Aldo Tambellini: Black Zero

Aldo Tambellini, c. 1962. Photo by Don Snyder

Boris Lurie Art Foundation Chelsea Art Museum 2011

Boris Lurie Art Foundation 50 Central Park West New York, NY 10023 212.595.0161 info@borislurieartfoundation.org www.borislurieartfoundation.org © Boris Lurie Art Foundation All rights reserved Essays © the authors Images © Aldo Tambellini, and AP Photography, Walter Dent, Giro Studios, Gerard Malanga, Don Snyder, and used by permission.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

The Boris Lurie Art Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to art education, the encouragement and support of politically and socially engaged art, especially work that has been neglected by the art mainstream on account of its radical content, and to the propagation of knowledge of the art of Boris Lurie himself. It was with a generous gift from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation that much of the art in the present exhibition was salvaged, having been long believed lost, and restored.

We wish to extend our special thanks to Gertrude Stein, Jean Zimmerman, Ron Morosan, Midori Yamamura, Kweighbaye Kotee, Christoph Draeger, Ben Morea, Randal Mixon, Henry Grimes, Michael Clapis, Pro Helvetia and Jelena Delic, Ishmael Reed, Michaeleen Maher, Juan Puntes and the White Box Gallery, Brian Burkins at Burkins and Foley Storage in Albany, NY, Bob Fitzgerlad and the Staff at Felton Street Studios in Waltham, Dr. Dorothea Keeser, Joe Ruffin, Orin Buck, and Nick Angelo Edited by John Wronoski, Heide Hatry, Chris Shultz, Anna Salamone & Joseph P. Ketner II Designed by Chris Shultz and Laura Hatry ISBN 978-1-4507-9609-5

contents

Foreword 9 John Wronoski

Total Transmission 13 Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti

Aldo Tambellini’s Voyage into the Illuminating Darkness

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Marek Bartelik

Aldo Tambellini’s Art of the Now, a Futurological Approach

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Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Electromedia 37 Joseph P. Ketner II

An Autobiography 51 Aldo Tambellini

Curriculum Vitae 85 Catalogue 95

Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini in his studio, c. 1962. Photo by Don Snyder 8

Black Zero

Foreword John Wronoski

Aldo Tambellini’s early work burns with a furious demand for something better of the world. It is a mirror to its violence, injustice, and indifference, in which beauty is reflected back at its ruins; his anger and frustration are palpable in the burned and gouged surfaces of his humble materials. The strange post-war emotional amalgam of shell-shock, relief, and elation was lifting by this time, and men, returning to their voices, could speak again from their deeper being and experience with a freedom that had long been thrall to false prosperity, a putative natural order founded on inequality, and values too long unexamined.

Voices of humane resistance were emerging throughout the West, from Guy Debord to Malcolm X to Che Guevara to Noam Chomsky to Carolee Schneemann. Of course, the worm was already in the apple, as it always had been, and such voices were slow to be heard; their like are still suppressed or ignored by the mainstream unless they should suddenly prove marketable.

It was in the space between resistance and fascination, or some might say, innocence and cynicism (pace Nietzsche), that the dominant art movement of the day would establish itself, and perhaps co-opt the co-opters. Its cool impresario, Andy Warhol, might be seen, on the one hand, as a modern-day Karl Kraus (without the fulminating), holding up a mirror of infamy to his society; on the other hand, it’s hard not to see his attitude toward the Imelda Marcoses and Ari Onassises as genuine adulation.

It’s the unresolvable ambivalence that keeps him interesting long after most of his confrères have ceased to reach new eyes.

Tambellini might have viewed being an artist as a job, but he certainly had no sense of art as Warholian commerce. In his quaint view, the job was the work, not the selling of the product (by which I by no means intend to impugn Warhol’s work ethic).

He naively imagined a world in which art was not a commodity to be traded but the common spiritual inheritance of the race, to be enjoyed for itself, accessible to all, there to ennoble everyone.

He lived and worked among poor people and felt a special affinity for African-Americans; he shared their thirst for freedom. His spirit had been annealed in fire, in the devastation of wartime Europe, and he smoldered still.

His work, even at its most abstract, has always been informed by a powerful political awareness and resistance against injustice.

With the early underground art collective, Group Center, of which he was a founder, he mounted art actions that would anticipate both the social activism of the later sixties and the guerilla art actions of subsequent avant-gardes. Group Center’s vision of a new art of global creative communities prefigures the integrative social concepts that animate much of the most advanced and radical art of our own time.

Although Tambellini’s reputation as a new media pioneer has grown impressively in recent years throughout the performance and avant-garde film communities in America and abroad, with widespread acknowledgement of his early and important contributions to modes of art that had no name when he was creating paths among them, much of even his new media work is infused with a profound sense of the painterly that developed during a lifetime of collateral work in two-dimensions. The present exhibition includes a broad sampling of his painting and related work over a period of more than three decades, covering the essential course of his long-standing and obsessive engagement with Black, which for him is, simply, the source and destination of everything; it is a spiritual and cosmic – and cosmogonic – principle akin to fire for Heraclitus. Over the decades of his work in black, Tambellini has evolved from the distressed, even pessimistic, observer of the destruction 9

Aldo Tambellini

of the human and natural worlds to a philosopher looking to distant, and inner, space with equanimity, and even hope. His Destruction Series of the early sixties places him alongside the early Yves Klein and the mature Alberto Burri, and certainly in a conceptual and tactical lineage with Lucio Fontana. His penetration of the pictorial plane and virtual attack upon it with gouges, drill-bits and flame bespeak the fury of this witness of humanity at its worst against the habits and limits that cast it back ceaselessly into its brutal past. Astonishingly, in his later body of distressed-surface works (1989), he creates a sense of boundless possibility and cosmic harmony, sub specie aeternitatis, using more or less the same tactics, materials, and iconography as he had in the earlier series, testimony to a long life devoted to the struggle of understanding.

To some extent, Tambellini’s majestic paintings might actually be viewed as preparatory studies for the time-based media and conceptual works he had already begun creating in the early sixties. His film, performance, and new media work have inspired several generations of a new breed of artist, the “primitives of a new era,” as Tambellini has called them, including, early on, Timothy Leary, whose notion of a neurological art (and eventually, the “light show” that became so widespread throughout the psychedelic era) can be traced back to Tambellini’s light projections of the early/mid sixties, and Andy Warhol, whose own Exploding Plastic Inevitable is more and more widely acknowledged to owe a significant debt to Tambellini’s Black Zero. As the founder and proprietor of the Gate Theater at Tenth Street and 2nd Avenue (1966-1969), the only cinema in NY (and possibly anywhere else) showing continuous avant-garde film every day of the week, Tambellini was among the guiding spirits of the most advanced garde in the American art of its day. And when he and colleague Otto Piene (of Group Zero) opened the Black Gate performance, 10

installation, and experimental space for artists in 1967 on the floor above the cinema, Tambellini’s gift to the art world of his day took on revolutionary proportions.

Tambellini’s own films, including the landmark Black Film Series, which was among the first works to treat film as the venue for a total sensory experience, are justly regarded as masterworks of the experimental or underground genre. He is generally credited with having, along with Otto Piene, created the first work of art for television (Black Gate Cologne, which aired in Germany in 1968). Tambellini was also part of WGBH’s The Medium is the Medium, which aired in Boston in 1969 and marked the first time in history that American artists took over the airwaves of television and broadcast art. When Piene became director of the renowned Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, he invited Tambellini to become a fellow, and from 1978-1984, he would create works and events that seem, in retrospect, to have prefigured not only the orientation of the new media art of the last decades, but larger social trends, such as social networking and communications-based mass actions as well.

In his long career, he has worked alongside of and given a forum to artists such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Hans Haacke, Ad Reinhardt, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Otto Piene, Carolee Schneemann, Jonas Mekas, Louise Bourgeois, Irene Rice Pereira, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Cecil McBee (and other radical jazz artists), Ishmael Reed, Bob Downey, and Brian De Palma, but until recently he had not shown his two-dimensional work in almost 40 years. The present exhibition represents the first truly large-scale, and the first ever museum show of his work in all its aspects.

Like Boris Lurie, Tambellini’s dear friend for almost fifty years and under the aegis of whose Art Foundation the present

Black Zero

exhibition has been mounted, Aldo Tambellini was among the revolutionary artists of the long-submerged American avant-garde of the fifties and sixties who struggled against the complacency and oblivion that characterized the nascent international superpower and the false values that its art market and its manipulators foisted upon an unwitting public. When

the new histories are written, as contemporary art seeks its legitimate antecedents outside of the approved and no longer vital movements of a self deceiving era, both Tambellini and Lurie, among many others, will be recognized as incarnations of the genuine art spirit that has always animated what is best in human creation.

Aldo & The Echo: A Spatial Painting, 1964. Duco enamel on canvas, 8 x 16 feet. Photo by Aaron Rose 11

Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini outside of his Lower East Side Studio, c. 1962. Photo by Don Snyder

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Black Zero

Aldo Tambellini, Total Transmission Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, Stivia, Lucca, Italy

Aldo Tambellini moved to New York’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1959, simultaneously beginning a new phase of his work, dominated by black. He writes, “There was something black about New York. To work in black came spontaneously.”

He recognized Black as a sort of non-color, an intransitive darkness, a generating principle, a darkness which has been his constant companion throughout his life. Soon after his move to New York, Tambellini expanded this new-found principle to his sculpture, painting, poetry, video, film, and experimentation with multi-media, which he called “Electromedia.”

When he arrived in New York, he made large black, semispherical sculptures using nails, tubing, and pieces of iron.

The structures were then inserted into a sand mold, cast with Hydrocal, and often covered with tar.

Some of these sculptures appear on the cover of a contemporary magazine from Syracuse, NY. Their dramatic air evokes dark industrial installations. It seems like the concave inside of a disturbing planet from which tubes and metal bars protrude.

Tambellini sits, thoughtfully, on one of the mixing containers as a Puerto Rican child from the neighborhood stands inside one of the semi-spherical sculptures. The sculpture does not explicitly deal with planetary representation, nor does it refer to a specific array associated with planets. Instead, we are dealing with a form which is related to, but at the same time incapable of being definitively associated with something specific.

Every reference of the piece, instead, returns to its beginning.

We see only forms that are circular, convex caves and the

emergence of metal objects from the plane of the cast. In his sculpture, Tambellini seems to be fascinated with the emptiness and fullness of the semi-spherical element. It is as though he had opened a section, among the many possible sections of a sphere, in order to look inside, to discover what protrudes from the cast.

The placement of these embedded iron objects was done as “in the dark”; Tambellini would place the metal objects in the cast without seeing their final arrangement inside, underscoring the interrelation of casts and forms, emptiness and fullness, internal and external, visible and invisible, light and darkness. (While studying with Ivan Mestrovic at the University of Notre Dame, Tambellini had made a bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman.

This represented a form that also evokes the semicircular. But now, for his Hydrocals, any connection to the maternal planet would stray from the artist’s intention and derail our thinking.)

Tambellini’s sculptures of this period appear to manifest the destructive aspect of the American redevelopment boom, not in a symbolic or metaphorical sense, but in a literal one. In a statement of dramatic irony, the artist used materials salvaged from demolished buildings in his neighborhood to make these sculptures.

