future: to include essays by architects, art historians, scientists, technologists, economists, sociologists, and town planners. Signalz shall print book reviews, notices of important exhibitions in London and the provinces, as well as accounts of pioneering work in the dance, cinema, theatre and music. Signalz shall bring to the attention of the artist new developments in technology and science that might be of assistance in the formation of the artist's discipline, in the choice of his materials and the improvement of his technique. We hope to provide a forum for all those who believe passionately in the correlation of the arts and Art's Imaginative integration with technology, science, architecture and our entire environment.

We believe that such an integration can only be accomplished by most rigorous means: by the exercise of the highest academic standards, and when society gives to the artist its available materials, its support, and complete freedom in the pursuit of his (the artist's) art.

Selected Subject Headings

  • Alcoholics - England
  • Architecture - Brazil - 20th century
  • Art - 1960s
  • Australian poetry - 20th century
  • Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona
  • French language - punctuation
  • Geomagnetism
  • Kinetic art
  • Laser beams
  • London - intellectual life - 1960s
  • Magnetism - early works to 1800
  • Manifestoes
  • Nepal - description and travel
  • Outer space - poetry
  • Robots in art
  • Sundials
  • Thought and thinking
  • Visual poetry, English
  • Waica indians - pictorial works

Notes

A mid-60s publication, Signals was published by the Centre for Advanced Creative Study, based in London and directed by David Keeler. The bulletin was edited by the artist David Medalla.

Using a newspaper format, the bulletins were a dense amalgam of disparate contents, but in most cases they revolved around the artist or exhibition that the Signals Gallery was hosting at the moment of its publishing; in-depth articles, original, reprinted or translated from an assortment of international sources, were accompanied with miscellaneous articles on literature, short stories, and poems; special attention was given to science developments, and their imbrications with art; therefore the emphasis on kinetic art and artists associated with this artistic development.

Signals is also remarkable in its internationalism, as most of the artists that were presented in the gallery were either from South America (Jesús Rafael Soto, Lygia Clark, Sérgio de Camargo, Carlos Cruz-Díez) or from Southern European countries (Takis, Marcello Salvadori, Eduardo Chillida), bringing to the fore other modernities beyond the Anglo or French paradigms, no matter if most of these artist were temporarily living either in Paris or London; what’s of note here is that attention was given to them not as ‘exotic’ enactors of those paradigms as earlier figures were presented in previous historical instances; rather, these artists were selected as initiators of new modes of art production, perception, and thought. For example, Lygia Clark had her first exhibition in England at Signals Gallery, and the April-May 1965 bulletin was a monographic dedicated to her work. A remarkable event, as it would take 30 years for Clark’s oeuvre to be reconsidered and understood in all its complexity by the same cultural infrastructure that was not able to follow up on Signals Gallery's daring program.

It appears that the decisive role that the artist David Medalla had as an editor of the bulletin and co-founder of the gallery cannot be underestimated; nor should the presence of Guy Brett be neglected as an early advocate of kinetic art, and specially of the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticia, years before these artists’ attempts at meshing art and existence with all its radical implications and resonances could be assimilated by the canon archons. And all of this without the well-meaning tropicalistic exoticisms and erasures, so in vogue during the 2000s.

As a testament to its significance and seminal importance, London’s Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) appropriately published in 1995 a crisp facsimile box with all the bulletins of Signals.

Or Signalz, as the first issue was named.

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