Angel with a Gun: Homage to Guy Brett
Jonathan Miles, ART.ZIP
June 2024
Guy Brett always appeared to defy art world fashion. He was involved with the short-lived Signals Gallery (1964-1966) and with this the newsletter publication. This enterprise drew together many artists from Latin America, Asia and Europe and so it became subject to the different influences of these continents. It should be described as a project as much as a Gallery because not only was it expressive of the cross pollination of this and that aesthetic wind, but also a vision of a meeting points of the worlds of science, technology, philosophy, and poetry which was a feature of the approach articulated with the publication. Signals was substantially associated with the advent of a constellation related to Kinetic Art, but it also gave rise to Participation Art and Auto-Destructive Art. As much as this had roots within the mainstream of Modernist art, it was also connected to a more amorphous counter cultural manifestation and forms of politics that resisted different forms of dictatorship. It was both worldly and an experiment in reverie. Intellectually figures such as Gaston Bachelard, Gregory Bateson, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, Indian Tantrism, Zen, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Reich were all thrown into a heady mix that defined and extended the location of the various debates which was post-Existential and pre-Situationist, but of its time and certainly radical. Over a period of subsequent duration Signals Gallery, as an artworld event, has attracted serious and sustained commentary. Certainly, several of the main figures exhibited here have been re-evaluated in the light of mainstream developments such as Relational Aesthetics, most notably Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Helio Oiticica. […]