At the time when Tambellini arrived in Lower East Side, the neighborhood was predominately Puerto Rican, reflecting the influx of recent immigrants. It had been a Jewish neighborhood, and even then it was home to poor families, many of them Russian immigrants. Allen Ginsberg still lived nearby. Vulnerable to the push for urban renewal, Tambellini’s neighborhood was being demolished building by building. Remnants of homes created pockets of alien microenvironments, and Tambellini still remembers the remains of an old Synagogue, an exposed wall of which bore a painting of the Lion of Judah.

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Aldo Tambellini

For him, the bombed-out zone from his childhood in WWII was being recreated in New York. His eyes were still full of B-23 air raids, the devastation of men and landscape, the deafening sound of exploding bombs, and the destruction of his neighborhood, San Concordio, in Lucca, Italy. Tambellini connects the destructive shelling of war and the destruction of urban speculation in the new post-war capitalism. With a parallel force of violence, the old and humane gets torn down to erect the new, sanitized substitutes, building incessantly.

Tambellini’s Hydrocal sculptures incorporate metal remnants and personal belongings of the immigrant communities. The sculptures, with their spherical forms and empty insides, offer rebirth to what was left of the old neighborhood by reconstructing its ruins into a new unity, all enveloped in black.

As gesso was injected into the voids in the petrified lava beds of Pompeii to locate the human forms immured within, so it was with the Hydrocals, which filled empty forms inside a space, existing in darkness and yet unseen. Tambellini later writes in one of his poems: “making the visible invisible making the invisible visible” In addressing the prevalence of destruction in his surroundings, the circular element spontaneously entered his work: the circle and the hemispheres begin to appear in his three-dimensional structures as they do in his painting.

Tambellini relocated to a storefront, still in the Lower East Side, forming new friendships and connections. His ability to establish relationships and solidarity with the powerless runs throughout his life and work. The attention he pays to people, his ability and desire to speak to anyone at all, encourages new 14

connections. Like the generating black, his activities developed from the core of his being. He became an activist in an underground culture, opposed, isolated, and marginalized by an ethos that glorifies money.

In this period, Tambellini befriended the black poets who held meetings across the street from his storefront and published UMBRA, a magazine renowned for its insights into black identity and civil rights. The pointed discussions evolving from these friendships reaffirmed Tambellini’s insights into the hidden destructiveness of society and heightened his treatment of these forces in his work. Some of these poets – Ishmael Reed, Norman Pritchard, and Calvin Hernton – later participated in Tambellini’s multi-media (Electromedia) performances.

In 1962, he published an underground newsletter called The Screw, and organized “Group Center,” bringing together sculptors, poets, photographers, musicians, dancers, and film makers. Group Center was made up of a core of artists: Aldo Tambellini, Elsa Tambellini, Rohn Hahne, Jackie Cassen, Ben Morea, and Don Snyder. They created an artistic community whose focus was to awaken social and artistic conscience and to counteract economic speculation in the arts. Artists and their work, they asserted, should be treated as cultural entities not used as investments. Group Center wanted to unite the world.

Tambellini’s ideal world would be united just as the astronaut sees it from outer space, unified by open communication in which all cultures participate in the dialogue. These were the objectives of Group Center.

The Group protested in front of New York’s museums; they drew graffiti on the ground and held performances to air their criticisms of the misguided orientation of the arts toward profit making. In direct challenge to New York’s artistic establishment,

Black Zero

The Group organized alternative artistic festivals and fashioned alternative spaces for artists to exhibit. They created a dynamic synergy that attracted the participation of a wider range of artists, some of them very well known, like sculptors Marc De Suvero and Richard Stankiewicz, and painter Ad Reinhardt. The Group put together an evening with Julian Beck and Judith Malina from the Living Theater, discussing “Revolution as an Alternative.” It was a period of intense cultural and political activism against the oppressive speculation of the arts, discrimination, segregation, and war. Such topics directly threatened the control of the art world old guard. As a result, the movement and the importance of its ideology were ignored by the establishment.

Tambellini’s early life in Europe fostered his development of a true moral sensibility and an aversion for the devastation of the last world war. Like the younger European artists, Tambellini embraced the call for a “tabula rasa.” He, in this sense, strongly resonated with many young people searching for rebirth and purification from the events of recent history and from fascism.

The idea of starting over motivated the European Group Zero, particularly its German artists, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, and Yves Klein from France. Lucio Fontana, a bit older, opened up a largely unexplored universe through his art, yet he remained fairly unknown to the larger American public, as did many others who gave rise to monochromatic painting and artistic experimentation, such as Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani.

What Group Zero aspired to in Europe was a new beginning of artistic activity, which implied both the nullification of the “baggage” carried over from previous experiences and breaking away from the restrictive art of the past. The artists spoke of operating in a “Zero-Zone,” a new cerebral environment freed of the suffocating structures of the established art world.

Tambellini shared with Zero, and especially with Otto Piene, a heightened detachment from that sort of “informal mannerism” which, by that time, had reduced art and related thinking to commercial products. They shared as well a similar desire to work in a space expanded by technology that would render meaningless the current distinctions made among various visual art forms.

Independently, Tambellini’s artwork was reborn in the use of black. He felt an immediate and extraordinary resonance with Piene’s work, and when the two met in New York, after having seen Piene’s work in a magazine, Tambellini recognized that he and Piene were in deep artistic sympathy, Piene working with smoke and he with black enamel.

In 1963, Tambellini was still unfamiliar with the work of Fontana. His own focus on space arose from a fascination with science, physics, space exploration, and laboratory experiments on cosmic rays captured by a physicist friend in photographs in the early 50s. Tambellini’s way of working, similar in focus to Piene and Fontana, but different in method, had already been established. He was, in his own way, already a “spazialista.”

In the later phases of his development, as his knowledge and experiences advanced along his artistic trajectory, his threedimensional work progressed conceptually.

At that point Tambellini began to paint on canvasses and paper using a very fluid enamel called Duco. Black, with its ancient oriental beginnings, had been used in New York in the Spanish Republic Series by Motherwell as well as by Pollock. Black was used by Franz Kline in his paintings and also by Rothko and de Kooning. Ad Reinhardt, a personal associate of Tambellini, was the exponent of a radical annihilation of painting toward a total black monochromy.

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Aldo Tambellini

Tambellini believed that these developments made the use of black quite natural to him in New York, but he developed a certain intolerance for the informal art academy, of the cliché of New York Abstract Expressionism, and so also of the modernism of Greenberg and his stained canvasses.

Tambellini searched for direct forms that repudiated both the academy and representation. Reflecting back on photographs of the cosmic rays seen ten years earlier, Tambellini found a primary form, an almost primordial form: the circle, a black form which he drew by hand with precision and accuracy, avoiding dripping. But, unexpectedly, he found that the circular form deals with energy. Therefore, it does not intend to communicate a subject nor the representation of an object, nor does it refer to anything external to the painting. It intends to transmit energy, to create a device which stops and then retransmits the luminous energy whose source is certainly not earthly, but spatial, just like the light from the sun or the asteroids in the night sky.

So, in the same manner that the cosmic ray was imprisoned on the negative, the relationship between light and color seems to invert itself on the canvas to become a black circle. In essence, Tambellini searches for a device* not only to present painting as a three-dimensional object but also to function as receptor and transmitter of energy through its viewing.

This device becomes almost a petition in support of an expansion of the canon of the modernists. In this case, the painting becomes not only a tri-dimensional object closed unto itself (which already constituted an infraction of the modernist’s bi-dimensionality), but also an object installed in real space to receive the light external to the painting, as well as its internal *A device (dispositivo) is a heterogeneous conglomeration of components that form a system, a unifying web. Rethinking the modernist reductions of single mediums to their bare essentials is a clear contradiction.

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light, the plane of existence for the viewer and the visual process.

And it was this conscious act that clarified itself slowly as Tambellini worked on the target slides and their perspective of projection into space.

Tambellini also understood film to be celluloid, a material on which one could intervene by painting, perforating, and treating with chemical agents in order then to project it inside an environment. But these processes are not limited to a mechanical method. The projection required a complex system which, at that point, went beyond any single internal parameter of a single medium. Rather, it appeared to be a device inside of which the media components seemed to be connected. In 1964, on the occasion of the gallery exhibitions Quantum 1 and Quantum 2, Tambellini exhibited The Echo, rigorously black, a work which he defined as a spatial painting.

There was no real methodological connection between Fontana and Tambellini until 1963,** when Tambellini punched holes into the celluloid of the slides and projected them. The act of perforation and projection, in this case, could be interpreted as a sort of spatial concept reinterpreted through light as a new media vehicle – that of the projection of slides. As a result, in that initial moment when he began to experiment in a painterly manner with photographic materials, Tambellini worked concurrently at creating the large canvasses of black Duco with the circles. This expanded the experimental consciousness of the artist into a sort of trans-media and post-media experience.

Another consideration, in regard to the aforementioned sculpture, is that the medium of painting immediately suggests **Editor’s note: Tambellini had already penetrated the plane of his material in the Black Series (1961-1962).

Black Zero

a sense of weightlessness. The circular form, its marked empty spaces, suspends and enhances the weightiness of the sculpture.

Tambellini reflected upon suspension in space, thinking of the images of the astronauts in their space labs without gravity anticipating the moon landing. It was also a way to escape the horizontal line.

The technology of the 60s transformed the world. It proposed a new reality that could be questioned at all levels. The idea of leaving the horizontal earthly spaces forces a new orientation toward the globe, through which one can revisit the divisions and global disparities: political, economic, social, etc.

Space was a concept which we can now define as utopian. A future was being projected in which technology, science, and art, finally operating in a symbiotic union and still as separate entities, would have united the world. Space was being understood as a concept but also as a vast reality. Across the ether, the real physical space, we add the wireless processes of communication. Beyond that there is the energy that crosses space: the cosmic rays, light. The consciousness of the new dimension of space could not help but expand the traditional consciousness of the various media. We can emphatically affirm that such consciousness expanded by real environmental space and the different media conceived within this real space constituted a fundamental artistic innovation. It was dealing with environmental art.

The circles which Tambellini painted with Duco in the early years of the 60s are substantially intransitive forms, forms that one could immediately see, concepts that are instantly understood. The exit from the terrestrial orbit, culminating in the lunar mission of 1969, forces a new and unifying vision of the earth.

Tambellini’s Echo seeks out the same immediacy with which one sees the earth from space. But the painting of the black circle does not refer to something else. It represents neither a planet or a circle, nor anything “other.” Each painting is a primary form with a strong environmental presence, acting boldly on the perception of the beholder. In this sense, Tambellini precedes the primary forms of environmental art and of minimalism.

For this reason, that sort of black sun, which we would be led to imagine metaphorically, becomes a vehicle for the vision which reconceptualizes itself, almost as if it detaches itself from the weight of any material support and dematerializes itself.

Therefore, it deals with a sort of spatial concept, a vision which is transmitted to the observer in the real world. And above all, it deals with a primary form which is capable of creating its own environmental device and locates itself essentially as a process of the transmission of the energy, real environmental light outside of the painting, which is allowing this to occur.

The concept of transmission, perfected over time, will be a major determinant of Tambellini direction – transmission of forms to a spectator, the transmission of energy. This implies always an opening of the work similar to Umberto Eco’s contemporary notion of “The Open Work.”

In this form of total transmission, Tambellini creates a painting that dematerializes itself in the reception of the viewer. Despite his link to the New York School, and thanks to the fact that he held a position of “outsider,” he is able not only to receive the lessons of Fontana as his European peers did, but also to detach himself from informal materialistic expression. In this sense, he constitutes a sort of trait d’union among the French and German artists (particularly Otto Piene) and the New York School.

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Aldo Tambellini

Tambellini reduces painting to its essential, toward a personal monochromatic expression which abolishes the illusionism of easel painting. The large black circles on a white background of cheap material become a device of perception in which the empty space between the canvas and the viewer is included in the environmental process.

Subsequently, in his first inter-media (Electromedia) experiments, the architectural space as environment becomes an integral part of the device. The frame of the work becomes the environmental space, all characteristics of which force us to reassess Tambellini’s work with much greater attention.

In that plane, the large black circle paintings, the moment of the instant transmission of the form, a pure form, intransitive, does not lean towards a single artistic logic, but more to a stronger image that understands the impossibility of keeping the subconscious from inferring meanings from it or inserting them into it, even if these resisted meanings are immediately bounced back to the sender for lack of logical conformity, due to the absence of any definitive reference. It is a pure transmission.

The only thing that matters is immediacy, its strength, not the object! Its strength lies in simultaneously engaging and affecting both the conscious and the unconscious of the viewer.

The minimalist object refutes any kind of reference to both the internal and external. It comes across as self-referential. But in practice, this ability to imply references, “having been chased out of the door, enters through the window.” One can see, for example, those comparisons that, with time, were established with industrial materials and processes.

If the unavoidability of the references is an aspect, even if secondary, that is present in minimalism, it is present in the 18

same manner in the Tambellinian spatial paintings, which in deference to it do not repudiate such comparison. Maybe because it is secondary, or maybe because it repudiates the industrial, puritanical coldness, it fascinates instead, at least in a specific phase, the minimal artists.

The Echo, presented in the Quantum1 Exhibition, does not refer to a planet, to a vinyl disc, or to an acoustic box from a stereo.

It becomes auto-referential. It does not close itself as a monad to visual transmission. Even some minimalist sculptures, at the subconscious level, continue just the same to be associated with something other than themselves. In comparison, The Echo, for its visual immediacy in its circular forms, the instantaneous perception is different from the minimalist process of progression and repetition, from doing one thing after another. It deals instead with the transmission of something auto-referential, that dematerializes as a perception and arranges itself as a process opened internally in an environmental field, spatial, involving it at the core of its strategic device. In 1963, Tambellini finds a supply of his photographic slides slated to be discarded. He starts to scratch, paint and pierce them. Fontana did not ever get this far. He never perforated a film leader, nor ever burned one! Not even Burri got to this point: this was a radical act, and very critical, as it was done consciously and intentionally.

Tambellini scratched spirals and circular forms. Then he projected them with a Kodak Carousel on the walls of buildings on 6th Street and Avenue D on the Lower East Side. Following this, he painted on glass mounts for slides and called them “lumagrams.”

This is the beginning of his multimedia development, which he names “Electromedia.” Tambellini was motivated by the desire to expand his artistic experience into new forms. In doing this, he looks immediately to give it an environmental dimension.

He projected them onto houses.

Black Zero

He later expanded his concepts of black, light, and movement with his hand-treated film. “Expanding” meant radically redefining the artistic workspace, using instead of paint those elements and concepts which are natural in space, like light and movement.

parameters that soon became too restrictive for most artists, a split that became a very manifest problem as it applied to film and the new media. What was in fact the essence of film? Was the essence in the screen, in the film, in the projection of the leader on the screen?

In the United States, modernism was synonymous with the Avant-garde and was the main positive focus of the most authoritarian critic of American art, Clement Greenberg, who dominated the New York scene up to the second half of the 60s. The art that rooted itself in the modern culture of the West was defined by Greenberg, who supported a separation of the various arts. In his view, the work of art had to avoid any reference to the external that might intrude on the most literal and essential nature of the medium. He would ask questions that were directed at identifying the bare essentials of each medium, painting, sculpture, film, etc. He would ask: How can you identify the most basic, lowest common denominator of the various disciplines? And how do you distinguish among them?

Greenberg’s tendency was to eliminate from each single discipline all of the “corrupting” effects, either adopted from, or transmitted by, other methods. For example, the essence of painting was in its bi-dimensional flatness and in its elimination of its surface. The essence of sculpture was its tri-dimensionality, while for theatre, it was space and time. Therefore, all that did not fit into one major category, e.g. painting or sculpture, was considered theatre or non–art.

This dissatisfaction with existing definitions and formulas encouraged new thinking about art and its expression.

Increasingly experimental works, such as Tambellini’s, threw modern critics into a state of crisis, and their reaction was predictable. Whosoever experimented with modern technologies risked being excluded from the community of artists recognized by the establishment. In these years of profound change, and despite mounting censure from old-guard critics, Tambellini’s uncontrollable creativity and development into intermedia work was seminal in forcing the expansion of the boundaries set by Greenberg, and thereby, in dismantling the modernist edifice itself.

Greenberg remained faithful to the old definition posited

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who, in his Laocoon, made a distinction between the arts of time and the arts of space. Music and literature were of time, painting and sculpture were of space, while the theatre was viewed as an intermediate hybrid of the various arts. However, this separation of the arts imposed

Translated from the Italian by Anna Salamone and Aldo Tambellini.

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Aldo Tambellini

A-11, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

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Black Zero

Aldo Tambellini’s Voyage into the Illuminating Darkness Marek Bartelik

“I believe that real artistic relatedness is not ‘influence’ the way historians tend to write about it, but Edmund Wilson’s ‘shock of recognition,’ that is, seeing something you recognize that confirms you in what you already are – though it is true also that there are Kierkegaardian ‘leaps,’ sprung by paradoxical faiths.”1 I revisit these words, which Robert Motherwell wrote in a letter in 1956, to speak about another artist, Aldo Tambellini, who since the early 1960s has engaged in a continuing dialogue with the achromatic color black, a major subject in his works.

In the late 1980s, Tambellini found several discarded rolls of architectural blueprints. In his studio, he placed them on the floor and, kneeling, painted swirling circles and disks on them in a gestural manner, using black acrylic paint, wax, and graphite powder. Additionally, he exposed some of the images to chemicals, and perforated or scratched them. All of these works are interconnected: subsequent images were produced in response to previous ones, while, simultaneously, the artist acknowledged and responded to the graphic content of the blueprint. They are endowed with great simplicity, but each image is highly distinct; the black form by turns suggests a giant eyeball, the eye of a hurricane, a black hole, or the Chinese pi disk (also known as The Stone of Heaven). The circles and disks usually appear single and centered, but not always: in one work a larger round form enters the space from the lower right corner to push a smaller one upward; in another, a similar form is crossed with emotional intensity by a curving line that looks like the trajectory of a comet or an aimless ejaculation or, simply, an abstract calligraphic mark. The images can be serious and humorous, refined and profane at the same time. In Tambellini’s art blackness undergoes constant transformation, changing

back and forth from luminous and lush to matte and gray. The centers of the circular forms often contain what appears to be an opening – as if to suggest a blind spot that is transformed into a passage to another space – making the shapes additionally enigmatic and fascinating. Is this yet another background that turns into a foreground? The black forms seem to float in space.

The series is titled Black Energy and dated 1988-89. As the artist observed, the sequential order was similar to the one used in his Black Film Series from 1965-69.2 Tambellini refers to his famous experimental films, mostly produced without the use of a camera, which began with Black Is in 1965, and developed and extended into multimedia performances, paintings, drawings, and works in other mediums.

For Tambellini, blackness has embodied an anarchistic thrust in a broader than formal sense, perhaps not dissimilar to the way the Suprematists in Vitebsk, Russia, understood the black square as a symbol of both rebelliousness and the cosmic aspirations of the revolutionary artist. Commenting on the 1965 performance Black Zero (a major work of Tambellini’s “Intermedia Program”) the artist declared: “‘BLACK ZERO’ is the cry from the oppressed man.”3 In a special issue of Artscanada from October 1967 devoted to the subject of “black,” the artist elaborated: “black is actually the beginning of everything, which the art concept is not. Black gets rid of the historical definition. Black is a state of being blind and more aware…I strongly believe in the word ‘black power’ as a powerful message, for it destroys the old notion of western man, and by destroying that notion it also destroys the tradition of the art concept.”4 The meaning of “black” here is clearly political, a response both to the domestic and international politics of the United States in the 1960s, measured by their impact on us through the medium of television, and to art history. The subsequent work, Black Trip 21

Aldo Tambellini

2, 1967, is about, according to the artist, “the violence and the mystery of the American psyche seen through the eyes of a black man and the Russian Revolution.”5 Black TV, 1968, exposes the violence on television in a rapid succession of abstract or out-of-focus images that relate to such historical events as the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the war in Vietnam. In these films, darkness is related to the media culture, which, with its ecstasy of technological innovation and instant news, becomes a tool of control and manipulation. Tambellini’s declaration that black is the beginning allied him with Otto Piene of Group ZERO; he shared his preoccupation with electronic media with Nam June Paik, and his interest in the uninhibited “open body” with Carolee Schneemann. His vast and impressive creative output from that period secured him a pivotal place among the precursors of transgressive multimedia art that challenges established norms.

The significance of “black” changes in the Suspended in Space series. In these works, the mature artist appears less as the rebellious avantgardist ready to challenge the boundaries of perception and more as a self-reflective gatekeeper of a cosmology with a distinct chromatic and formal topology. He works in the silence of his studio. In such an environment he might, in fact, have made his “Kierkegaardian ‘leap,’” into the grander cosmic space.6 Such a leap might seem paradoxical for an artist with a longstanding record of interaction with the public, but it was perhaps paramount for his vision of artistic communication as simultaneously time specific and timeless.

