Poster for Aldo Tambellini, Black Zero (1965–68), 1965.

64 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00219

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment

NADJA MILLNER-LARSEN

Midway through a 2012 reperformance of the expanded cinema event Black Zero (1965–1968)—a collage of jazz improvisation, light projection, poetry reading, dance performance, and televisual noise—the phrases of Calvin C. Hernton’s poem “Jitterbugging in the Streets” reached a crescendo: 1 TERROR is in Harlem A FEAR so constant Black men crawl the pavement as if they were snakes, and snakes turn to sticks that beat the heads of those who try to stand up— A Genocide so blatant Every third child will do the junky-nod in the whore-scented night before semen leaps from his loins— And Fourth of July comes with the blasting bullet in the belly of a teenager Against which no Holyman, no Christian housewife In Edsel automobile Will cry out this year Jitterbugging in the streets. 2 Hernton’s rendering of the 1964 Harlem uprising, originally published as part of the New Jazz Poets record, is gradually engulfed by a bombastic soundscape dominated by an archival recording of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Apollo 8 launch interspersed with video static and the familiar drone of a vacuum cleaner. Surrounded by black walls spattered with

Grey Room 67, Spring 2017, pp. 64–99. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 slides of slow-rotating abstract spheres whose contours melt into gaseous implo - sions, viewers are stimulated by flashing television monitors, black-and-white projections from hand-painted celluloid, and video images of black children pro - jected onto a glacially expanding black balloon. Hernton’s words mark the event of American independence as one underwritten by racialized acts of violence reverberating in the present of the late 1960s. At the center of Black Zero ’s mise- en-scène , Hernton’s reading of the poem underscores the work’s attempt to expand the meaning of blackness through a surplus-aesthetic of multimedia bombard - ment. Here, the subject of black takes on numerous connotations: black men, Black Power, black space, black poet, black bloc, black music, black clothing, black flag, black film stock, the black box, the black monochrome. Black is presented as at once everything and nothing: the site of racism, the consolidation of the imago, the threshold of transcendence, the sign of anarchy, the limit-case of modernist paint - ing, the empty void of the black box theater. Black Zero was produced collaboratively by the artist Aldo Tambellini and his partner Elsa Tambellini, members of the anarchist anti-art group Black Mask, numerous jazz musicians, including Bill Dixon and Calo Scott, and poets associ - ated with the Umbra group of the Lower East Side, an early progenitor of the Black Arts Movement. 3 The work represents the culmination of a series of performances begun in 1965, all variations on the theme “black.” 4 These works deployed blackness—as a chromatic resonance, a hue, a skin color, and an idea —in order to address the rise of Black Liberation within a multisensorial “environment.” In what follows, I discuss Black Zero ’s attempt to formalize an alternative to the prob - lem, raised by black activism, of being positioned by representational thinking. I show how this monochromatic abstraction of abundance also responded to the new iconicity of black militancy facilitated by the televisual presence of Black Power. 5 Against the modernist fantasy of black as a noncolor liberated from signification, the electromedia environment dramatized the ways in which the politics of Black Liberation and the rise of the Black Arts Movement intervened in formalist uses of the color black in 1960s art practices—to multiple and contra - dictory ends. Following Anne Anlin Cheng’s important move “away from the vis - ibility of race” and toward an account of “its visuality,” I suggest that the “problem” of racial difference structured Black Zero’s deployment of expanded cinema. 6 Interrogating the complicated valences between the surfaces of the skin and the painted canvas, the black box, and Black Power, the expanded cinema environment dramatized the very border of art and life through its treatment of race as itself a new technology of vision. 7

66 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 The intensity of black’s mobilization as metaphor was much in the air at the time, largely due to the convergence of the radicalization of Black Liberation and the expansion of new technologies. 8 This was a convergence that even appeared in the art press of the time. The logic behind Black Zero ’s fixation on the subject of black is demonstrated in Tambellini’s appearance in an issue of Arts/Canada magazine.

The Monochrome Surrounded: Blackness and the Work of Art around 1967 9 In August 1967, seven men, three in Toronto and four in Manhattan, spoke to one another through the medium of a telephone loop about the concept of black . At the behest of the arts magazine Arts/Canada , these seven men—artists, musicians, and critics—spoke to one another through microphones, receivers, and earpieces pro - vided by the Bell Telephone Company and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The tapes recorded during this “simultaneous conversation” served as the raw material for a publication about black, editorialized as a “spatial concept, symbol, paint quality . . . as stasis, negation, nothingness . . . change, imperma - nence and potentiality” alongside the “the social-political implications of black.” 10 The participants included a white sociologist, a white architect, three white visual artists, a white musician, and a black musician. Each was presumably chosen for a unique ability to diagnose the question of blackness. Architect and critic Harvey Cowan’s interest in the use of black in built urban environments provided a design perspective. Structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow, musician Stu Broomer, and Tambellini had all previously worked with the aesthetic properties of light and darkness in their kinetic experimentations. Cecil Taylor was integral to the “new jazz” scene of the black avant-garde. And sociologist Arnold Rockman spoke from a behavioral-science perspective. Ad Reinhardt rounded out the bill as a representative of the black monochrome. 11 Most of the commentaries ranged from the universalist (black as transcendent) to the utterly banal (black as one half of the yin/yang). Fred Moten describes the conflictual encounter between Taylor and Reinhardt at the center of this dialogue as one that explicitly placed “the problem of blackness . . . in relation to the work of art.” 12 The particularities of Reinhardt’s aesthetic formalism (exemplified in his series of “black” paintings, 1960–1967) informed his position that the criticality of black depended on its excision from any social referent. Meanwhile, Taylor’s position as a member of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement was articulated as thoroughly conditioned by the experience of black social life. But the deep fissure between these two positions was mediated by Tambellini (the primary author of

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Black Zero ), whose enthusiastic interjections echoed the techno-utopian claims of the broader American expanded cinema movement. Posthumously dedicated to Reinhardt, whose tragic death occurred only a few weeks after the recording of the dialogue, Arts/Canada ’s “Black” issue placed Reinhardt’s opinions on the relationship between blackness and aesthetics at the center of its inquiry. The artist began the conversation by jettisoning the symbol - ism of black: “As an artist and painter I would eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a colour but as a non-colour and as the absence of colour.” 13 These terms of engagement are reminiscent of those taken up by Theodor Adorno, who, in his Aesthetic Theory , proposes “black art” to be a form of “radical art” for its ability to resist the commodifying and instrumentalizing capacities of the culture industry. Though in Adorno’s dialectics black is less colorless than it is anti-affirmative—for aesthetic form always “harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance” as “sedimented content”— black is still “an ideal,” because it stands in opposi - tion to the mimetic, identifiable, and ideologically circumscribed, thus negating the tyranny of signifi - cation by deferring any “easy” meanings. 14 Variously adapted in the aesthetic strategies of twentieth- century modernism, this ideal was formalized in the square black monochromes Reinhardt had hung a few months earlier for his self-titled 1966–1967 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. 15 Reinhardt some - times referred to these works as “ultimate paintings,” for they were conceived as pushing abstraction to its formal and chromatic limits. 16 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Reinhardt went to great lengths to expunge all associations from the surface of the canvas—employing turpentine washes to drain the pigment of all gloss and overlaying the canvas with numerous layers of blacks, greys, and blues to create a composite surface. His preference for a matte black

68 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 is disclosed later in the Arts/Canada dialogue. For Reinhardt, glossy black has “an objectionable quality” because that which it reflects—the social—disallows the purity of absorption at the scene of the artwork. 17 In support of his initiating statement, Reinhardt presented his interlocutors with a detailed list of factors that would have to be excised from the meaning of blackness for the dialogue to get under way: “the use of black all the way through the Bible, . . . colour caste, . . . the black hell void, . . . the blackness of darkness that is involved with . . . the maternal, the hidden, guilt, origin, redemption, faith, truth, time.” Black, Reinhardt permits, “can symbolize all those.” 18 But such notions must be eliminated from an explicitly aesthetic understanding of black. As Moten observes, “the multiplicity of symbolic meanings . . . attached to the color black . . . are and must be detachable from the absence (of difference) that defines and is internal to the color black.” What has no meaning, for Reinhardt, is the fact of blackness’s symbolic status, as well as its radical instability. 19 However, the very structure and presentation of the Arts/Canada dialogue coun - tered this claim. Underwritten by the principle of black’s hyperreferentiality, the eccentric art direction of the issue aggressively communicates the abundant force of black’s metaphorical agility. The text is accompanied by images of the participants’ work: Tambellini’s celestial lumagrams (painted glass slides) grace the cover and a num - ber of images from Black Zero occupy the centerfold. Inside is Reinhardt’s Black Diptych and stills from Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). The issue is bookended by Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov’s legs floating in space, and the pages con - tain images of early modern black books and dictionary definitions of the word black . The illustrations extend across media and time periods, juxtaposing ama - teur photography and modernist painting, avant-garde and kitsch. One page pairs an exhibition shot and detail of Snow’s early photographic work Atlantic (1967) with an image of “Black Rock,” the CBS headquarters building in New York. In one of the stranger visual juxtapositions, a weathered bust of the Queen of Sheba faces a large reproduction of the Black Panther symbol leaping from a white background, as if pouncing on the text beneath it. Despite the editors’ desire to pay tribute to Reinhardt, both the form and content of the published magazine focused on “black” as the ultimate entanglement of art and life—even though, as Barbara Rose wrote, “Ad believed that life and art were separate.” 20 If, for Reinhardt, at issue in the meeting of blackness and aesthetics was the function of a sign

Opposite, top: Lumagram slide from Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero (1965–68) on the cover of the special issue “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967). Opposite, bottom: Aldo Tambellini. Black Zero , 1965–68. Centerfold collage for “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967). Right: Page view with Ad Reinhardt painting, “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967).

