Description
In 1964, the Filipino artist David Medalla showed his kinetic sculptures Cloud Canyons: Bubble Machines at Signals, the art gallery that he ran with Paul Keeler. These artworks were constructed out of wooden box-like structures of various heights that contained electrical pumps that drew bubbles out of containers of water and detergent at their base. These bubbles would then rise through the interiors of the wooden boxes and pour out of holes at the top. The machines were produced with the aim of creating a continuously growing and changing kind of sculpture. Numerous interpretations of these artworks were offered by contemporary critics, but this paper builds on two specific insights. First, Medalla published photographs of Cloud Canyons alongside a quotation from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s A Cloud In Trousers, which reads “If you like I shall grow irreproachably gentle, not a man, but a cloud in trousers…” and implies a transformative relationship to masculinity. Second, Cloud Canyons recalled, in their forms and materials, top-loading washing machines.As a result, this paper traces how the Cloud Canyons works interrogate the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, and washing machines – through discussions and anxieties in the 1960s about the end of empire, homosexuality, domestic work, laundry detergent, and the simultaneously useful and threatening qualities of foam. It explores how Medalla’s bubble sculptures would have evoked the both transformative and destructive possibilities of new domestic technologies and their supporting materials for gender roles in Britain during a period when the status and position of both homosexuals and Commonwealth migrants within the nation were being reformulated. At the same time, it demonstrates that Medalla’s use of bubbles was directly connected to people in the Philippines known as ‘bakla’ – a term not comfortably aligned with either ‘gay’ or ‘transgender’ that broadly encompasses people assigned male at birth and who go on to embrace effeminacy and cross-dressing. As a result, this paper explores how Cloud Canyons: Bubble Machines use laundry detergent to offer expansive and transnational possibilities of gender and sexuality, between Britain and the Philippines.
| Period | 2 Jun 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Everyday Rituals In The British Empire And After, 1880-1980 |
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Nottingham, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |