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Aldo Tambellini, c. 1962. Photo by Don Snyder Boris Lurie Art Foundation Chelsea Art Museum 2011 Boris Lurie Art Foundation 50 Central Park West New York, NY 10023 212.595.0161 [email protected] www.borislurieartfoundation.org © Boris Lurie Art Foundation All rights reserved Essays © the authors Images © Aldo Tambellini, and AP Photography, Walter Dent, Giro Studios, Gerard Malanga, Don Snyder, and used by permission. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. The Boris Lurie Art Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to art education, the encouragement and support of politically and socially engaged art, especially work that has been neglected by the art mainstream on account of its radical content, and to the propagation of knowledge of the art of Boris Lurie himself. It was with a generous gift from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation that much of the art in the present exhibition was salvaged, having been long believed lost, and restored. We wish to extend our special thanks to Gertrude Stein, Jean Zimmerman, Ron Morosan, Midori Yamamura, Kweighbaye Kotee, Christoph Draeger, Ben Morea, Randal Mixon, Henry Grimes, Michael Clapis, Pro Helvetia and Jelena Delic, Ishmael Reed, Michaeleen Maher, Juan Puntes and the White Box Gallery, Brian Burkins at Burkins and Foley Storage in Albany, NY, Bob Fitzgerlad and the Staff at Felton Street Studios in Waltham, Dr. Dorothea Keeser, Joe Ruffin, Orin Buck, and Nick Angelo Edited by John Wronoski, Heide Hatry, Chris Shultz, Anna Salamone & Joseph P. Ketner II Designed by Chris Shultz and Laura Hatry ISBN 978-1-4507-9609-5 CONTENTS Foreword 9 John Wronoski Total Transmission 13 Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti Aldo Tambellini’s Voyage into the Illuminating Darkness 21 Marek Bartelik Aldo Tambellini’s Art of the Now, a Futurological Approach 25 Lisa Paul Streitfeld Electromedia 37 Joseph P. Ketner II An Autobiography 51 Aldo Tambellini Curriculum Vitae 85 Catalogue 95 Aldo Tambellini Aldo Tambellini in his studio, c. 1962. Photo by Don Snyder 8 Black Zero Foreword He naively imagined a world in which art was not a commodity John Wronoski to be traded but the common spiritual inheritance of the race, to be enjoyed for itself, accessible to all, there to ennoble everyone. Aldo Tambellini’s early work burns with a furious demand for He lived and worked among poor people and felt a special affinity something better of the world. It is a mirror to its violence, for African-Americans; he shared their thirst for freedom. His injustice, and indifference, in which beauty is reflected back at spirit had been annealed in fire, in the devastation of wartime its ruins; his anger and frustration are palpable in the burned and Europe, and he smoldered still. gouged surfaces of his humble materials. The strange post-war emotional amalgam of shell-shock, relief, and elation was lifting His work, even at its most abstract, has always been informed by by this time, and men, returning to their voices, could speak a powerful political awareness and resistance against injustice. again from their deeper being and experience with a freedom With the early underground art collective, Group Center, of that had long been thrall to false prosperity, a putative natural which he was a founder, he mounted art actions that would order founded on inequality, and values too long unexamined. anticipate both the social activism of the later sixties and the Voices of humane resistance were emerging throughout the guerilla art actions of subsequent avant-gardes. Group Center’s West, from Guy Debord to Malcolm X to Che Guevara to vision of a new art of global creative communities prefigures Noam Chomsky to Carolee Schneemann. Of course, the worm the integrative social concepts that animate much of the most was already in the apple, as it always had been, and such voices advanced and radical art of our own time. were slow to be heard; their like are still suppressed or ignored by the mainstream unless they should suddenly prove marketable. Although Tambellini’s reputation as a new media pioneer has It was in the space between resistance and fascination, or some grown impressively in recent years throughout the performance might say, innocence and cynicism (pace Nietzsche), that the and avant-garde film communities in America and abroad, dominant art movement of the day would establish itself, and with widespread acknowledgement of his early and important perhaps co-opt the co-opters. Its cool impresario, Andy Warhol, contributions to modes of art that had no name when he was might be seen, on the one hand, as a modern-day Karl Kraus creating paths among them, much of even his new media work (without the fulminating), holding up a mirror of infamy to his is infused with a profound sense of the painterly that developed society; on the other hand, it’s hard not to see his attitude toward during a lifetime of collateral work in two-dimensions. The the Imelda Marcoses and Ari Onassises as genuine adulation. present exhibition includes a broad sampling of his painting It’s the unresolvable ambivalence that keeps him interesting long and related work over a period of more than three decades, after most of his confrères have ceased to reach new eyes. covering the essential course of his long-standing and obsessive engagement with Black, which for him is, simply, the source Tambellini might have viewed being an artist as a job, but he and destination of everything; it is a spiritual and cosmic – certainly had no sense of art as Warholian commerce. In his and cosmogonic – principle akin to fire for Heraclitus. Over quaint view, the job was the work, not the selling of the product the decades of his work in black, Tambellini has evolved from (by which I by no means intend to impugn Warhol’s work ethic). the distressed, even pessimistic, observer of the destruction 9 Aldo Tambellini of the human and natural worlds to a philosopher looking to installation, and experimental space for artists in 1967 on the distant, and inner, space with equanimity, and even hope. His floor above the cinema, Tambellini’s gift to the art world of his Destruction Series of the early sixties places him alongside the day took on revolutionary proportions. early Yves Klein and the mature Alberto Burri, and certainly in a conceptual and tactical lineage with Lucio Fontana. His Tambellini’s own films, including the landmarkBlack Film Series, penetration of the pictorial plane and virtual attack upon it with which was among the first works to treat film as the venue for gouges, drill-bits and flame bespeak the fury of this witness of a total sensory experience, are justly regarded as masterworks of humanity at its worst against the habits and limits that cast it back the experimental or underground genre. He is generally credited ceaselessly into its brutal past. Astonishingly, in his later body of with having, along with Otto Piene, created the first work of art distressed-surface works (1989), he creates a sense of boundless for television (Black Gate Cologne, which aired in Germany in possibility and cosmic harmony, sub specie aeternitatis, using 1968). Tambellini was also part of WGBH’s The Medium is the more or less the same tactics, materials, and iconography as he Medium, which aired in Boston in 1969 and marked the first had in the earlier series, testimony to a long life devoted to the time in history that American artists took over the airwaves of struggle of understanding. television and broadcast art. When Piene became director of the renowned Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, he To some extent, Tambellini’s majestic paintings might invited Tambellini to become a fellow, and from 1978-1984, he actually be viewed as preparatory studies for the time-based would create works and events that seem, in retrospect, to have media and conceptual works he had already begun creating prefigured not only the orientation of the new media art of the in the early sixties. His film, performance, and new media last decades, but larger social trends, such as social networking work have inspired several generations of a new breed of and communications-based mass actions as well. artist, the “primitives of a new era,” as Tambellini has called them, including, early on, Timothy Leary, whose notion of a In his long career, he has worked alongside of and given a forum neurological art (and eventually, the “light show” that became to artists such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, so widespread throughout the psychedelic era) can be traced Hans Haacke, Ad Reinhardt, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, back to Tambellini’s light projections of the early/mid sixties, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Otto Piene, Carolee Schneemann, and Andy Warhol, whose own Exploding Plastic Inevitable is Jonas Mekas, Louise Bourgeois, Irene Rice Pereira, Stan Brakhage, more and more widely acknowledged to owe a significant debt Jack Smith, Cecil McBee (and other radical jazz artists), Ishmael to Tambellini’s Black Zero. As the founder and proprietor of Reed, Bob Downey, and Brian De Palma, but until recently he the Gate Theater at Tenth Street and 2nd Avenue (1966-1969), had not shown his two-dimensional work in almost 40 years. The the only cinema in NY (and possibly anywhere else) showing present exhibition represents the first truly large-scale, and the first continuous avant-garde film every day of the week, Tambellini ever museum show of his work in all its aspects. was among the guiding spirits of the most advanced garde in the American art of its day.