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 refusing to signify, for Taylor and Tambellini the opposite was at stake. 21 Taylor’s inaugurating statement moves sideways from Reinhardt’s concerns by theorizing the meaning of black as a problem not of symbolism but of experience: “for my first statement I would like to say that the experience is two-fold, and later, I think, you’ll see how the two really merge as one experience.” 22 Where Reinhardt will engage the color black only as a formal quality, Taylor establishes it as indistin - guishable from social and cultural life—the very condition of his being. In what Moten calls a “re-inaugural rupture,” Taylor’s voicing of “experience and later, existence,” directly counters “Reinhardt’s overly stringent essentialism.” 23 Taylor’s insistence on an understanding of a black aesthetic as necessarily social is both amplified and attenuated by Tambellini’s interjections. “Black to me is like a beginning,” Tambellini states. For him, that beginning eliminates history, art, and tradition within a total - izing vision of rebirth. In his comments, Tambellini draws a through line between the concept of black, racialization, the picturing of black space, and the transformation of aesthetic categories: Black is one of the important reasons why the racial conflicts are happening. . . . We oppose black. . . . Blackness is the beginning of the resensitizing of human beings . . . “black power” is a powerful message, for it destroys the old notion of western man, and by destroy - ing that notion it also destroys the tradition of the art concept. 24 In his emphatic presentism, Tambellini imagines blackness as a universal force that will “get rid” of race. For him, the fact that “Ad Reinhardt still retains black within the context of art” is already belied by the simultaneity inherent in “a whole creation going on of forms and concepts, of the atomic era, the space era, the computer era.” Black’s containment within the aesthetic is shattered by “the era that man lives in, all of a sudden we have a simultaneous idea of all man’s endeavors coming to us at once.” 25 Invoking the astronaut as

Top: Page view, “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967). Clockwise from left: Eero Saarinen, CBS Building (1965); Michael Snow, Atlantic (1967); detail of Snow, Atlantic . Bottom: Page view with Black Panther Party logo, “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967).

70 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 a “primitive man, a caveman,” Tambellini presents him as at once premodern and hypermodern—a transcendent figure delivered from the corruptions of modernity through his intergalactic consciousness. For Tambellini, the very existence of such a figure—who has experienced the deluge of black space for himself—demands “man . . . get rid of this whole concept of black pictures or of black anything as a physical object. He’s got to realize that he is black right now.” 26 Tambellini’s unequivocal embrace of his time reflects the contemporaneous rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan and Gene Youngblood but is also symptomatic of the convergence of new technologies with new social movements, particularly that of Black Power. The 1960s were a momentous period of rapid shifts in technologies of vision. From television to satellite technology, military weaponry, and recording devices, the convergence of modernist investments in abstraction with the critique of racialized violence was particular to its moment. As Sasha Torres and Kara Keeling argue, the televisual and cinematic appearance of the civil rights movement and, later, the Black Panther Party had far-reaching effects for 1960s political culture. 27 Just a few months before the recording of the Arts/Canada dialogue, live footage of a Black Panther Party protest at the California State Capitol distributed images of armed black militants to television screens across the United States. Such images, alongside the popular media’s spectacularized reporting of Black Power’s turn away from nonviolent tactics—a shift announced by Stokely Carmichael in 1966—transformed the visibility of black activism. 28 As the political understanding of blackness was undergoing a radical renovation in the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power, “the appearance of the Black as Black Panther signaled a profound crisis” of representation, Keeling points out. 29 The “sediment of signification” that accrued around the style of those acting collectively against racism (afros, guns, and leather) “intensified,” in Keeling’s argument, “the adversarial valence of the Black, reveling in its neces - sary status as image.” 30 This trans - formation of the black imago also

Ad Reinhardt and Cecil Taylor on the cover of the newsprint supplement to “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967).

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 71

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 produced a discursive context in which the aesthetic uses of black could no longer perform the functions they were meant to—to stand apart, outside, or beyond the worldly, the everyday, the social. 31 Produced amid these events, the magazine’s unusual format and its mono - chromatic topic implicitly suggested “the race problem” might be solved through transparent dialogue and instantaneous communication. The structure of the issue echoed the claims Youngbloood would make three years later in his classic 1970 Expanded Cinema , that the “Paleocybernetic Age” signaled a transformation in “the image-making technologies that promise to extend man’s communicative capacities beyond his most extravagant visions.” 32 Yet while the discourse attempted to connect formal and aesthetic questions of pigment, abstraction, and symbolism to the social struggles of black people building new movements, the difficulty of defining which of these questions (e.g., of hue, color, or race) might be catego - rized as political, which theoretical, and which aesthetic, became increasingly apparent. The televisual phenomenon of Black Power’s new iconicity thus sur - rounded even Reinhardt’s efforts to retain the autonomy of the black mono - chrome. 33 Notably frustrated with the direction of the debate, Reinhardt intervenes to say, Well, of course, we have enough mixed media here. I just want to again stress the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality. . . . There’s something about darkness or blackness that has something to do with something that I don’t want to pin down. But it’s aesthetic. And it has not to do with outer space or the colour of skin or the colour of matter. 34 While Tambellini embodies a hyperbolic enthusiasm about an electrified encounter with blackness, Reinhardt is alarmed by the intrusion of the technolog - ical world (with all its mixed media) into an aesthetic realm he wished to preserve from enframing. 35 In response to this issue—we might distill it as the relationship between art and the social— Arts/Canada ’s black issue presents its most contentious debate: Taylor: My work gives me pleasure. . . . Poverty is not a very satisfying thing . . . . I don’t only have a responsibility to myself, I have a responsibility to my community. Reinhardt: As a human being, not as an artist. Taylor: . . . Of course Reinhardt visualizes blackness as some kind of tech - nical problem. I visualize it as the quality that shapes my life, in terms of the

72 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 quality of the acceptance that my work gets or does not get based on the fact that it is from the Afro-American community. Reinhardt: But your art should be free from the community. 36 While Reinhardt’s demand that art be “free from the community” reflects an implicitly Adornian rejection of a culture industry that he sees as the greatest threat to art’s anti-utilitarian status, Taylor places art as not only inseparable from social life, responsible to, and produced in collaboration with his community, but as a realm of pleasure. In the above passage, Taylor is, in effect, ventriloquizing the core thesis at the heart of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement. As Larry Neal wrote in 1968, “The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community.” 37 The tension between Reinhardt and Taylor—even as it is submerged beneath a triumphalism (both Tambellini’s and that of the magazine’s editorial staff) regarding the radical possi - bilities of contemporaneous technologies—reveals the way in which this discourse at once approaches and disavows the racialized semiotics of color. Nevertheless, that ambivalence revealed the very fragility of the relation between the inside and outside of art as it was animated by the technopolitical culture of 1967. The Arts/Canada dialogue is an attempt to theorize the meaning of color while also accounting for the new visibility of black people mobilizing an antiracist politics. The magazine’s content, its participants, and the peculiarities of its tech - nologically enhanced staging exemplify the tensions about the separation of art and life wrought by both the rise of new media technologies and the radicalization of the Black Liberation movement. Made possible by the invention of satellite tech - nology—itself responsible for the development of live television—the dialogue’s form and content is underwritten by the very infrastructures facilitating the expan - sion of popular media. That expansion is spectacularized within the dialogue by the inclusion of numerous images of the dialogue’s recording at the CBC stu - dio, replete with the technological gad - getry provided by Bell Labs: ear pieces, head phones, circuit boards, and so on. The Toronto participants (Rockman, Broomer, Cowan) are pictured listen - ing attentively to editor Anne Brodzky, who is presumably relaying technical instructions about how to use these

Right: Page view showing con - tributors to “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967). New York participants in conversation, pictured from left to right: Aldo Tambellini, Michael Snow, Cecil Taylor, Ad Reinhardt.

