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.