In the past, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, and Frank Stella, to name just a few artists, ventured into their own quiet blackness with often striking results. In the 1970s, Pierre Soulages invented a word, “outrenoir,” (“beyond black”), which stands for “another space” and “another mental state” beyond those of generic 22

“black.” Tambellini’s works from the late 1980’s might signal movement in a similar solitary direction, or perhaps more provocatively, a vanguard universalism. We’d do well to recall that the American artist worked on his “Suspended in Space” series during the period when Ross Bleckner was creating his series of dark paintings alluding to the AIDS epidemic, Lorna Simpson and Lyle Ashton Harris were challenging the norms of representation of black people in America, and a scandal erupted over Robert Mapplethorpe’s latest photographs; C. Carr’s essay in the catalogue of the 1990 “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,” bears the provocative title: “Rehearsals for Zero Hour: Performance in the Eighties.” While the deeply socially and culturally aware Tambellini must have registered these changes in the way art and culture in America interacted with politics, he increasingly focused on “the circular logic of the Universe,” which embraces the diversity of forms in life and in art as universal and purposeful.7 In the “Suspended in Space” series, Tambellini’s leap becomes formally circular. In the way his artistic gesture interacts with the existing, found surface of the architectural blueprints, his black circular forms become graphic ciphers of artistic exploration of boundless space. The blueprints read as remnants of American cities undergoing constant transformation, the past submerged, the future rising upon it, but surviving in its traces. By celebrating the “accidental” encounter of the artist’s free hand with a coded architectural design, the art takes us into the tunnels of illuminating darkness, without identifying, or perhaps knowing, its final destination. The imaginary voyage in space appears both familiar and strange. In the process of traveling within Tambellini’s works, we experience our own emphatic “shock of recognition,” which might return us to its original, Melvillean meaning, as he described it in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 1850.8 Melville is fascinated by the “blackness

Black Zero

in Hawthorne,” but he cautions about reaching too deep into the artist’s psyche: “Nor need you fix upon that blackness in him, if it suit you not. Nor, indeed, will all readers discern it, for it is, mostly, insinuated to those who may best understand it, and account for it; it is not obtruded upon every one alike.”9 Engagement with Tambellini’s own quiet art may insinuate a similar reading. ____________________ 1. Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111. The second edition of Wilson’s The Shock of Recognition; the Development of Literature in the United States appeared in 1955.

“Shock of recognition” is, in fact, a term coined by Herman Melville, which Wilson used in his discussion of the forming and spreading of a distinct American literature from 1840s on. The term became popular among artists in the 1940s and 1950s interested in developing uniquely American art.

2. Statement provided to the present author in June 2010.

3. Aldo Tambellini, unpublished book, 26 4. Ibid, 36 5. Ibid, 39 6. Focusing on the subject of anxiety, the Danish philosopher argued that being anxious generates self-conscious reflection, while linking making choices to personal responsibility; see Begrebet Angest (The Concept of Anxiety), first published in 1844.

7. The expression relates to the article “The Circular Logic of the Universe,” written by Natalie Angier for The New York Times (December 8, 2009), which the artist has used as a reference to talk about his art.

8. It reads: “genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

9. Ibid.

Aldo Tambellini in Gerard’s Backyard, North Williamsburg, 2004.

Photo by Gerard Malanga

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Aldo Tambellini

We Are the Primitives of a New Era, 1961. Monoprint and Duco on paper, 22 x 35 inches

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Black Zero

Aldo Tambellini’s Art of the Now, a Futurological Approach Lisa Paul Streitfeld

The future is the present. The present is the future. Jean Gebser’s paradoxical theory of the ever-present origin1 anticipated a 21st century art form that resolves the contradictions, or the aporias, associated with conventional linear views of time, within a holistic integral structure. By definition, the art of a new, nonlinear paradigm must embrace everything that has come before, and everything that is to come. At the center of the duality of past and future is the dynamism of the present moment, the transcendent reality of the Now. Gebser’s view was linked, inexplicably at the time, to the precession of the equinoxes, in which the wobble of the Earth’s spinning axis causes the sun to appear to rotate backwards (counterclockwise) through the zodiac2 as it revolves around the center of the galaxy, which is also cycling through space. In a universe in which everything is in motion, to venture within is also to connect with the outer cosmos; the intimate is the infinite.

How do we recognize an Ouroboric3 art form that engages this revolving galactic orientation while embodying a non-linear structure in its very principles? Before the development of the high-powered telescope, which brought other galaxies into our view, Aldo Tambellini departed from his classical training to embrace a galactic mode of being, and creating. It was an enigmatic, perhaps mystical, experience that ignited his life-long challenge of making the Now – from seed to gestation to birth – manifest in art. When he was just 22, a stranger appeared mysteriously at his studio and charged him with a task that would point to an entirely new relationship among material, space, and time.

Defining the NOW in a Personal Narrative When Tambellini arrived in lower Manhattan in 1959, an upheaval in the old forms of artistic creation was underway.

From the perspective of our time, these happenings can now be viewed as precursors to the “do it yourself ” free-for-all era of social networking where one needn’t leave home to engage in multidimensional digital collaboration incorporating several disciplines at once. But fifty years ago, television was in its infancy, representing a new medium for exploration in art. Tambellini viewed the (r)evolutionary potential of electronic transmission as a tool for community building and intercommunication.

What is more, he penetrated directly into the signal as a means of appropriating the public airwaves for artists. His “Electromedia” collaborations, concurrent with the explorations of Nam June Paik, launched a revolution that became more apparent as the commercial domination of the medium homogenized the mass culture.

Tambellini’s pioneering work began innocently enough in 1963 as an organic exploration of his East Village neighborhood.

He discovered the slide as a ready-made surface for painting circles and spirals. Seeking, as always, to incorporate his environment in his iconography, he projected the resulting images onto a tenement building. The narrative was developed in a series of 160 handmade “lumagrams,” black circles split by a band of light. Projected in his Electromedia experiments to an accompaniment of sound and motion, these communal experiences were subversively awakening the kundalini4 in the artistic underground.

Subsequent experiments with film intensified his exploration of dark energy5, furthering a lifelong trajectory as a rebel liberated from traditional structures of museum, gallery, and even studio.

Bypassing external structures, he painted emulsion directly onto 25

Aldo Tambellini

celluloid. The resulting narrative of holistic multidimensionality would not be understood until digital technology rendered such a renegade, hand-made narrative literal: the birth into a new mythology limited only by the borders of a single frame of celluloid as it follows another in a non-linear linear sequence.

The marriage of the poles of this contradiction emanating from the artist’s unconscious consisted of holistic chapters – comprising past (painting), present (film) and future (digital) – in a multidimensional narrative of rotating dark energy projected through light. Within these frames, a new archetype was being formed that would sustain in dynamic tension the opposites rendering Tambellini’s image making so powerfully charged.

The sign for the Black Gate Theater still exists on Second Avenue, a relic of Tambellini’s pioneering movement that found a home in his East Village neighborhood in 1966. Carving out a space in the ghetto for intermedia experiments exploring the “dark energy”5 that had yet to be labeled as such by science, this venue was born out of earlier collaborative experiments. Devoting his activism as well as his art-making to the transpersonal dynamism of the black hole, Tambellini moved into the space of the looming shadow cast by Warhol, who himself had entered the shadow of Hollywood star-making in his 47th Street film-making Factory.

Yet, as Warhol came to define Pop as a new movement devoted to the everyday object created by mass production, Tambellini penetrated further into the American shadow, working with black revolutionary poets and musicians in his “Black Zero” multimedia productions. These events weren’t simply about a new integral aesthetic of transparency or statements about racial injustice; they derived from and incorporated, if arcanely, profound and deeply personal experience from his childhood.

His city of Lucca, in war-torn Italy, was liberated by the AfricanAmerican Buffalo Soldier regiment, imprinting a permanent 26

sense on the young artist that the Black Man represented a symbol of freedom.

Aside from his dedication to the alchemy of transforming lead into gold in his programmatic negation of color, there is another important contrast that separated Tambellini from the Pope of Pop. In 1962, Warhol developed the technique of silkscreen as a statement of artistic mission, a method of factory (re) production that simultaneously provided him the freedom to pursue the jet-set lifestyle. In contrast, Tambellini relied on the intimacy of the curved hand to create a vocabulary of cycles, at times using architectural paper to build geometrical structure into the very foundation of his image making. In doing so, he directly incorporated a philosophy of transcendence, evident in the emergence of celestial space from the negation of discarded or discredited human architectonic paradigms. Mirroring the rotation of the planets in space, as well as the rotation of the chakras,6 the gesture united his personal narrative with the universal mythology of the birth of a new age. For Tambellini, black is the womb where the archetype of holism, what C.G. Jung referred to as the Self, is born, and the circle within the circle is the galactic view of an evolving universe, of independent yet interconnected revolving bodies. In dedicating his very being to a process of continual surrender, the artist tied his fate, or timing, to that of the New Birth, an assertion made evident in The Black Seed of Cosmic Creation Series, executed in 1961-2.

The future, our present, is immanent in the past, of course, but the process of historical germination obscures the fact. The elaboration of the division between such a penetration into the depth of Self and the essential superficiality of the not-Self was a necessary step in this process. The incommensurable paths of Pop’s glorification (or conversely, the subversive mirroring) of the slick surface of consumption and that of the devoted

Black Zero

seeker of a new, humane, paradigm is revealed in their divergent approach to the mass icon. As TV promulgated a consumerdriven popular culture to the masses, Warhol erased his personal history from his work, supplanting himself with the well-known persona in which his image of celebrity, flattened into twodimensionality in his iconic silkscreens, hovers emotionlessly, arrested in time and space. Meanwhile, Tambellini pursued a profoundly personal narrative in his obsessive engagement with and literal tracing of the geometry of holism itself – the circle. The form, with a hole in its center, was lodged in his subconscious as the geometry of nurture, invoking the mill where his family took refuge during the war.

In Arriving, the ancient and humble utilitarian millstone is transmuted into a 21st century icon illuminated by the artist’s written musing on the paradox of fame (“Arriving is a point of never arriving.”) around the ancient symbol for the Sun, divine spirit (circle) surrounding the seed of potential, representing the potentiality of the Self.

Tenets of a New Paradigm The trajectory of art history in the postwar period is explicit in its categories: from action to flatness, from minimalism to vacancy, and, in our time, to unrooted meaninglessness.

From Clement Greenberg’s Abstract Expressionist bible to the dictates

of feminist postmodern deconstructivism breaking down the western canon, the concepts which engaged the art of these movements were, as ever, the experience of these generations coming to terms with the radical emptiness of the social model that had eventuated in total war, profound corruption, corporate domination, and universal injustice. The pockets and residues of humane art that coexisted with and struggled against the officially sanctioned arts of the period sustained ancient values through barren and hopeless times, and in some instances sheltered within themselves the seeds of a new paradigm. Where there were only fragments, these proposed The Unifying Symbol; where there was despair and inaction, these offered models of Proactivity; where there was ruin and isolation, these urged Interactivity With the Environment; where there was stasis and the dread that it would always be thus, these taught Dynamic Presence; where those saw a life of unremitting uniformity, these spoke of Transcendence; where those admitted nothing new under the sun, the new art embraced, and thrived on Uncertainty. And underlying everything was a profound sense of solidarity expressed in collaboration, perhaps the essence of the new way.

By the turn of the millennium, collaboration had become the means as well as the message, leading to and Arriving (Manifesto Series), 1961. Duco and writing on paper, 35” x 22” from these tenets of a New Paradigm 27

Aldo Tambellini

Art Form: The Unifying Symbol; Interactivity With the Environment; Proactivity; Dynamic Presence; Transcendence; and Embracing/Overcoming Uncertainty. The New Paradigm integrates and confers retrospective meaning upon the fragments and cul-de-sacs of post-modernism and reunites contemporary art with the ancient Western tradition with which it had selfconsciously and abruptly broken subsequent to the Second World War, with many of its avant-garde practitioners viewing themselves as shamanic interpreters of hidden patterns of meaning.

The Unifying Symbol

With his personal roots in subatomic realism, Tambellini’s blood-infused 1962 On Becoming 2, dynamically balanced by the erotic attraction of opposites, was the signal of his unique and precarious positioning as the hidden link between the American avant-garde and a 21st century grassroots movement rooted in the erotically charged icon at dawn of civilization, the hieros gamos.7 To the extent that the tenets of a New Paradigm in Art were approached by Abstract Expressionism, and before them the Surrealists, the individual artist faced considerable personal peril in accessing an archetype that had yet to be fully configured in the collective unconscious. For Tambellini, dealing with loss at the most fundamental and personal level, the danger of this terrain was projected onto his personal trajectory with the tragic disappearance of his works for nearly 30 years following yet another prescient series (1984) in which he consciously created works on paper only to destroy them afterwards. “I was consumed with destruction,” he says of that time. His premiere exhibition, titled after his final 1989 series of graphite and wax with perforations, Black IS, represents reclamation as well as a celebration of an Ouroboric movement that has perforce remained underground, or misunderstood, awaiting the moment when the collective consciousness was prepared to embrace it.

Lurking behind Tambellini’s penetration into the black vortex is a mystery that was never explained: a stranger appeared in the open door of his studio in 1952, asking him to create a circle.

Not just a single circle, but a series investigating the very essence of the form. Being open to the unexpected and the inexplicable, Tambellini embraced the commission, which would provide the artist, at the age of 22, with a life-long trajectory for his art. Instinctively, he sought to materialize a deep awareness of the circle as an iconic form embodying the convergence of past, present, and future. Resolving the inherent problem of placing an ancient objective figure into a subjective quest for meaning would necessitate a leap into a new paradigm of non-linear transcendent reality.

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Recourse to the ancient past to uncover the sacred geometry of a defining symbol is a primary characteristic of a New Paradigm Art, evident already in the first great self-conscious art movement of modernity, the Renaissance. In our own time, the World Trade Center can be seen as such a defining symbol, whose destruction drew a demarcation between the world-weary post-modernist era and the narrative of a new non-linear paradigm in which the Ouroboric life/death/rebirth cycle reveals the transformation of personal narrative into the universalism of a truly global art form.

The ultimate key to the marriage of objective/non-objective would prove to be rotation. The culmination of Tambellini’s language for the spiral was his 1967 cameraless spiral “Videograms” created from electronic waves emitted by a television set. This breakthrough was followed by his invention of a television sculpture, Black Spiral. In removing the hand of the artist from the symbol of life, he was creating an electronic visual vocabulary for a new era precipitated by the human exploration of space.

Black Zero

Proactivity

he protested the treatment of artists by the institutions that purported to serve art. The overt radicalism of the actions sealed Tambellini’s fate in the art world of the day; he was ostracized by the system of curators, dealers, and critics, compelling him – as if it were necessary – to adhere to his previously established trajectory of fierce penetration into the unknown realm of dark energy. His very activism kept him in the shadows awaiting the moment when the birth of a new hero was at hand.

A prophetic 1950 painting reveals Tambellini’s remarkable level of vision and masterful style already at the age of 20. The Funeral depicts the artist and another man bearing a coffin while leading a winding procession of grieving women up a hillside. This prophetic self-narrative superbly exemplifies a multidimensional reality in which the future is determined by the conscious proactivity of the present. As such, it sweeps the past into a materialization of the ever-present origin, invoking the Eternal Return, in which the New Son/Sun replaces the god of a dying age.8 The coffin, of course, belongs to the patriarchy and its fixation on linear time. This rather classical painting already contains the narrative that would emerge in such future experiments with quantum reality as 10 Second Delay, a live space and time interaction with projected recordings of the event. Leaping into the non-linearity of the everpresent origin demands the radical act of making the Self known through such self-determining creative actions. In seeing the early phases of what would become the corporate domination of the art institution, Tambellini instigated The Screw, a project consisting of a communal magazine and The Funeral, 1950. Cassein on masonite, 35 x 47 inches public demonstrations in which

Interactivity with the Environment “Unless we become a society which exchanges with each other, we will be destroying each other,” says Tambellini. In November 2009, the artist returned to the area of his former East Village neighborhood, gathering old friends and collaborators for a long-awaited reprise of Black Zero. It was an experience for whose profundity few among its audience were prepared, a journey into the depths of the soul by way of the bodily penetration of militant black poetry and jazz, marrying the reaches of space projected onto a spherical black balloon. The darkness of outer space zoomed into the black of inner space, striking the recesses where fear 29

Aldo Tambellini

lurks and bringing it to the surface to be expelled with the pop of the balloon. While the poetry evoked the racial tension of the early 60s, the collaboration was both timeless and timely, piercing the mythology bubble surrounding 2012.9 The Mayans viewed the Milky Way as the Great Mother, the Galactic Center as her womb, the dark rift as her birth canal, and the central bulge as the pregnant birth of a new world.10 The mythology of a new birth arising out of the chaos of breakdown has been a powerful personal narrative driving the activism of Aldo Tambellini. Having experienced the destruction of his city during World War II bombings, he sought for the rest of his life to secure himself in his environment. When he returned to his birthplace of Syracuse, he painted street murals and made connections with the urban soul through documentarystyle photography. When he was living in a storefront in his decimated neighborhood of the East Village, he established his image of brujo (magician) with what was perhaps the first neighborhood storefront art installation in his living space. He invited the Hispanic children in the neighborhood to participate in the making of his convex sculptures, thereby externalizing into his environment the nurturing he discovered in the most universal of holistic forms.

As instructor at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the late 70s and 80s, Tambellini conducted experiments with an authentic grassroots reality TV as a form of interactive public expression. Individuals in different public locations would speak to one another in words and movement through the medium, emphasizing the potential for interactive mass communication that would later be realized on a global scale by digital technology. Five Minutes in Pittsburgh had different students positioned in different pats of the city with video cameras to record their environment precisely at noon, and then 30

all the material was put together as a visual conversation aired by Carnegie Tech. By bringing the public airwaves directly into the communal space, the intermedia pioneer was making a radical statement about the commercial theft of the airwaves that would come to define the celebrity-obsessed corporate entertainment media. His philosophy of appropriation and making familiar the transcendent energies behind 20th century media was the ultimate rebellion against the commercial forces at work behind the homogenization of the mass culture.

Dynamic Presence The art forms of a new paradigm, by their very definition, must be alive, embodying the principle of rotation in the subatomic space of raised consciousness as a co-creation with the external revolution of the planets and their satellites.11 The dynamic physicality of Tambellini’s art is already evident in his 1959 masterpiece, Pregnant Woman, which abstracts the classical figure just enough to investigate the circle as a material design in the fully feminine body. The circle is present here not just in the obvious places of the stomach, buttocks and breasts, but also the knees, shape of the arms, seat and head.

This idiosyncratic “Black Madonna”12 restores the lost feminine divinity in the “full circle” reinstatement of the sacred power of the Great Mother in the female physical form, making the body alive and dynamic, even in the presence of its earthbound stillness.

Pregnant Woman is alive with the Ouroboric cycle of life/ death/rebirth spiraling through Tambellini’s black art. In this interrelationship between heaven and earth through an obsessive dedication to the very process of rotation, Black IS becomes the resolution of a life journey to penetrate into the very nature of things.

Black Zero

Transcendence Tambellini’s penetration into the circle was a quest for transcendence, internally in his soul, and externally in his art.

The marriage of inner and outer became a black vortex that could equally spin upward into ether or downward into matter.

Jung links Tambellini’s motifs, the circle and the quaternity (the square slide and film frame) to the individuation process: The transcendent function does not proceed without aim and purpose, but leads to the revelation of the essential man. It is in the first place a purely natural process, which may in some cases pursue its course without the knowledge or assistance of the individual and can sometimes forcibly accomplish itself in the face of opposition. The meaning and purpose of the process is the realization, in all of its aspects, of the personality originally hidden away in the embryonic germplasm; the production and unfolding of the original, potential wholeness. The symbols used by the unconscious to this end are the same as those which mankind has always used to express wholeness, completeness and perfection; symbols, as a rule, of the quaternity and the circle.13

The quest emerges again among the New York avant-garde on the very weekend of the premier of Tambellini’s long-deferred exhibition in Cambridge. In an unprecedented “do-it-yourself ” free-form production, Ralph Lemon incorporated monologue, video, the film Solaris, live dance and light sculpture into How Can You Stay in the House All

Day and Not Go Anywhere? Using the organizing archetypes of opposites – an authentic “ordinary hero,” alternatively as spaceman (heaven) and hare (earth) and a wailing woman – this multidisciplinary artist delivered a personal narrative transcending into a universal language, revealing a new view of human relationship by way of the kundalini-awakened body.

How to form dynamic partnerships in this transcendent field in which everything is blissfully alive? Incorporating all the tenets of a New Paradigm Art delivered into the avant-garde by Tambellini a half century earlier, Lemon shifted the paradigm to infuse an ancient knowledge of sacred geometry into dance – creating duets, trilogies, quartets and quintets illuminating the current struggle of the five, in which sexual desires are continually thwarted by a chaotic system in imbalance.

Such a New Paradigm Art Form has been embraced by the New York avant-garde utterly unaware that the cycle had been completed by an artist who fifty years ago incorporated all these different mediums into live performance, penetrating into the very nature of the uncertainty surrounding dark energy. Collaboration is the medium as well as the message.

Uncertainty

Pregnant Woman, 1957. Bronze, height: 30 inches

Collaboration was the key to getting beyond the known of the ego observer into the Unknown of the paradigm 31

Aldo Tambellini

leap. Engaging with multiple perspectives freed Tambellini from the limitations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in which the consciousness of the scientist or artist affects the outcome of the experiment.

This provided a ready trajectory: the medium of collaboration as an exploration of the transpersonal forces that science had yet to label dark energy was taken from the external realm of personal interaction with other artists in the 60s into the private realm of painting. In creating his black paintings, Tambellini had evolved from the interaction with humans as projections of the transpersonal forces to a private collaboration with the transpersonal forces in the solitary realm of the studio.

The accumulated consciousness that Tambellini brought to his art, which by the 1990s was focused on poetic investigations into the nature of space, enabled him to penetrate into the nature of the invisible dark matter, which continues to confound science through its very invisibility. And paradoxically, the very theory that would have illuminated the artist’s solitary inquiry was also being made invisible.14 Former NASA consultant and current renegade Richard C. Hoagland presents a compelling case for the Hyperdimensional Model as the “theory of everything”15 sought by a scientific community that continues to reject him. Hyperdimensional physics theory attributes the source of 32

stellar energy to rotation, the circular motion that we experience in Tambellini’s black paintings. In deep inner consciousness that the artist brings to his curved gesture, the spin of his undulating line shifts our relationship to inner space, where the configuration of a new archetype is in formation. The theory attributes the torsion spin causing the Earth’s precession to the spatial stress between dimensions; leaping into this vacuum by way of the Tambellini vehicle ipso facto propels the observer/ participant into the holism at the foundation of a paradigm arrived at by intuition alone.

The spirals that emerged as the iconographic center of his later work, most of it existing as sketches in his notebooks, take on this dynamic presence through their very concept, becoming simultaneously more complex and ethereal, more abstract and freed from even allusion to matter, depicting energy exuding energy, the very mechanism by which transpersonal forces effect transference between dimensions, allowing us to experience our future before it happens.

Embracing change as an evolutionary awareness of rotation as the new model for unity immediately negates the division of subatomic space into the either/or of particle vs. wave.

Reviving Modernism

Spiral. Ink Sketch from Notebooks, 2009

Just as postmodernism arose with the failure of science to find a unifying theory, postmodernism must finally die with the ascent of a new paradigm in which such a theory is embedded

Black Zero

in an embodied awareness of a multidimensional reality. What was pursued in the 1960s through the altered states produced by certain drugs is now accessible to the mass of humanity.

Einstein’s theory of relativity reflected and diagnosed the fragmentation of reality thematized in the art of his day, catalyzing his continued search for a Unified Field Theory and proposing a cultural theory for the meta-narrative devoid of authentic characterization. But what postmodernism sought to remedy – the cultural negation of the feminine – it continued to repress by way of the feminist straightjacket which had gained a stronghold on academic thinking at the close of the 20th century.

And yet, this is the quandary over which we now find ourselves perching at the edge of the abyss: only a deep inner wisdom is capable of delivering a holistic model to the minds and hearts of humanity, yet the feminine face of this wisdom is still being denied. Any artistic revival of modernism for the 21st century would have to revive this divine feminine power, identified here as the Kundalini, and unite Her with her masculine consort in the alchemical conjunctio, the sacred marriage of opposites. This archetype entered the New York avant-garde when Tambellini and his partner Beverly Schmidt interacted with his “lumagram” projections, described thus by Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice “…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.”16 Collapse of the Quantum Wave In an exchange of letters over a period of nearly thirty years, C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli agreed17 upon the hieros gamos as the archetype to emerge from under the collapsed wave.18 Tambellini was utilizing the ancient symbol for life, the spiral,

to unite the mediums ruling both the collective consciousness (television) and the collective unconscious (film). We see how his deep intuitive immersion in the transparent process of wielding the transpersonal energies to simultaneously penetrate inner/outer space delivered him into the womb where a new archetype was being formed: the “wavicle.”19 Everything, the Earth itself, is alive in this view, and all is interconnected in a constant stream of interchange between levels of consciousness connecting (feminine) inner knowledge and (masculine) decisive outer action.

Significantly, Tambellini’s most radical public performance, The Event of the Screw, was wielded as an instrument against the entrenched powers of society; yet the symbol was also a signal to artists, as harbingers of what is to come, to inwardly connect with the dark feminine power, the Kundalini activated at the base of the spine which Tambellini makes profoundly visible in his 1962 Black Energy Burns with Fire Series.

How does the wavicle20 manifest itself within this inner evolutionary process? Utilizing the language of quantum physics, a body energized by the Kundalini spiral takes form: the wave of this dynamism will be held in balance by its opposite, the particle.

This state of “stationary motion” is one in which subatomic movement is balanced by external stillness manifesting itself as silence. In this stillness is the leap into the New Paradigm, the unknown realm of a newly emerging archetype, the sacred marriage, where the merging of dynamic complementary bodies gives birth to something entirely new: a new form, a new idea, a new lens for viewing a holistic universe.21 As we experience in The Echo, a pair of white circles within black circles, the dynamism of duality within a unity of opposites is the secret that unlocks the extraordinarily cohesive multimedia 33

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art of Aldo Tambellini. We enter his unknown realm at our own peril, for the loss of the patriarchal ego-self in the blackness is the gap of stillness separating us from the retrieval of the emerging archetype of the Self. The leap of faith that takes us from the wave/particle opposition to the integral revolution of the wavicle is the challenge facing humanity at the time that Tambellini’s art has its premiere exhibition.

It was with the emergence from underground of Tambellini’s art prompted by the 2005 discovery by his archivist, Anna Salamone, of work that had literally been lost for thirty years, that the Ouroboric cycle of his opus could be completed: impregnation (The Black Seed of Cosmic Creation Series), gestation (To Be Enveloped by Black Series), birth (On Becoming Series), life (Manifesto Series), dissolution (Black IS Series), death (Destruction Series), rebirth (Black Energy Suspended Series).

To those of us who have often wondered how an individual artist can escape the gravitational force of history and embody the future in his work, surrendering to the ever-present origin, Aldo Tambellini, shamanic interpreter between paradigms, answers with the ominous and bracing text of his 1961 “manifesto,” The Cell Grew: “we are the primitives of a new era.” ____________________ 1. Jean Gebser. The Ever-Present Origin, translated by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984). Gebser accounts for human progress through four mutations of consciousness: origin/archaic; magical; mythic; mental; and finally, integral structure, which by definition contains all previous stages. His focus on the aperspectival makes him a prescient philosopher for a new modernist movement that isn’t limited by the shadow of the ego.

2. The astrological Great Cycle is the approximate 26,000-year revolution of the Sun through the twelve constellations of the zodiac, with approximately 2,150 years marking an Age. A New Age refers to the change in the constellation appearing at sunrise on the Vernal Equinox, the balance between night and day.

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It is the rotation factor that takes us backwards in time, as we shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. This understanding that we are “moving backwards in time” to our “ever-present” origin which many link to Atlantis.

3. The Ouroboros, an ancient alchemical symbol of circular time represented by a serpent eating its own tail, is the self-reflexivity, or cyclicality, of the artistic process, which is constantly re-creating and renewing itself.

4. In Sanskrit, kundalini literally means coiled, referring to the unconscious libidinal force, Shakti, or serpent power. Coiled at the base of the spine, the activated kundalini is the potential for the fully awakened consciousness of a human being. The term is becoming more prevalent in society due to the popularization of yoga, a Sanskrit word which means union.

5. In 1998 Michael Turner coined the term “dark energy,” derived from Fritz Zwicky’s labeling of “dark matter” in the 1930s. The term is a source of great mystery to scientists who have yet to make the connection between “dark energy” in space and the kundalini power latent in the body. In writing about Tambellini’s art, I use the words interchangeably.

6. Chakra, a Sanskrit word that translates as “wheel” or “turning,” is a vortex for the reception and transmission of energies. The hermetic art views magical correspondences between the planetary energies and the chakras.

7. The hieros gamos (Greek for sacred marriage) is the state of divine union of the opposites achieved in yoga through the union of the goddess Shaki and the god Shiva at the crown of the head, and sought in the alchemical conjunctio as the quintessential element uniting Sol (masculine) and Luna (feminine) under an eclipse cycle. The mythology of the Sacred Marriage Rites originated at the dawn of civilization in ancient Sumer (present day Iraq) as the public betrothal of the love goddess Inanna and her consort, Dumuzi. As a pre-patriarchal love goddess, Inanna’s power of erotic attraction incorporated the sacred marriage in her androgynous persona, identifying herself as “Queen of Heaven and Earth.”

8. Mircea Eliade. The Myth of Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon, 1954).

9. The Mayan long count calendar ends on the Winter Solstice in 2012, causing much speculation regarding an apocalyptic event. While many a career has been made out of prophecies surrounding this precipitous time of a paradigm leap, the obvious is rarely stated: the Mayans actually had a cyclical worldview of life/death/rebirth and it is this very fact of the end of a calendar and a new beginning that confronts the linear view of western time and the repression of the feminine wisdom honored by the Mayan religion. The counterculture mythology surrounding 2012 has to do with the precession of the Winter Solstice Sun aligned with the central bulge of the black hole at the Galactic Center on December 21, 2012.

10. John Major Jenkins. Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date (Rochester, VT: Bear & Co., 1998). Pluto crosses the Galactic Center every 248 years. In 2010, the planet of “death and rebirth” conjuncts the Winter Solstice Sun at the “Sacred Tree” crossing point of the Galactic Equator

Black Zero and the Ecliptic under the conjunctio of a lunar eclipse, a celestial event reinforcing the universality of the Mayan cosmology.

11. Richard Tarnas. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Plume, Penguin Group, 2007). This monumental book is a definitive study of the transpersonal energies of the outer planets, their relationships (sacred geometry) and cycles, on human evolution. Linking an intuitive knowledge of the chakras and the Tarnas philosophy of human co-creation with planetary cycles, Tambellini’s aesthetic struggle to integrate heaven and earth delivers the ancient alchemical adage of “as above, so below” into the dialectic of art.

12. The creative feminine divine, denied and repressed for millennia, entered western consciousness as the physical form of the Black Madonna, These black cult figures carried the arcane Templar legend of the Black Virgin as the bride of Jesus carrying his child, 13. C.G. Jung. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, (New York: Meridian Books, 1956) 120-21.

14. Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Barra. Dark Mission (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2007) 59. See chapter two for the Russian development of the Hyperdimensional model, which was hidden behind the Iron Curtain until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. 15. Ibid. While potentially the “theory of everything,” the Hyperdimensional model has remained uninvestigated by western science. The authors tie the repression with a NASA cover-up of extra-terrestrial activity on the Moon and Mars. Whatever the reluctance of the scientific community to test this theory, it does account for the predictive potential of astrology. The Hyperdimensional Election of Barack Obama and 2012 (www.redicecreations) gives a compelling explanation as to why Pluto, a small body rotating at a great distance, has such an extraordinary power. Its very distance, along with a highly irregular and elliptical orbit, acts as a lever in the solar system.

16. Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, (June 23, 1966).

17. www.psychovision.ch. Dr. Remo Roth, a student of Jung’s disciple Marie Louise Von Franz, translates and interprets an exchange of letters pertaining to the hieros gamos.

18. www.gaiamind.com On January 23, 1997 there was a hexagon configuration between heaven and earth that would seem to be a manifestation of this prophecy.

The hexagram is a symbol for the hieros gamos.

19. The term is increasingly used to transcend the either/or duality of quantum mechanics. In using these quantum terms to identify a holistic structure, I am negating the duality at the foundation of quantum mechanics, while at the same time honoring the belief system that, at least, acknowledged this duality.

20. K.C. Cole. Something Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 146-47. In her biography of Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium Museum, Cole gives an up-to-date mainstream journalistic view of the wavicle: “One the face

of it, nothing can be a wave (which extends in space) and a particle (which is concentrated in one place) at the same time. But this is how nature has arranged things. The fact that the human mind hasn’t evolved to grasp such a dual thing as a ‘wavicle,’ as some have called it, is beside the point.”

21. In Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas states on page 15: “The postmodern mind may eventually be seen as having constituted a necessary transitional stage between epochs, a period of dissolving and opening between larger sustained cultural paradigms.” On page 63: “I believe now that only this direct encounter with empirical data that one has personally investigated can effectively serve to overcome extreme resistance that virtually every person educated within the modern context must initially experience towards astrology.”

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Aldo Tambellini

(Fig. 1) Black Out, 1967, inaugural performance at the Black Gate Theatre

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Electromedia Joseph D. Ketner II Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Emerson College, Boston

In the 1960s, Aldo Tambellini experimented with a variety of media, both traditional and new technologies, to develop a distinctive multimedia artistic experience, Electromedia as he coined it. Beginning in 1963 Tambellini progressively explored a sequence of innovative artistic strategies from painting to slide projections and films, incorporating music, performance, and poetry, and orchestrating them into overwhelmingly energetic, scintillating experiences previously unknown in the domains of art and theater. From this beginning he evolved to working with the mass communication media of video, television and telecommunications. He participated in the 1960s avantgarde revolutions in the visual arts, independent filmmaking, video, performance, jazz and new music. “Tambellini was an originator of a form which did not have a vocabulary,” and he recognized that he was one of the “primitives of a new era”1. His Electromedia influenced the subsequent evolution of cameraless film, multimedia, interactive theater, and, in pop culture, the psychedelic discotheque and rock concert light shows. He created these works at a formative stage of the evolution of multimedia, establishing his position as one of the catalysts of the transformation in the cultural and artistic landscape of the United States and Europe at this time. This essay sketches Aldo Tambellini’s development of Electromedia, chronicles the critical and popular response to these installations, and situates his work within the artistic innovations of the 1960s.