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 73

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 new devices during the conversation. Dubbed a “simultaneous conversation,” the dialogue is as much organized around the spectacle of instantaneous communica - tion (the shrinking of space-time between New York and Toronto) made available by new technologies as it is an exploration of blackness. The staging of the dialogue is an instantiation of the ameliorative desires surrounding the very pos - sibility of dialogue in a newly emergent technological world. The conflicts at the heart of the Arts/Canada dialogue reflect the ways in which in 1967 it was becoming nearly impossible to think the black canvas without the intervention of black skin and black social life. The image of racialized corporeal - ity, overexposed by a new technovisual landscape, yet simultaneously patholo - gized and overlooked, became inextricably linked to aesthetic discourses imagined to be autonomous and self-contained. The Arts/Canada dialogue pictures the crisis of signification within which blackness found itself in 1967 but offers little infor - mation about how people saw racial difference in this moment. 38 What the dialogue does show us is the way in which race had become a technology of vision animating the very terms of the aesthetic.

Black Zero ’s Abstraction of Abundance Black Zero dramatizes the signifying crisis that the Arts/Canada dialogue repre - sents. The rise of collective struggles against racism, coupled with the expansion of new technologies (namely, television and space travel) reorganized the visibility politics of blackness. Because that visibility politics intervened in the production and circulation of aesthetic meaning, these historical events not coincidentally form the primary references of Black Zero . More significant is the work’s attempt to fold such references through an amalgamation of aesthetic strategies sourced from both the history of modernist abstraction and the Black Arts Movement and threaded through the contempora - neous emergence of expanded cinema kinesthetics. Performed five times from 1965 to 1968, Black Zero ’s premiere at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque’s New Cinema Festival I continued a collabo - rative model Tambellini had developed for a longer series of “electromedia” environments. Reflecting the struc- ture of the Arts/Canada dialogue, the

Left: Page view showing contrib - utors to “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967). Toronto participants in conversation, pictured from left to right: editor Anne Brodzky, Arnold Rockman, Stu Broomer, Harvey Cowan. Opposite, top: Group Center. Poster for Ad Reinhardt, “The New Revolution in Art,” lecture, 1964. Opposite, bottom: Aldo Tambellini. Blackout , 1967. Electro- media performance for the open - ing of the Black Gate Theatre. Photo by Richard Raderman.

74 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 electromedia environment was a spectacle of simultaneity. 39 The performance’s cacophony of stimuli was produced with two 16 mm projectors, three monitors, five slide carousels, one dancer, three musicians, and four projectionists. This breadth of media was matched by the enormous number of people involved in pro - ducing the environments. Collaborators included musicians Dixon, Cecil McBee, Alan Silva, and Scott; dancers Lorraine Boyd, Carla Blank, and Judith Dunn; poets Ishmael Reed, Norman Pritchard, and Hernton; and artists Ben Morea and Ron Hahne, who would form their own collective, the anarchist anti-art group Black Mask, by late 1966. 40 These performances were originally produced on the Lower East Side by Group Center, the collective founded by Aldo Tambellini, Elsa Tambellini, Hahne, and Morea. 41 Fascinated by the recently launched NASA Space Program, Group Center’s vision of artistic community imagined the “energy” of a “mobile society” as a unifying force exemplified in the astronaut’s visioning of the world from outer space. 42 The group’s admiration for Reinhardt is evident in the inclusion of one of his black monochromes in their 1964 exhibi - tion Quantum II .43 Reinhardt also lectured on his art-as-art dogma for a festival that Group Center organized at St Mark’s Church. 44 Titled “The New Revolution in Art,” the lecture claimed “Art-as-art” as “a battle cry, polemic, picket sign, sit-in, sit-down, civil disobedi - ence, passive resistance, crusade, fiery cross, and non-violent protest.” If he appeared to suggest the monochrome might stand in for a picket sign, Reinhardt never theless concluded that “The one, eternal, permanent revolution in art is always a negation of the use of art for some purpose other than its own.” 45 Reinhardt’s positions on both politics and aesthetics were remarkably consistent and remarkably divergent from Group Center’s own project. Reinhardt’s influence is thus somewhat paradoxical and likely based, at least in part, on a misreading of his aesthetic project. Nevertheless, Black Zero took up the provocation of the black monochrome—

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 75

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 to negate the realm of appearance—in order to repack its “obstinate blankness” 46 with an explosion of referentiality. While they proffered radically divergent strate - gies of negation, both the black paintings and the black electromedia environment interrogated the problem of “being positioned in and by representational thinking” and posed the question of how such a problem might be contested at the scene of the artwork. 47 The paternity of Black Zero cannot be attributed solely to Reinhardt, however. Jazz was the mediating factor that brought Tambellini, Hahne, and Morea into con - tact with their collaborators Reed and Pritchard, participants in the Umbra poetry group that met weekly in the building across from Tambellini’s East Second Street studio. Formed by regulars from the neighborhood’s only black-owned coffeehouse, Les Deux Mégots (a reference to Les Deux Magots, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés café in Paris), Umbra was active from 1962 to 1965. The group’s main participants produced a journal that aimed to provide an arena for emergent black discourse in the years immediately preceding the consolidation of the Black Arts Movement. 48 Umbra’s cross-medium workshops were so popular that people often came to spectate rather than share writing, thus transforming the workshop space into a performance site. 49 Reed, Pritchard, and Hernton collaborated with Tambellini on the first electromedia performance Black (1965), which established the basic structure (a dancer, jazz musicians, a poet, and numerous projections) and the per - formativity of the iterations that followed. Black Zero ’s centerpiece was an expanding black balloon on which abstract circular shapes were projected alongside images of celestial formations, amuse - ment park rides, pages from the East Village underground press, and faces of African-American children. The performance began with a gas-masked dancer dressed in black shining a flashlight through a coil, making spiral shapes on the walls. 50 As the balloon expanded, the audience was bombarded with an array of stimuli launched from multiple directions by the hands of the artists. 51 Chief among these was the projection of up to two hundred of Tambellini’s lumagrams made from slides of his own black paintings. As the slides rotated, the heat from the projector caused the cellular shapes on the lumagrams to run, decomposing in real time—suggestively melting the substance of the monochrome. The vacillation between the desire to represent or abstract, to indict or phenomenologize, remained an irresolvable tension throughout the corpus of these works. Reperformances of these events in 2011 and 2012 were dominated by two ele - ments in the soundtrack: recordings of Hernton’s poetry and the 1968 Apollo 8 launch. 52 Hernton’s phrases give way to NASA’s liftoff: “T-minus sixty seconds and

76 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 counting . . . fifty seconds and counting.” This second manned mission of the Apollo program was responsible for transmitting Earthrise , a predecessor of the “blue marble” image that would grace the cover of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog . “Jitterbugging in the Streets” had been published in the East Village mag - azine Streets (which also distributed the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon) and had been well circulated by the time of these performances. 53 Responding to Tate Modern’s 2012 performance, Stewart Home notes that the convergence of these two influences reflected “the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra and others.” 54 Black Zero ’s imagery posed the cosmonaut and the black poet in space as figures of hope for a new era whose interconnectivity was embodied in the instant transmission of intergalactic imagery. These same technologies that pro - vided the communitarian vision of the “whole earth” formed the infrastructure for a U.S. space program whose massive expenditures were representative of a hegemonic white power that continuously secured itself on the grounds of racist terrestrial practices such as redlining and urban renewal programs—modes of spatial violence at the root of the 1960s urban uprisings described in Hernton’s writing. 55 The coupling of futuristic imagery with Hernton’s “Jitterbugging in the Streets” produced a dialectic between the promise of the coming “space-age” and the “reality” of the social—between the ameliorative fantasies surrounding the possibility of change in a newly emergent technological world and the horror of state violence. The piece’s dramatic ending in the bursting of the balloon implied the instability of the representational imagery it had tenuously supported. As suggested by the title and iconography of the work, the optical drama of Black Zero focalized the motif of the circle. The curious status of zero—whose great rupture was the introduction of a sign whose function was to indicate the absence of signs—underscored the work’s focus on the decolonization of percep - tion. 56 Reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, the rotating circular images of Black Zero attempted to focus “attention on the act of seeing itself, rather than creating depictions to be seen.” 57 That motif was extended to the interior installa - tion, whose womblike quality was amplified by the heartbeats that provide the opening bass line of Black Zero ’s soundscape. The electromedia environment functioned as a twentieth-century metaphor for Plato’s cave: man is a “new primi - tive” cloaked in a darkness whose source is the infinite blackness of intergalactic space rather than earth’s internal cavities. Like the expanding black balloon, the performance space was constructed as a maternal body with the artists acting as “philosopher-obstetricians.” 58 Blackness appeared as the infrastructural matter— or amniotic fluid—forming the surround (or the ground) from which being is

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 77

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Below and opposite: Aldo Tambellini. Lumagram slides used for Black Zero (1965–68), 1965.

78 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 79

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 remade. The mise-en-scène projects a fantasy of the spectator-as-fetus: floating with others deracinated and ungendered, subjects once ejected will be reborn, bathed in light, ready to perform the sociopolitical directives possible only through resensitization. 59 Beyond the subject of black, the influence of the two-dimensional monochrome was not very apparent. But it did emerge in the projections of Tambellini’s “Black Films,” whose intersplicing of black spirals, blank frames, and newsreel images were set to the tune of children’s voices singing “black is beautiful” over a steady drumbeat. 60 The projections sourced from Tambellini’s videos were largely exper - iments with the internal structure of the medium. To produce Black Video I (1966), Tambellini created a feedback loop between his Sony CV 2000 camera and a microphone while manually shining a light into its lens to burn shapes into the vidicon. 61 The work attempted to move inside the image by scratching at the inter - nal mechanisms used to produce recorded representations. The process of pro - ducing the videos—the recording of the interplay between various media (microphones, cameras, duplication equipment, flashlights, et cetera)—stood in for the form of relationality embodied in Black Zero . The work’s examination of the interplay between signs—the symbolic function of blackness in 1960s American culture and the work’s incessant chasing of the moving referent black —extended to the very mode of production at the center of the piece. Symptomatic of 1960s kinesthetic investments in the use of light as the ultimate readymade—the “raw ‘is-ness” of life itself— Black Zero ’s black light did not orient the viewer but per - formed experiments on perception in an attempt to retrain or resensitize accord - ing to alternative logics. 62 These were preoccupations Tambellini held in common with Otto Piene of Group Zero, with whom, in 1967, he opened the Black Gate Theatre as a venue explicitly devoted to the exploration of electromedia: “a test - ing ground for radical experiences.” 63 As Black Zero expanded the black monochrome from canvas to the filmic and videographic, it called on specific representations—the black figure, the cos - monaut, Robert Kennedy—in order to overpack their represented signs, overload - ing the referentiality of blackness to allow new associative chains to form. 64 The work could thus be read as the residual other of the monochrome—a swarming field of the “blackest black” formed by the density of the monochrome’s subtrac - tions. Like a tornado lifting debris from the ground to fuel its turbulent coherence, Black Zero ’s aesthetic project attempted to lift the coordinates of the sign system not to evacuate them of signification but to tumble and spin them in a wind tunnel of chaos, only to throw them back onto land in an altogether unrecogniz -

Aldo Tambellini. Diagram for Black Zero performance, 1966.

80 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 able form. Taking up the concept of “electromedia” in order to explore the very relationship between media themselves—how they respond to one another when put into contact, get layered over one another, or get burned inside each other— Black Zero pointed to the ways in which both representations, and the technolog - ical devices used to make them (from television to race), are deeply contingent on one another. The live performance was the site where the relationships between these devices were at their most vulnerable to the element of human perception and agential embodiment. But this raises the question of what one is to make of the human element (beyond the spectator) at the center of these performances: dancers writhing in gas masks across projections of liquidating slides and beneath expand - ing balloons; poets reciting tales of rape, riots, and rocket ships; cellists fighting with feedback; stumbling artists maneuvering bulky slide carousels and vacuum cleaners. Part of the power of this meeting of fleshly human presence with the garbage heap of technomodernity lay in the work’s movement toward positioning the human as yet another technology put into relation with others. Dixon’s account of the 1965 electromedia performance at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque emphasizes the way in which the electromedia environment was a place to stage interactions between media, both new and old, human and machinic. Dixon describes the first time he and Silva rehearsed with Tambellini: “He wanted me to play to this painting. . . . Tambellini had this weather balloon being pumped up, and making a bass sound. . . . Silva and I played to that paint - ing.” Dixon’s account of the event focuses on the problem of placing himself and Silva—playing for a black painting—in the middle of the work’s viewing space. He comments, “Aldo . . . wanted us to play right there in the audience. I . . . didn’t want to be seen. . . . I walked out the night before the performance.” Dixon’s hesitation about the relationship of his own visibility to the composition of the performance reflects some of the more implicit dichotomies of a work that structures a series of decomposing, abstracted, half-legible images as the surround from which a grouping of recognizably black figures—musicians, poets, and dancers clothed in black—are figured. 65

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 81

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Contemporaneous reviews of Black Zero found it impressive and bewildering. One critic described the “noise” as “a buzz saw gone berserk and a machine gun.” 66 Like many responses to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (which pre - miered only a year after the first Black performance), viewers immersed in these works’ incoherence were not returned to anything one might associate with self- presence. 67 As one reviewer explained, “The eyes can’t cope with the data . . . while it makes the spectator more aware it gives their brains nowhere to go, save for some poems by Calvin C. Hernton.” 68 The electromedia environment’s invoca - tion of the “black experience” attempted to negate a fantasy of the self’s supreme autonomy by presenting the experience of blackness as at once everything and nothing—an unnamable, indefinable, uncontrollable, infinite transcendence. Yet as Hernton’s words became the only element by which the audience could cog - nitively map their surroundings, the work positioned the poet in a tradition of colonial black figuration based on a certain givenness of race, thus charging the black figure with the task of delivering the spectator from alienation. Hernton’s citational presence recalls the mode of ontological violence Fanon described in his seminal fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks , notoriously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness”: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things . . . and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” 69 Fanon’s account of epidermalization—itself newly available to the New York counterculture in 1967—describes the experience of racialization as a process of becoming-object fixed by the white gaze. 70 As the grounding force of the work, Hernton’s signifying power comes to bear the “burden of representation” invoked by Fanon and, before him, W.E.B. Dubois. 71 In Keeling’s rereading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks , she underscores “the possibility that ‘the Black’ and ‘the White’ are ‘problems’ in the sense of a pros - thesis . . . thrown forth in order to dissimulate” the “originary experience of colo - nization and violence.” 72 I follow Keeling’s account here because it centralizes the “problem” of visualizing blackness as one that, for Fanon, can be confronted only through an explosive revocation of colonial reality’s condition of possibility. That condition—the violent event of colonization and enslavement—is the “spatio- temporal coordinate from which” the image of “‘the Black’ and ‘the White’ are pro - jected.” 73 For Fanon, the ontological unthinkability of the black man is due to the fact that when “the Black” appears he is always overlaid by the “historicity” of the black imago. Describing his encounter with the white gaze, Fanon explains the sense in which his own body always already appears as a stand-in for “cannibal - ism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all else, yes,

Aldo Tambellini. Black Zero (1965–68), 1966. Calo Scott on cello with lumagram projections.

82 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania .” 74 As these images inhere in the percepti - bility of “the Black,” Keeling explains, “this appearance of the past in the present— what Fanon calls historicity—limits the present expression by binding it in a closed circuit with the colonial constructions of the past.” 75 In the present of 1967, Black Zero emphasized the hyperreferentiality of blackness in order to spiral out the historicity of the black imago. However, in rematerializing the black figure at the center of the work, his image became a site of sedimentation indicative of the question that Dubois posed as demonstrative of (as Keeling writes) “liberal White engagements with Black existence—‘How does it feel to be a problem?’” 76 This is a question that “Jitterbugging” responds to with vehemence, as Hernton demands a particularly explosive revocation of colonial contemporaneity: “There will be no fourth of July this year.” 77 Instead, the terror of state violence will be answered in the ecstatic movements of the jitterbug dance. Fanon experiences this desire to explode in—of all places—the cinema. 78 Because, as Keeling points out, the cinema is a space par excellence for the circu - lation and consolidation of the imago’s historicity, Fanon’s experience as a viewer is structured as a “hellish cycle” of anticipation and traumatic confirmation of his “own” image. But Fanon cannot appeal to the construction of better representa - tions within a visual regime that ensures that “as soon as they appear as such (and they always already appear as such), ‘the Black’ and ‘the White’ are prob - lems.” 79 Might an expanded cinema do more than proliferate the “hellish cycle”

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 83

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Fanon anticipates as he sits in the cinema waiting for a film to begin? If, as Alessandra Raengo argues, Fanon’s account of racialization can be mapped onto a reading of the photographic—where the photochemical “fixing” of the image shares the same semiotic structure of the black body within the visual field—then expanded cinema’s dizzyingly percussive relationship to the image offers a differ - ent photochemical imagination. 80 To account for the representational dilemma that is its subject, Black Zero demanded a reckoning with the very condition of possi - bility that produced “the black” as a problem—the originary trauma of coloniza - tion that is both citable and unthinkable because it is productive of modernity itself. Ultimately, Fanon desires an explosion whose total revocation would require “nothing short of the ‘end of the world,’ the death of ‘the Black,’ and ‘the White,’ and the creation of new ways of being human.” 81 The electromedia environment’s pushing and pulling, expansion and contraction, cacophonous vibrations, come close to modeling what an experience of such an explosive reconstructive trauma might feel like. Black Zero attempts to animate a closed circuit of significations in order to explode them through a strategy of overstimulation. But the work also confronts the problem of visualizing the black figure by placing black poets and musicians, as well as a white dancer clothed in black, within a space of what Noam Elcott names “artificial darkness.” For Elcott, the nineteenth-century introduction of the black bodysuit in conjunction with the black screen facilitated a technical trick— the disappearance of the figure—that afforded a series of productive in visibilities throughout the history of artificial darkness. 82 By extending this technology to the visuality of skin, the black electromedia environment played with the kinds of dis - appearances afforded by “black-on-black obfuscation,” placing figure and ground in flux as each were demarcated and collapsed in turn. 83 So, too, for sound—at par - ticular moments the legibility of what Group Center called the “hard reality” of Hernton’s prose is rendered inaudible as the soundscape of the piece engulfs his words. 84 On the one hand, the intermittent invisibility of the figure against the swelling ground of darkness worked to undermine the supposed facticity of the racialized body as it was simultaneously made available to the audience’s gaze. On the other hand, the work’s ineluctable reliance on Hernton’s representational status underscores its participation in the “hellish cycle” of anticipation and objectifica - tion internal to the representational logic of colonial modernity. The work’s auda - cious vibrations—its flickering tumult—gestured toward an explosion of the coordinates that produced “the Black” as a problem, while it also vindicated the tradition of representation culpable for such imagery. The incessant movement

84 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 between visibility and invisibility, overexposure and underexposure, signification and transparency, is symptomatic of the work’s attempt to push expanded cinema beyond techno-utopian emancipation and toward a decolonizing account of social struggle. However, while Black Zero ’s interior installation could dramatize such an explosion, it would have to point beyond itself to enact its own provocation. The aesthetic strategy of Black Zero , contrary to the monochrome’s subtrac - tive impulse, was wholly additive; it was based not on the elimination of the symbolic connotations of blackness but on their explosion. What is at stake is not reduction but a deployment of black as a means for proliferation—the mul - tiplication of elements across space-time. Tambellini and Black Mask’s insis - tence on the everythingness of black endowed it with an originary status, the experience of which constituted the ultimate threshold between this (actual) world and another (possible) one. Rather than a study of its own internal lim - its—the condition of the black squares— Black Zero ’s politics of abstraction pointed beyond itself to the “real” of contemporaneous political struggles out - side the black box. These were struggles that appeared to be on their way toward the “absolute violence of decolonization” (quite literally, in Stokely Carmichael’s rejection of nonviolence and the televised images of collective protest) imag - ined, by Fanon, as the only option for revolutionizing consciousness. The work thus demanded a radical presentness. As Tambellini explained in the Arts/Canada dialogue, the audience of the electromedia environment had to realize the implications of black “right now.” 85 And those implications would necessarily point beyond the black box. 86 The subject approached by Black Zero required an explosion that could not be contained by the screen or the black box—no matter how expanded. Black Zero took up both the provocation of the monochrome’s negating power and the influ - ence of Umbra and refracted it through a kinesthetic techno-utopianism to explode the referentiality of black through and beyond abstraction. Black Zero ’s ontologiz - ing impulse gestured toward a revocation of colonial reality but ultimately under - cut its own radicality by marking not only “the Black” as particular and problematic but “the White” as equally unproblematic. Unlike feminist engage - ments with expanded cinema whose appropriations of cinematic technologies often involved the author’s placement of her own body into the central space of the tableau (thus pointing to the gendered body as a site of signifying power), Black Zero ’s primary authors were typically distributed at the edges of the action. 87 Reacting to a 1966 performance of Tambellini’s Moondial at the Dom, Jonas Mekas described the sight he encountered on turning away from the central action:

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 85

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 In the middle of the performance . . . I turned, for a moment around and looked where the slides and projectors were set behind the audience’s back. . . . I saw both Tambellinis immersed in a deep dance trance of their own, moving, with hand-held projection and slides, shaking and trembling, no more conscious of themselves . . . it seemed that the things on the stage were directly connected with their fingertips, their face movements, their very flesh. 88 Employing the immersive strategy of electromedia to produce an eruptive event productive of a “new man,” the white bodies of the Tambellinis, Morea, and Hahne remained partially hidden behind slide projectors, tape recorders, gas masks, and various instrumental machines, reflecting the very structure by which whiteness secures its own power. 89 Group Center’s attempt to form a militant relation to antiracist struggles through an examination of color responded to Umbra’s own understanding of their work as an aesthetic “wing” of Black Liberation. Nevertheless, the specific use of figuration, especially the figure of the black poet, reproduced the representationalism named by Fanon that year, and DuBois before him, as an effect of the white gaze. Given such representational limitations, Group Center’s eventual overcoming of the electromedia environment might be seen as following the more radical implications of Fanon’s work. After all, many members of the collective were readers of Fanon. 90 Both Tambellini and Black Mask would move past the hermeneutics of the expanded environment after 1968, as Tambellini’s interests moved further inside the apparatus and Black Mask aban - doned art practice altogether. 91 Taking up Amiri Baraka’s call to go “Up against the Wall,” the group moved toward a militant solidarity politics with Black Power by calling for the abolition of whiteness. 92 The rarity of Group Center’s attempt to reckon with social movement politics within the field of intermedia is expressed in Woody Vasulka’s account of Tambellini’s practice in the 1960s. 93 I personally regard Tambellini’s and Paik’s concerns in the sixties as the true and direct inspiration to our generation of “synthesizing” artists. We had spotted Aldo’s theater on Second Avenue, the Black Gate, and later when I met him, he indeed was dressed in black. He was obviously a walking mani - festo, obsessed and fully committed. He made a fabulous film with black kids and was dedicated to the black cause. His art form seemed to center on a field of the blackest black, with a figure of light as the protagonist. I never read nor talked to him about it, nor do I understand why he had chosen electronic

86 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 images as a part of his arsenal. Of course, the Black Spiral made a completely different statement. Clearly it spoke to the perceptual issue so close to my own concerns. 94 Vasulka draws a sharp distinction between Tambellini’s commitment to “the black cause” and his work Black Spiral , a televisual sculpture commissioned by Howard Wise for the 1969 exhibition Television as a Creative Medium . Where Vasulka sees no direct connection between the problem of vision and the problem of racism, the electromedia environment’s great rupture was to propose a constitutive relation - ship between the two. The convergence of new technologies and the expansion of Black Liberation had provoked a “crisis in seeing” refracted through the black elec - tromedia works. 95

Coda: Black, Blank, and Blue Notably absent from the Arts/Canada dialogue is any mention of the bloody upris - ing in Newark, New Jersey, that took place three weeks before the recording of the conversation. Just across the Hudson River, Baraka had been pummeled and pelted by members of a police force who had sparked a six-day protest after beating a black cab driver on the street. 96 Baraka’s transformation from “token insider” of the white avant-garde “to angry militant outsider”—together with his roles as inter - locutor of the Umbra group, friend and collaborator of Dixon and Silva, theorist and progenitor of the Black Arts Movement, and inspirational figure for Black Mask—inhabits the exchanges central to both Black Zero and the Arts/Canada dialogue. 97 Baraka’s arrest on suspicion of harboring firearms was a topic of heated discussion on the Lower East Side, and it cannot have been too far from the minds of Tambellini, Hahne, Morea, Taylor—or even Reinhardt—in their meditations on blackness in 1967. 98 The aesthetic choices Baraka made that same year in his short story “Answers in Progress” suggest another possibility for challenging the logic of representation in late-1960s America. This work is so brief it barely arrives before it overturns the tables on the terms of debate. 99 Rather than centralizing the hypersymbolism or austerity of blackness, Baraka turns to a new relationality between black militants and blue aliens while treating whiteness to a radically eliminative procedure. If race had become a new technology of vision to explode the representationalism Fanon described (and Arts/Canada and Black Zero explored), one might need to turn against chromatic saturation to indict the problem of whiteness. “Answers in Progress” tells of a nationwide black insurrection from the per -

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 87

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 spective of an organizer in Newark. “Touch the edge of answer,” Baraka begins, “The waves of nausea / as change sweeps the frame of breath and meat.” A trian - gular poem running across Baraka’s page inserts blood, flesh, and dismemberment into the center of the narrative, reinaugurating the story’s beginning: “‘Stick a knife through his throat.’” he slid in the blood got up running toward the blind newsdealer. He screamed about “Cassius Clay.” And slain there in the street, the whipped figure of jesus, head opened eyes flailing against his nose. They beat him to pulpy answers. We wrote Muhammad Ali across his face and chest, like a newspaper of bleeding meat. A violent rebellion on the battlefield of “New Ark” produces a place on earth for the spacemen to inhabit. Music summons them: “The next day spaceships landed. Art Blakey records was what they were looking for.” “Answers in Progress” describes the first five days of a revolution whose rupture transformed the space of “New Ark” into an entirely new landscape where “the Center” was “[n]ational - ized on the spot. . . . Boulevards played songs . . . and we rounded up blanks where we had to.” 100 Labeled throughout the text as “blanks,” white people are killed en masse to little fanfare. Here, white skin is so utterly devoid of signification that the bodies it envelops are entirely expendable. The emergence of a new race is visual - ized as dependent on what Fanon calls an explosion: an end to the epiphenomenal world as we know it, a force strong enough to reset, in Keeling’s terms, the origi - nary spatiotemporal coordinates of the colonial encounter “from which ‘the Black’ and ‘the White’ are projected.” 101 This force, in “Answers in Progress,” enacts a new relationality between black and blue, inner space and outer space, concrete and ideal. In the aftermath of this explosive resetting of the scene, blue aliens and black revolutionaries imagine a new world as the ruins of white hegemony scatter around them. Baraka’s “blue dudes” are on the hunt for Art Blakey records—an anachronistic request for the late 1960s, by which time the avant-garde jazz scene in New York (whose younger set included Taylor, Dixon, and Silva) had moved past Blakey’s hard-bop style. Baraka saw this transition—from hard bop to avant-garde—as corresponding to the shift from the civil rights movement to Black Liberation. 102

88 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 That shift, for Kobena Mercer, also informed “a transformation of the proper name, from /Negro/ to /Black/” that could be “seen as an expression of widening forms of counter-hegemonic struggles in which the liberal goal of equality was displaced in favor of the radical democratic goal of freedom” and was displayed in “an exis - tential affirmation of negated subjectivity—precisely that which was signified under erasure as simply ‘X’ in Malcolm Little’s symbolic renaming.” Such renam - ings—like Baraka’s shedding of Jones—produced, for Mercer, a transformation of the ethnic signifier toward new identificatory links with Third World struggles. 103 In the case of “Answers in Progress,” the new identificatory relation enabled by this shift was that which congealed between the black and the blue. Though the aliens want to know what happened to Blakey, Baraka’s earth men tempt them with “the Sun Ra tape,” thus introducing them to the new music of the present: “We thought about the changing reference of our new world. As it stood already in the old ruins. . . . But when the Sun-Ra tape came on this blue dude really opened up.” 104 This new world—of “changing reference”—is an explosive conflagration of past, present, and future that realigns the “spatio-temporal coordinates” projected from the founda - tional rupture of colonialism. In a metonymic reflection of that changing reference, the mingling of black and blue recall the aftermath of a wound whose trauma to the flesh gets worked out—reconstructed—in the changing tones of the skin’s surface . “Answers in Progress” takes the ingredients of space travel, black militancy, and the epistemologies of color to another place quite apart from Black Zero ’s univer - salizing impulse. Instead of imagining space as a visual panacea always already just out of reach, Baraka’s science fiction “projects and produces other spaces . . . right here, right now.” 105 The transformative possibilities of space travel had to reach well beyond the frame of consciousness because the white gaze could not be resensitized; it had to be eliminated. Like the monochrome that foregrounds a blankness typically reserved for the background, “Answers in Progress” introduces chaos into a signifying regime that gathers its normative power by claiming its own invisibility. 106 Like the zero degree of form, the blank is radically unmarked— the primordial state (or slate) on which all marking is made. The work reveals the elisions and impurities internal to the racial sign by turning away from the mean - ing of blackness, through the nonmeaning of whiteness, thus undercutting the stability of both and reversing whiteness’s aspirational structure. In this way, the story presents us with what Moten might call an “ontology of disorder” that answers the inadequacy of “already given ontologies.” 107 As a technology of vision, race—in particular, the new transformation of blackness as it was instigated by the televisual presence of the Black Panther Party—is presenced by Baraka as part of

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 89

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 a collectively induced rupture with the historical present. If both the black mono - chrome and the expanded cinema environment positioned blackness as the formal threshold through which to overcome an epiphenomenal world in the name of a noumenal world to come, “Answers in Progress” exploded the realm of appearance by beginning from an ideal real thrown forth from the rubble of whiteness. A work of fiction, the writing of the story nevertheless anticipated the “real” events of the Newark uprising a few months later. But as Baraka commented on these pre - dictive scenes, “they were based on a, well, premonition I had about the whole rebellion, and the rebellion didn’t happen until later that year. But I haven’t given up on fiction.” 108

| | | | |

These examples display the way in which the cultural meanings attached to the appearance of black and white—as they have been projected outward from the colonial encounter—could not, by 1967, be entirely unstitched from aesthetic meanings that imagine the function of, say, the black monochrome, to stand apart from the social. Raymond Saunders’s contemporaneous insistence that “Black is a color” and not a metaphor for racial identity affirms the very difficulty of securing even abstract art’s freedom from the symbolic at this sociohistorical moment. 109 Aided by the acceleration of televisual technologies during the 1950s and 1960s, the trope of the monochrome’s negating surface (as the indictment of the epiphe - nomenal world) became implicated in a critical new engagement with the visual - ity of racial politics. 110 As audiovisual texts, both Arts/Canada and Black Zero approached the problem of racial epistemology through the examination of color but nevertheless reached an impasse in their attempt to negotiate the relation between the idea of blackness and the being of black political life. Both are never - theless symptomatic of the way in which blackness was put to work, so to speak, to bear an increasing number of claims, both aesthetic and political, that came to ani - mate the very fragility of the boundaries between the inside and outside of art. My claim is not merely that the electromedia environment dramatized a crisis of representation invoked by the new hypervisibility of black radicalism. Rather, that dramatization contained within it yet another crisis—a crisis regarding art’s interventionist capacities. Through the paradigm of expanded cinema, Black Zero asked after the question of what the black monochrome might do if its referent were not the zero degree of painting but the zero degree of racialization. Once abstraction does away with the referent, the question of how the inside of art

90 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 relates to its constitutive outside becomes one of paramount importance—stakes made particularly explosive in and around 1967. 111 While both the monochrome and the electromedia environment demonstrated that fragility, “Answers in Progress” exploded it. In its prefigurative peculiarity—that convergence of propo - sition with “real” events—it enacted the porousness between the inside and out - side of the aesthetic. That Black Zero invoked a familiar discourse of racial identification is unsurprising for its time. But in its effort to overcome the realm of appearance, Black Zero demonstrated a porousness to the world—one whose precarity might ultimately affirm Baraka’s insistence that one need not give up on fiction and that which it might enact in “the real.”

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 91

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 Notes 1. Aldo Tambellini: Retracing Black , The Tanks at Tate Modern, 9–14 October 2012. 2. Calvin Hernton, “Jitterbugging in the Streets,” in Black Fire , ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1968), 208–9. See also Walter Lowenfels et al., New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967). 3. On the Umbra poets, see Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 79–90; and Calvin Hernton, “Umbra: A Personal Recounting,” African American Review 27, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 579 –84. 4. The first performance, Black , was produced with the participation of Ishmael Reed and Norman Pritchard at Columbia University on 6 January 1965. Subsequent performances, Black and Black 2 at the Bridge Theatre (21 and 22 March, and 7, 18, and 21 June 1965) featured Reed and Pritchard and then Lorraine Boyd, Carlos d’Alessio, Calvin C. Hernton, Cecil McBee, Ben Morea, and Elsa Tambellini. One version, Black Round , produced by Group Center, was performed outside at the Washington Square Park fountain in New York on 25 September 1965 with Judith Dunn, Ron Hahne, Al Kurchin, Morea, and Elsa Tambellini. See “‘Electromedia’ Performances,” Aldo Tambellini [web - site], http://www.aldotambellini.com/video2.html. 5. Kara Keeling’s account of the cinematic appearance of the Black Panther Party informs my read - ing of Black Zero . See Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 72–76. 6. Anne Anlin Cheng and Tom Holert, “Do You See It? Well It Doesn’t See You,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal 65 (May–August 2015), http://supercommunity- pdf.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1218.pdf. 7. On this point, I follow several critical race theorists and media theorists who have theorized race as a technology of vision. See, in particular, Wendy Chun and Lynne Joyrich, eds., “Race and/as Technology,” special issue, Camera Obscura 24, no. 70 (2009). The ideas presented in this essay are particularly inspired by the recent work of Anne Anlin Cheng in Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013) and of Kara Keeling. 8. This intensity is not limited to the 1960s, but it does take on a particular character in the con - text of Black Liberation. Black’s “unlimited usefulness in the history of modern art” has recently been displayed in the exhibition Blackness in Abstraction at Pace Gallery in New York. See Adrienne Edwards, ed., Blackness in Abstraction , exh. cat. (New York: Pace Gallery, 2016), 9. While this exhi - bition explored the performativity of blackness in artworks across various time periods, mediums, and contexts, my argument is less transhistorical. Rather, the shift that this article locates is one that is immanent to a sociohistorical moment characterized by particular technological and political developments. However, the argument that race became a technology of vision that intervened in art practice is not limited to the 1960s. For example, the important recent work of Louis Chude-Sokei shows that the emergence of race as a Western concept was entangled with the development of tech - nologies central to nineteenth-century industrialization in the United States and England and that this entanglement also informed the production of cultural modernism. Cheng also explores the rela - tionship between modernism, the visuality of race, and the emergence of new technologies in the 1920s. That the theme of blackness in abstraction appears to be relevant today may thus have more to

