Heisenberg, Medalla & the Art of Indeterminacy

David Medalla, Cloud Canyons, 2017. Lito and Kim Camacho Collection

In the mid 1960s artist David Medalla wrote a fan letter to Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist. Heisenberg returned the favor in a letter praising Medalla's Cloud Canyons, the series of kinetic sculptures for which the artist is best known. Seeking to give "tangible form to invisible forces," Medalla created motor-powered sculptures in which a long-lasting detergent foam spurts from phallic tubes. Cloud Canyons' ever-changing, impermanent, and fundamentally random foam inverts the expectations of sculpture as solid, purposeful, and eternal. Heisenberg must have appreciated the analogy to the new physics in which atoms are wave-like processes subject to chance and indeterminacy. 

Now at the Hammer Museum, "David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos," is something of a revelation. Born in Manila, David Medalla (1938-2020) was a prodigy who began painting at age 5. As a teen, he translated Hamlet into Tagalog, and he did anthropological studies of tribal peoples in remote parts of the Philippines. His itinerant art career spanned the globe, with extended stays in London and New York. He was always known as a man who knew everyone, a hub in the art world's social network. It was Medalla who introduced Yoko Ono to John Lennon, arguably triggering the break-up of the Beatles.

Though Medalla was deeply engaged with the art of museums, he worked outside the gallery-museum ecosystem. (The Hammer show, his first American retrospective, is far larger than any exhibition he had in his lifetime.) Medalla's multimedia practice was focused on time, entropy, and the homoerotic. The majority of the works at the Hammer are small, diaristic drawings, clippings, photos, and agitprop, documenting Medalla, his lovers, his politics, and his obsessions. 

"David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos" continues a string of Hammer exhibitions that spotlight under-recognized 20th-century artists who seem suddenly of the moment. It runs through Sep. 15, 2024, and will travel to the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.

David Medalla, Mohole Flower, 1964-72

Only a geology nerd could conceive Mohole Flower, a tribute to the ill-fated Project Mohole, a 1960s voyage into the inner space of the earth's mantle. The "petals" rise as the light pulses on.

David Medalla, Sand Machine, 1963

The Sand Machine, also called Lament, was "the death of metal, stone, all the material of the past," said Medalla. "I also see the sand machine as a metaphor for the future."

David Medalla, The Raven, 2013

David Medalla, New York Footprints No. 1, 1989-91

David Medalla, A Prophecy, 1989, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London