From the time of youthful experience of World War II in Italy through the tumultuous cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s to the global revolutions of the present day, Tambellini’s

life experiences have confirmed the necessity of challenging artistic and social conventions. As in the case with many people of his generation who were old enough to witness the horrors of the world at war and systematic genocide, he grew with the conviction that society and its cultural expression must change.

Günther Uecker, a German artist of the same generation clearly articulated this dilemma for the artist, “With this heightened awareness of the annihilation of people all over the world, of this mass murder…one could not stand in a meadow and paint flowers.“2 As a formative artist in Syracuse Tambellini did not simply stand in the meadows of upstate New York, but grappled with the question of how to translate his life experience.

From an early stage Tambellini possessed firm convictions concerning his artistic enterprise, principles that he has maintained over a half century. Within a few years after moving to New York City, he organized an artist’s collective, Group Center, in 1962 and drafted the Group’s purpose to “form a community of the arts…of poets, actors, dancers, painters, musicians, photographers, sculptors, film/makers…Where, through a free exchange of ideas, we can search for new concepts of ourselves and our society.” A pillar of this purpose was a fundamentally activist ambition to generate social and political change, “it is no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation. We feel the hunger of a society lost in its own vacuum and rise with an open active commitment to forward a new spirit for mankind.”3 Within this statement are the key strategies that guide Tambellini’s artistic process: drawing from a diversity of artistic media to create synthetic visual experiences that communicate larger social and cultural issues.

Tambellini worked precisely at a moment in time when many artists from different disciplines across the United States and Europe were exploring the confluence of a variety of media, new 37

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and old, into single sensory experiences. In this period from the It was not until after World War II that the technological late 1950s through the 1960s, we witness the convergence of advancements began to stimulate widespread experimentation contemporary painting, with art and technology independent filmmaking, into synaesthetic expernew technology, sound, iences. Nam June Paik music, and performance, predicted that, “As into what became known the collage technique variously as intermedia, replaced paint, so the multimedia, and eventcathode ray tube will ually evolving into new replace the canvas.” 4 media. Of course, new This change of media media is not new. The responds to the dramatic materials of the artist shift in our worldview have always followed the engendered by the horror technological advanceof the Second World War, ments of society. Some the advent of tremendous scholars trace the beginnuclear power, our first ning of new media to the views from space onto development of photothe blue planet, and the graphy in the nineteenth prevalence of media in century, or Picasso’s daily life. These influences breach with traditional stimulated a generation artistic media when he of younger artists to mold attached chair canning traditional into avantand a rope to his Cubist garde forms, utilizing (Fig. 2) Calo Scott, cellist, performing in Black Zero, 1968.

Photo by George Ehrlich still life painting in 1912. the new strategies and Others look to the Cabaret Voltaire, artist Marcel Duchamp’s new technologies. The Happenings reshaped performance as a introduction of the found object, or Kurt Schwitters’s collage reflection of everyday life. The independent filmmakers broke and assemblage installations such as his Merzbau (1930) as from the narrative of Hollywood cinema to fashion a new vision the origins of performance, collage and installation art. Laszlo for the moving image. Charles and Ray Eames developed multiMoholy-Nagy proposed the creation of a culture of light at screen film projections for the Moscow Worlds Fair in 1959 the Bauhaus in the 1920s and formulated a series of kinetic, and for the New York World’s Fair in 1964. And, classical and mechanical, light pieces that fulfilled his concept of the “Total popular music squealed from their tonal centers with the advent Theater.” of electronic music and avant-garde jazz. Tambellini produced 38

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aesthetic experiences that were a confluence of these artistic initiatives.

Tambellini and other artists in the 1960s developed the model for these new artistic events using slides, videos, electronic sounds, strobe lights, film, and television – the media of the age – to create immersive, multisensory, multimedia experiences that were ephemeral (Fig. 2). These multimedia installations were a significant form of expression for the generation that came to maturity in the 1960s, reflecting the consciousness of the era,

(Fig. 3) The Event of the Screw in front of the Museum of Modern Art, July 12, 1962

its political history, its social awareness, and the domineering presence of mass media. Certain writers of the period considered the simultaneous, synthetic experience of various stimuli as a direct reflection of the barrage of media in the dawning age of media saturation. Gene Youngblood wrote, “synaesthetic cinema is the only aesthetic language suited to contemporary life.”5 Multimedia art of the 1960s can be viewed as the consummation of Richard Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts). For Tambellini Electromedia “was the fusion of the various arts and media; it broke media away from its traditional role and brought it into the area of a new art…transforming both the arts and the media.”6 It was also the historical moment at the crest of the civil rights movement in America, and the dawning student protests against the Vietnam War. Tambellini was in the midst of this artistic and social upheaval with an artistic and political message that resonated with the younger generation. The Group Center served the Lower East Side of Manhattan as the site for the community to express itself artistically and to vent its frustrations. Disappointed in rejection from the art establishment and, living in the poor, largely Black and Hispanic community, the Group’s first actions were political. A self-described “counter-culture activist,”7 Tambellini began, in 1961, to publish The Screw, a newsletter that served as a forum for the artists in the neighborhood. The title clearly expresses the anti-establishment editorial position of the paper. Not heard in the larger artistic and political circles, the Group took their complaints uptown and July 12, 1962 staged an action consecutively at the Museum of Modern Art, then the Whitney Museum, and finally the Guggenheim, where Tambellini, accompanied by a vocal troupe and a costumed dancer, delivered “The Manifesto of the Screw,” then cynically presented administrators of the respective museums with “The Golden Screw Award” (Fig. 3). This landmark protest against the 39

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museum-gallery system takes Kaprow’s idea of the Happening into the streets, with a clear political agenda. Tambellini’s protest precedes the Fluxus Happenings that began the following year, and are reminiscent of Wolf Vostell’s artist actions in Germany for which he coined the expression, “The Theater is in the Street.”8

(Fig. 4) Lumagram, 1967.

The Group was also building a network of artists with similar sentiments, and, in the process, forming the Lower East Side artcommunity. Organizing arts festivals for St. Mark’s Church and exhibitions in neighboring galleries and uptown over the next three years (1963-1965), Tambellini brought neighborhood 40

artists together with more widely recognized artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Mark De Suvero, Ad Reinhardt – as well as the European Group Zero (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker). These events brought artistic vibrancy to the neighborhood and helped to solidify the Lower East Side as a vital arts district in New York. David Bourdon described Tambellini and Group Center in The Village Voice as the “harbingers of a New Bohemia.”9 Working intuitively, Tambellini had a moment of creative brilliance in 1963, a felix culpa, when he pulled boxes of slides of his own paintings out of the trash and began to use the slides, not as reproductions of his paintings, but reincarnating the slides into new artworks. He punched, painted, scratched, and burned these slides, then projected them, resulting in luminous, monumental works (Fig. 4). He invited some friends to witness his new invention and projected them from the rooftop onto the buildings in “Alphabet City.” He immediately recognized that the visual impact of the tremendous scale and luminosity dramatically changed the nature and experience of the artwork.

In the next year Kodak released its Carousel projector (1964) and Tambellini began to incorporate his so-called Lumagrams into his Group Center projects projecting them onto intermedia performances. These involved collaborations with groups of musicians, dancers, and poets, whose performances were coordinated with Tambellini’s hand-painted slide projections, sound and lighting equipment and staged at a variety of venues creating a comprehensive theatrical experience that invoked Moholy’s “Theater of Totality.”10 Tambellini’s intermedia broke out of the Lower East Village in January 1965 with the debut of Black at the International House of Columbia University. The New York press was impressed with the novel performance. David Bourdon wrote The Village Voice

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that Black was a “Hypnotic Bounce,”11 and, the excited reviewer for The New York Herald Tribune mistakenly assumed that the purpose of Tambellini’s Group Center was to foster “the meeting of technological concepts with those of art.”12 The enthusiasm surrounding this novel form of avant-garde theater resulted in a string of invitations to produce it at other alternative venues in Manhattan. Over the course of the year the piece evolved, becoming increasingly complex, adding new performers and media techniques. In June Tambellini presented the second version of this piece, Black 2, at the Bridge Theater in the Lower East Side with poet Calvin C. Hernton, jazz bassist Cecil McBee, and dancer Lorraine Boyd where he “brought into an organic form…the fusion of abstract and social commitment.”13 Then, in September Tambellini took his theater to the street when he presented Black Round in Washington Square Park before thousands, who thronged the park to witness the event.

Elsa Tambellini, his former wife and collaborator, exhilarated over the transformation of the park, “That night the city was our theater and the endless variations of people who gathered in the park our audience.”14 Tambellini naturally recognized the potential to activate the still celluloid frame onto a filmstrip and he began to create handcrafted films that he described as “paintings in motion.”15 He treated film stock with the same roughness that he attacked his slides with workshop tools, chemicals and kitchen utensils to expand the duration of his Lumagrams. Black Is (1965, Fig. 5), the first in a series of approximately twenty films, that he created that year, is a frenetic sequence of flickering abstract images, dark splashes of circles, spheres, chemical dispersions, and craggy scratches are set to the sound of a beating heart. He improvised his inventions in each of the subsequent films, each possessing distinctive characteristics with a compelling visual presence. The cameraless film had been part of the work of Stan

Brakhage and Harry Smith, two key figures in the independent film movement, who beginning in the late 1950s created nonnarrative, abstract images, often painted directly onto the film.

Unlike these filmmakers, Tambellini approaches the film from the perspective of a painter, not from a perspective formulated behind the lens as had Brakhage. His work is more like that of Len Lye, who’s Free Radicals (1958) approximates the bold graphic quality that characterizes Tambellini’s work with film.

(Fig. 5) Filmstrip from Black Is, 1965.

1965 was a significant year for optical, kinetic, video, and film arts in New York. The year began in January, when the New School for Social Research featured an exhibition and performance by Nam June Paik including manipulated television sets, films, and a performance with Charlotte Moorman. In February the Museum of Modern Art opened, The Responsive Eye, an exhibition that focused on still works of art that rendered the appearance of movement. Then in the fall Howard Wise Gallery hosted Otto Piene’s first solo show in New York, Light Ballet.