92 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 do with a similar convergence between the radicalization of social movement culture (e.g., the preva - lence of Black Lives Matter) and the expansion of new technologies of visualization (the camera phone, the police camera, and the mechanisms of distribution facilitated by social media). See Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016); and Cheng, Second Skin . 9. The phrase “monochrome surrounded” is inspired by the title of the first chapter of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons . See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Politics Surrounded,” in The Undercommons (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 16–20. The surround is here under - stood as the constitutive outside of the monochrome’s enclosure. 10. “Black,” Arts/Canada 113 (October 1967): 3. 11. After Reinhardt’s sudden death prior to publication, the editors dedicated the issue to him and included many art world responses to his life and death in a newspaper supplement. 12. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2009): 188–89. 13. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 3. 14. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5, 39. The Adornian account is but one perspective on abstraction, the meaning of which is far from monolithic. 15. The use of black in abstraction is subject to competing claims that cannot be fully encom - passed by Reinhardt’s insistence on black as the color of nonmeaning. For example, Frank Stella rein - serts referential meaning to his black paintings when he chooses titles such as Arbeit Macht Frei (1958) and Die Fahne Hoch ! (1959), which suggest associations between blackness and German fascism. On the naming of Stella’s black paintings, see Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44–63. 16. Reinhardt used the term ultimate to suggest that the black paintings were the “last paintings” anyone could make but also to underscore their status as the culmination of his work throughout the 1950s. Reinhardt was a member of the New York School, but his paintings nevertheless contained an implicit critique of abstract expressionism’s cult of the self and its increasing entanglement in the circuits of capital accumulation. While the development of the paintings depended on abstract expressionism’s introduction of new perceptual models into the canvas, Reinhardt’s critique of expression and embrace of seriality also gestured toward the new provocations of minimalism. Reinhardt was a committed socialist and member of the Communist Party and his black paintings could be seen to communicate a critique of the commodity form through his insistence on their non - instrumentality, their uselessness, and their status as a proposition. Analyzed in conjunction with the radical negations of Reinhardt’s art-as-art dogma, they might even be read as protest paintings whose obdurate finality pushed abstraction beyond its formal and chromatic limits and toward a broader institutional critique. For a recent reevaluation of the politics of Reinhardt’s black paintings, see Annika Marie, “Ad Reinhardt: Mystic or Materialist, Priest or Proletarian?” Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 463–84. On the relationship between Reinhardt’s paintings and his political cartoons for New Masses and Soviet Russia Today , see Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion, 2008). For an earlier critical appraisal, see Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1981). 17. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 7; and Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 194.

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 93

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 18. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 3. 19. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 191. 20. Barbara Rose, “A Tribute to Ad Reinhardt,” Arts/Canada 113, supplement (October 1967): 2. 21. The relationship between black and abstraction was also explored that same year by Raymond Saunders in his Black Is a Color pamphlet. Saunders’s argument for abstraction as a tool to guard against the representationalism often ascribed to black identity is an interesting counterpoint to Reinhardt’s position in the dialogue. Darby English places Saunders’s pamphlet in the context of black abstraction in his book, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 22. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 4. 23. Moten also argues that “Taylor’s attempt to open things up in exchange with Reinhardt . . . embod[ies] sound in a discourse of sight, making sound matter like an irruptive thing.” See Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 189–92. 24. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 5. 25. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 5–6. 26. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 12. 27. On the televisual emergence of the civil rights movement, see Sasha Torres, Black, White and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). On the cinematic appearance of the Black Panther Party, see Keeling, The Witch’s Flight , 72–76. 28. For more context on Arts/Canada ’s picturing of 1967 racial politics, see Krys Verral, “Artscanada ’s ‘Black’ Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements,” Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011): 539–58. 29. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight , 75. 30. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight , 75. The phrase “sediment of signification” is from Cheng, 8. 31. Kellie Jones’s exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s also explored the effects of the Black Panther Party’s civic activism on artists’ approaches to equality politics. See Kellie Jones, “CIVIL/RIGHTS/ACT,” in Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties , exh. cat., ed. Theresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2014), 11–56. While beyond the scope of this article, the relationship between the rise of Black Power and the institution of the museum is an important element of this story. See Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 32. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1977), 41. 33. Given the monochrome’s infamous introduction in Paul Bilhaud’s Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit (Negroes fighting in a cellar at night) of 1882, the monochrome could be said to have been surrounded from the beginning. For a recent discussion of Bilhaud’s painting in relation to the history of avant-gardist deployments of technologies of darkness, see Noam Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1–4. 34. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 7. 35. Fred Moten reads Reinhardt’s quip about “mixed media” as a “Friedian rejection of mixture- as-theatricality.” See Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 194.

94 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 36. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 16. 37. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review 12, no. 4 (1968): 28–34. 38. Cheng argues—through the figure of Josephine Baker—that exploring the relationship between modernism and primitivism can teach us less about how people see racial difference at particular historical moments than it can about “how racial difference teaches us to see .” Cheng, 6. 39. Black Zero reached its full expression at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. 40. Information on performance participants has been gathered from the Ben Morea and Aldo Tambellini Art and Anarchy Collection, TAM 530, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 41. Group Center’s membership later included photographer Don Snyder (a major chronicler of 1960s and 1970s counterculture), Jackie Cassen, and Rudi Stern (who together produced the visual displays for Timothy Leary’s light shows and presented the Theatre of Light at the Dom club above Stanley’s Bar, later home to Andy Warhol’s multimedia spectacle, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable ). Warhol’s spectacle is a clear point of comparison to Black Zero , although Warhol was also a notable object of antipathy for Tambellini, Hahne, and Morea. 42. Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, “Aldo Tambellini, Total Transmission,” in Aldo Tambellini (New York: Boris Lurie Art Foundation, Chelsea Art Museum, 2011), 14. 43. In 1965, Group Center organized two complementary exhibits, Quantum I and Quantum II at the A.M. Sachs Gallery and the Noah Goldowsky Gallery. The shows included the works of Reinhardt, Charles Mingus, Heinz Mack, and Otto Piene’s Zero Group, Louise Bourgeois, and others, alongside those of Group Center’s Morea, Hahne, and Tambellini. 44. Aldo Tambellini, “An Autobiography,” in Aldo Tambellini , 56–58. 45. Posters for the event read, “The New Revolution in Art,” but the lecture is referred to as “The Next Revolution in Art” in Tambellini’s archives. The essay referred to here is published as “The Next Revolution in Art (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part II),” in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt , ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 59–62. 46. This is Kobena Mercer’s term. See Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 20. 47. Moten uses this phrase to describe Frantz Fanon’s narrative of epidermalization in Black Skin, White Masks . See Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 186. 48. Many members, including Reed, Hernton, Askia Touré, Pritchard, Steve Cannon, and Rashida Ismaili, would go on to become important participants in the Black Arts Movement. See Hernton, “Umbra: A Personal Recounting.” 49. David Henderson discussed this aspect of the Umbra workshop at Celebrating the Umbra Workshop, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (1 November 2013). 50. Jeremy Heymsfield, “Space World in ‘Black Zero,’” New York World Telegram , 6 December 1965. 51. In this way, Black Zero exemplifies Branden Joseph’s point that “Central to the emerging definition of expanded cinema was the interaction between performers and their images.” Branden Joseph, “Plastic Empathy: Ghosts of Robert Whitman,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 65. 52. At the Tate Modern in 2012 and the Chelsea Art Museum in 2011.

