“Lygia Clark at Signals London, 27th May to 3rd July” is a special edition of Newsbulletin of Signals London devoted to Lygia Clark (1920−1988) on the occasion of the Brazilian artist’s first solo exhibition in England, which was organized by Paul Keeler at his short-lived experimental gallery. This issue of the Newsbulletin includes several important texts written by the artist in which she describes her series Bichos (translated in the leaflet as “Animals”) and Trepantes (translated as “Going”). Clark thought of her Bichos as organic constructions that were revitalized by an active interaction between the viewer and the object itself. Like her countless metal bugs, her Trepantes rely on the immediate connection between the active viewer and the work, in which the work becomes a projection of the viewer’s body. In both series, Clark writes, the idea is the artist’s, but the viewer provides its expression, so that the work depends on the fusion of the two. “The Significance of Lygia Clark,” an article written by the Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900−1981), complements Clark’s statements, placing her in the tradition of active space and viewer participation that was first suggested by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner in their Manifiesto Constructivo (Constructivist Manifesto) written in 1922. Pedrosa nonetheless acknowledges that (unlike the European precedent) what is truly revolutionary about Clark’s spatial constructions is that they no longer depend on the viewer’s movement around them. On the contrary, her works awaken the viewer’s immediate participation in them, since her objective was to construct a new space where the viewer is projected into the work. The result is a force field for organic and reflexive expression; what is still involved is a very special kind of energy, which is Clark’s specialty.           

Newsbulletin of Signals London, the journal published by Signals London, featured experimental writing and progressive ideas about architecture, art, and modern life. The editor was the artist David Medalla (born 1942), who was born in Manila but lived in London. In the editorial for this special edition, Medalla published an excerpt from “GO TO WORK ON A POEM” or “999 instructions on reading david medalla’s found-poem for takis,” which Signals London sought to publish in 1966. Medalla’s poem is a kindred spirit to Kinetic art because, like Clark’s work, it requires the reader’s manipulation to understand its myriad meanings. The special edition of Newsbulletin of Signals London includes poems by Walmir Ayala, Hugo Williams, and Nicholas Snowden Willey, a simplified bibliography, Clark’s curriculum, and quotes by Sérgio Camargo, Henri Deligny, Dore Ashton, and others. The issue includes texts that are unrelated to one another, such as “Disarmament and the Struggle Against Underdevelopment” by Josué de Castro, a former chairman of the board of the FAO (the UNESCO’s Food and Agriculture Organization), and the fifth chapter of the newspaper column “John Newell on Science” about the beginning of life. Every page of this special edition is preserved intact as rare reproductions of some of Clark’s barely known smaller series are interspersed throughout the texts, including Construcciones con Cajitas de Fósforos (Constructions with Match Boxes) from 1964.

Signals London played an important role in defining London as the center for experimental art during the 1960s. Together with other alternative spaces such as Gallery One, New Vision Centre, and Indica, Signals exhibited works of art that emphasized movement and viewer participation and kept its distance from Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, which were the dominant movements at the time. The space appeared in 1964 in association with the Centre for Advanced Creative Study that was founded by the gallery’s director, Paul Keeler, the London-based art critic Guy Brett, and the artists Medalla, Gustav Metzger (German, born 1926), and Marcello Salvadori (Italian, 1928−2002). The group and the gallery promoted themselves as Signals London when they moved to a four-story building in downtown London. During its two-year life span, the gallery developed a network of international experimental artists such as Clark, Sérgio Camargo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Mira Schendel, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero, Hélio Oiticica, and the Greek artist Vassilakis Takis (born 1925), from whose tension sculptures Signals took its name.