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 95

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 53. The poem had a communal life of its own; it was originally written for Ishmael Reed and was often read by other artists as a part of various performances, readings, or recordings. Hernton, “Umbra,” 582. 54. Stewart Home, “Aldo Tambellini at Tate Modern,” Mister Trippy , 14 October 2012, https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/5605. 55. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 145. 56. Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 1. 57. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 98. 58. Alice Elaine Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 146. 59. Luce Irigaray draws out the relation between the Platonic cave and the womb; in particular, its implications for the erasure of the mother. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 60. Donal Foreman describes the films “as concerned, as John Cage’s conception of silence, Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings . . . with notions of time as a colourless intersection, void and nothing - ness.” Donal Foreman, “Venom, Eternity, and Other Discrepancies,” Experimental Film Club , 22 February 2009, http://experimentalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html. 61. Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi, Aldo Tambellini: Cathodic Works 1966–1976 (Treviso, Italy: Von Archives, 2012), DVD liner notes. 62. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Seacaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1964), 61, quoted in David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 76. 63. The announcement for the theater’s opening read, “We . . . are leaving the dead objects to the aesthetes (who never cared about meanings anyway) and to the possession chasers (who want their souvenirs of a process that ceases to count). . . . Painting does not light itself; motionless sculptures are in the way; objects inhibit traveling. . . . Light expands. Light reaches far and reaches many. Light is immaterial. THE BLACK GATE IS OPEN.” Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene, eds., The Black Gate Newspaper (A Newspaper Dedicated to World-Wide Unity and Interest) , April 1967, in Ben Morea and Aldo Tambellini Art and Anarchy Collection, TAM 530, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 64. I have in mind here a method akin to Elizabeth Freeman’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “minor literature” as a form of “semantic overpacking.” See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xix. 65. Even though Dixon and Tambellini “came to blows” over this issue, Dixon ultimately per - formed the way Tambellini desired and concluded that “it worked. It was a smashing performance.” Ben Young, ed., Dixonia: A Bio-discography of Bill Dixon (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 88. 66. Don Ross, “Rebellion in Art Form—Tambellini’s ‘Black 2,’” New York Herald Tribune, 13 June 1965, 39. 67. On the deterritorializing force of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI ), see Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002):

96 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 80–107. For a rare comparison of the EPI and Black Zero , see Anne Brodzky and Greg Curnoe, “A Conversation about Mixed Media from New York City,” Twenty Cents Magazine 1, no. 3 (November 1966). 68. Ross, “Rebellion in Art Form,” 39. 69. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109. A more accurate translation of “The Fact of Blackness” is “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89–119. 70. The English translation of Black Skin, White Masks was published by Grove Press in 1967 and marketed as a part of the “revolutionary handbooks” series. For more on this publication history, see Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review , and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 71. See W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996). The phrase “burden of representation” was introduced by Kobena Mercer in his essay “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 10 (Spring 1990): 61–78. 72. Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 93, 96. 73. Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 96–97. 74. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 92. 75. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight , 30–31. 76. Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 92. 77. Hernton, “Jitterbugging in the Streets.” 78. Fanon made only one film himself, with Rene Vautier: J’ai huit ans (1961). 79. Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 102. 80. Drawing on Fanon’s point that “the Other fixes me with his gaze . . . the same way you fix a preparation with a dye,” Raengo argues that “blackness and photography share the same hermeneu - tics—the hermeneutics of face value .” See Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2013), 90. See also, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 89. 81. Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 110. 82. Among other sites, Elcott explores the use of the black bodysuit (and the “black-on-black obfuscation” it afforded) in nineteenth-century black art, the work of Oskar Schlemmer, Étienne- Jules Marey, and in Claude Rains’s portrayal of The Invisible Man in James Whale’s 1933 film. While Elcott’s history of artificial darkness sets itself apart from the racialized discourse of blackness, the path he forges from the monochrome to cinematic space is another useful model for thinking the darkness of the electromedia environment. See the “Black Screens” chapter in Elcott, 77–134. 83. Elcott, 106. 84. “News from the Bridge: Black Zero, ‘Expanded Cinema at the Bridge,’” press release, 23 November 1965, in Ben Morea and Aldo Tambellini Art and Anarchy Collection, TAM 530, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 85. “Black,” Arts/Canada , 12.

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 97

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 86. Juliane Rebentisch suggests that it is “because of its interest in political utopias that installation art points beyond itself to spheres of moral-practical and theoretical-scientific reason in which alone such a utopia could become concrete.” Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 275. 87. Valie Export, Joan Jonas, and Carolee Schneemann are important examples here. See Pamela M. Lee, “Bare Lives,” in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s , ed. Mathias Michalka (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), 70–89. 88. Jonas Mekas, “On the Tactile Interactions in Cinema, or Creation with Your Total Body,” Village Voice , 23 June 1966. 89. See Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997). 90. Gavin Grindon, “Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up against the Wall Motherfucker,” Art History 38, no. 1 (2015): 13. 91. Tambellini’s collaboration with Piene of Group Zero would culminate in the production of the television artwork Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel , broadcast by WDR III Cologne. See Christiane Fricke, “1968/69 Black Gate Cologne: Otto Piene /Aldo Tambellini,” in 40yearsvideoart.de—Part 1 Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 to the Present , ed. Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 98–103. 92. An account of this complex move is beyond the scope of this article. See Nadja Millner-Larsen, “Up against the Real: Anti-Representational Militancy in 1960s New York” (PhD diss., New York University, 2013). In 1968, Morea even declined an invitation to become an honorary member of the Black Panther Party. See Grindon, 18. 93. Ken Dewey and Nam Jun Paik did attempt to address civil rights in some of their intermedia work during the same years. See William Kaizen, “Participation Television,” in Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016), 25–77. 94. Woody Vasulka, “Aldo Tambellini: Black Spiral (TV Sculpture), 1969,” in Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt : Pioneers of Electronic Art , ed. David Dunn (Linz: Ars Electronica, 1992), 110. 95. Cheng and Holert, “Do You See It? Well It Doesn’t See You.” 96. Tom Hayden, “A Special Supplement: The Occupation of Newark,” New York Review of Books , 24 August 1967. 97. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 86. Hahne and Morea, with the Black Mask group, distributed a leaflet in response to the events in Newark. With the word NEWARK emblazoned in block letters across the top of the page, Black Mask wrote, “If Newark is under siege—we are all under siege. If they crush the black struggle we are all crushed.” While white activists in downtown New York called for renewed support for black struggles, Black Mask explicitly rejected the logic of support, writing in one tract, “the time for support is over,” and in another, “Support is the evasion of struggle. . . . To support is to remain passive . . . it is the failure of whites to see their own being.” Rejecting black painting, black film, and black expanded cinema, the group nevertheless remained invested in the anonymizing capacities of the black mask. As a stand-in for anonymity, the black mask nevertheless continued a modernist investment in black’s capacity to act as a negating nonsite. See Black Mask, “Newark . . .” flyer, n.d. [1967], in Ben Morea and Aldo Tambellini Art and Anarchy Collection, TAM

98 Grey Room 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021 530, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives; Up against the Wall/Motherfucker, “Another Carnival of Left Politics,” leaflet, in Ron Hahne and Ben Morea, Black Mask and Up against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 130; and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, “We Don’t Support . . . ,” flyer, n.d. [1968], reprinted in Osha Neumann, Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker: A Memoir of the ’60s, with Notes for Next Time (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 97. 98. This was especially so for the poetry world. See Kane, 173. 99. As Jurgen Grandt writes, the story is “[m]ore like a snapshot—or sound clip—of the prolonged uprising, the story mixes prose, shaped poetry, and song.” Jurgen E. Grandt, Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 70. 100. Amiri Baraka, “Answers in Progress,” in The Fiction of LeRoi Jones /Amiri Baraka (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2000), 219, 221. 101. Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 96. 102. Jazz made a stylistic transition in the late 1950s through the early 1960s from the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to the hard-bop style that Blakey’s Jazz Messengers was a part of. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25. See also, Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Greenwich Village and African-American Music,” in The Music (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 181–89; and LeRoi Jones, “Loft and Coffee Shop Jazz” (1963), in Black Music , 92–98. The latter was first published in Down Beat . 103. Kobena Mercer, “‘1968’: Periodizing Postmodern Politics and Identity,” in Cultural Studies , ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treicher (New York: Routledge, 1992), 433. 104. Baraka, “Answers in Progress,” 222. 105. Paul Youngquist, “The Space Machine: Baraka and Science Fiction,” African American Review 37, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn, 2003): 337–38. 106. Angeline Morrison, “Autobiography of an (Ex)Coloured Surface: Monochrome and Liminality,” in Discrepant Abstraction , 135. 107. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 187. 108. Amiri Baraka and Charlie Reilly, Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 101. 109. Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color [pamphlet] (1967). 110. Cheng argues that the notion of the modern (pure) surface “demands a critical engagement with ideas of racial difference.” See Cheng, 11. 111. Hal Foster has made this claim repeatedly. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); and Hal Foster, “At MoMA,” London Review of Books 55, no. 3 (7 February 2013): 14–15.

Millner-Larsen | The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment 99

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00219 by guest on 01 October 2021