“The first fully programmed kinetic light exhibition in the United States,”16 the show was a sensation. Grace Glueck writing for The New York Times described the installation as “a highvoltage dazzler…surrounding viewers with endless projections of light and shadow forms.”17 The introduction of the European 41

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artist’s immersive light and sound installation would prove to be important for Tambellini and other artists in New York.

provided an African American vocal cadence, reciting his poem Monster Demon, Jitterbug in the Street, while a jazz duet improvised on horn and bass. The duration of piece was determined by a black balloon that was gradually inflated during the performance and doubled as a screen for Tambellini’s film and Lumagram projections. At the denouement of the performance the balloon burst. Tambellini was quoted as describing Black Zero as “a vehicle for expressing…man’s new relationship with the world…and the violent social revolution now sweeping the world…in an abstract way, of course.”20

An especially significant event in 1965 was the New Cinema Festival organized by Jonas Mekas at the Cinematheque in November 1965 bringing together many of the artistic innovators in performance, art, film and new media, including Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Tambellini, Stan Vanderbeek, and Andy Warhol. Mekas scheduled this review of what was then called Expanded Cinema to, “pull out these artists, whose work I had followed privately for years, Mekas’ Expanded Cinema 18 into the light of day,” Paik program launched a tidal showed his Zen for Film wave of response. Six months (1961) and some of his early after the program he wrote in manipulations of television Movie Journal, “Suddenly, the signals. Vanderbeek, one of intermedia shows are all over the principal proponents of the town…Thus Pandora’s expanded cinema, had been box was opened.”21 Clubs building his Movie Drome began to open up in the Lower in upstate New York since East Side that popularized (Fig. 6) Score for a performance of Black Zero, 1966. Drawn by Tambellini.

1963. This was a spherical the multisensory experience structure designed to house a variety of audio-visual devices that as an environment for dancing, music, and psychedelia. The would simulate “The full flow of color, sound, synthesized form, multimedia craze in the late 1960s was largely the result of Aldo 19 plastic form, light and picture poetry.” Vanderbeek presented a Tambellini and another artist at the Expanded Cinema Festival, reduced form of his Movie Drome projections.

Andy Warhol. Warhol was the only filmmaker at the Expanded Cinema Festival to present a single-screen film.22 He was clearly At the Festival Tambellini showed Black Zero, the current impressed with what he saw at the festival and remarked to the manifestation of his intermedia work that began with Black reviewer for The Nation, “Everyone is being so creative for this earlier in the year (Fig. 6). In a typically frenetic environment of festival that I thought that I would just show a bad movie.” his flashing Lumagrams and flickering films, Calvin C. Hernton This experience motivated him to embark on a new venture to 42

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manage a rock n’ roll band and to develop a multimedia show to accompany them.

Magazine in May 1966.

Warhol, in his inimitable way, had introduced the vocabulary of new media art into the domain of popular culture.23

Only a few weeks later, in December he contracted to manage the Velvet UnderWarhol significantly ground and to develop changed his multimedia a multimedia show to show from February to accompany them that April, appropriating some he called “Up-tight.” of the visual effects and The first performance in technical devices from Aldo January 1966 consisted Tambellini’s Electromedia of the band playing and and Otto Piene’s Light Ballet. films by Barbara Rubin Of course, Warhol’s Factory projected onto the walls of had been a multimedia the ballroom, while Warhol party for several years with and Jonas Mekas shone films, music, reflective foil spot lights on a convention and a cast of alternative of psychiatrists asking proculture figures. He had also vocative questions, insulting attempted to start a pop band the doctors in attendance in 1963, and he collaborated and causing considerable on a film projection with consternation. A second sound by Lamont Young for performance in February Lincoln Center in 1964. But resulted in a similar Warhol’s direct experience (Fig. 7) Black TV, 1968. response. Warhol then with the Expanded revised his act, moved downtown, rented The Dom, and in April Cinema Festival and particularly the work of Tambellini and reintroduced the Velvet Underground with his new multimedia Piene motivated him to embark on a public presentation in this extravaganza, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI). This edition genre and to rent the Dom, where Gerd Stern and Jackie Cassen of the performance included his films – not Barbara Rubin’s Tambellini had presented their “Theater of Light” including – strobe gels, and projected slides. The EPI multimedia show Tambellini’s Electromedia performances beginning in 1965, became a nationwide pop culture hit, making the cover of Life only a few blocks from The Bridge Theater, where Tambellini 43

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regularly presented his works. The visual relationship between Piene, Tambellini and the new Warhol EPI is transparent and was recognized during the time by Anne Brodzky, the editor of Arts Canada, who observed, “it was obvious that the Exploding Plastic Inevitable had taken a lot of very effective devices from Tambellini’s and other filmmakers’ and packaged them for mass consumption.”24

(Fig. 8) Black Video, 1966. 1st video tape: an experiment with light, audio feedback & voice improvisation. Photo by Peter Moore

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At this time one witnesses the appearance of the television set and, by extension, the medium of video as an emerging new artistic medium. Video was invented as a mechanism for transferring visual images and sound almost in real time and evolved technologically and programmatically as the basis for broadcast television. It remained the domain of corporate commercial television until the introduction of the Sony Portapak in 1967 that provided an inexpensive, portable camera for immediate recording and replay of video that was accessible to the public and artists.

The introduction of broadcast television into Europe and America after World War II fundamentally reshaped the lifestyle and culture of both societies. Beginning in the 1950s in America the television set replaced the radio as the altarpiece of the home around which families gathered and socialized. By 1960 ninety percent of American households had a television and people were spending as much as five to eight hours a day watching commercial programming. At an early stage of this cultural shift, critics were concerned about the impact of commercial television. Theodor Adorno forecast the impact of the dawning age of television in 1953 when he observed that, television “fits into the comprehensive scheme of the cultural industry…to surround and intercept from all sides public consciousness.”25 Artists, like Tambellini, recognized this and responded. Media histories cite the displays of television sets with manipulated signals by Wolf Vostell in 1961 and Nam June Paik in 1963 as the beginning of the artistic reflection on the role of television in modern society. Vostell’s important early film Sun in Your Head (1963), in which he had his manipulations of television signals filmed, then edited, is, arguably the earliest critical treatment of television programming. Tambellini also began working with the television as a medium in 1964, before the introduction of the portable video camera. At that time he began to accumulate

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television newscasts over the next two years, using them in various Electromedia performances, then compressed them into a 9.5-minute film, Black TV (1968, Fig. 7). Unaware of Vostell’s Sun in Your Head (1963), Tambellini, as had the German artist, distorts video signals into a frenetic, barrage of imagery to generate a skeptical view of the content in commercial television.

Tambellini explored other means of creating visual effects through video and television. He set up first video camera at the Gate, created audio feedbacks and shone lights into the lens to burn exposures onto the tape. The resulting effects were edited into Black Video (1966, Fig. 8), and became an additional tool in his Electromedia arsenal. Tambellini’s striking video imagery attracted the attention of the local ABC news affiliate that broadcast a clip on the evening news in 1967 triggering Tambellini’s realization of the potential of television as a medium of mass artistic communication.

With the tremendous reception Tambellini received from his Electromedia performances, the response to multimedia in general, Aldo and Elsa Tambellini opened The Gate Theater in September 1966, as a venue primarily for presenting experimental film,. Many avant-garde filmmakers of the period, including Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Jack Smith, introduced their work at the Gate, which also organized multimedia events such as the notorious ”Psychedelic Tune In.”26 These attracted considerable attention from both the avant-garde and counter culture communities.

(Fig. 9) Black Gate Cologne audience participation in the studio, 1968, WDR-TV, Cologne, Germany. Photo by Nan R. Piene (above) (Fig. 10) Black Gate Cologne broadcast, 1968, WDR-TV, Cologne, Germany.

Photo by Peter Kliem (below)

Tambellini learned of Otto Piene and Group Zero’s exhibits at the Howard Wise Gallery and immediately recognized their mutual interests. Tambellini invited Group Zero to participate in an exhibit in 1965, and then later met Piene. They quickly bonded and began to collaborate. The success of their individual 45

Aldo Tambellini

slide, film, and light installations, encouraged Tambellini and Piene to jointly open the space upstairs from the Gate Theater in March 1967 calling it The Black Gate Theater, the first theater in New York devoted to Electromedia. They inaugurated the space with the double performances of Tambellini’s Black Out (Fig. 1) and Piene’s The Proliferation of the Sun (1964-67). These pieces, novel even in the avant-garde art world, represented innovative approaches to art with Tambellini’s improvisatory multi-disciplinary productions, and, the new hand-painted slides projections of Piene set to a serial, repetitive text that synchronized with the contemporary appearance of Minimal music.

The culmination of their collaboration was an Electromedia performance, produced for broadcast by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Cologne. Piene had persuaded Wibke von Bonin, the executive producer, that his collaborative multimedia performances with Tambellini would be exceptional programming for German television. She accepted the proposal and in the fall 1968 the pair produced an Electromedia performance in the studios of WDR and edited the videotapes into a 30-minute program of recorded performance and edited video that aired in January 196927 (Figs. 9 and 10). This tape is now widely acknowledged as the first broadcast television program to involve artists in collaboration with television producers to create a non-commercial, visual experience. During two shoots with five cameras Piene staged one of his participatory inflatable sculpture installations with an invited crowd gleefully playing in the studio. Halfway through the program Piene’s performance merges into Tambellini’s film with an increasingly frenetic montage of abstract hand-painted slide and film forms that dissolves into news broadcasts announcing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The combination of playful enjoyment transforming into harsh realities characterized maddening 46

swings of the 1960s from love and peace to violence in the city streets and the distant jungles of Vietnam.

Immediately on the heels of Black Gate Cologne – then largely unknown outside of Germany – WGBH, Boston, had begun working with artists in its Experimental Television Workshop under producer Fred Barzyck. Their first program, The Medium is the Medium, aired in March 1969 with segments by Allan Kaprow, Paik, Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Tambellini. The program opens with the narrator asking the question, “What happens when artists take control of television?”

Then, it proceeds to a clip from Tambellini’s ongoing series on the subject of Black. Utilizing over 1,000 slides, seven films and footage of black children in a playground, Tambellini mixes the cells, circles, and spirals with snippets of faces and phrases from the children into an eerily poignant portrayal of the racial conflict that grips America. As the barrage of images fades, the viewer is left with the impression of the children as bewildered, innocent victims, as the artist had once been during the war in Italy. The program continues with the other five shorts demonstrating a range of possibilities for transforming television from a commercial marketing tool into a creative medium.

At this idealistic moment Tambellini and Piene envisioned the potential of television to transform the aesthetic experience of millions of viewers and to democratize art. In my conversations with the two artists, they both expressed that, at the time, they sincerely believed that television would succeed cinema and become the new medium of the postwar technological age.

Tambellini nostalgically reminisced that, “I thought we were dealing with the art form of the future.”28 And, for a very brief flourish of a few years around 1970, other artists also created programs for broadcast TV in pursuit of this idealistic notion.

However, these ideals were never realized, as commercial

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television solidified its grip on broadcasting in the 1970s.

this new development Howard Wise mounted in his gallery the first exhibition devoted Tambellini’s imaginative approach to television, TV as a Creative to telecommunications was widely Medium (1969). The enthusiasm acknowledged. The New York State spread and the Rose Art Museum Council on the Arts awarded him of Brandeis University, followed a grant in 1969 to collaborate with in 1970, with the first museum television engineers to explore the exhibition on the subject titled aesthetic potential of television.

Vision and Television (Fig. 11).

He established relationships with In the introductory paragraph Tracy Kinsel and Hank Reinbold from that catalogue by Russell of Bell Labs, who engineered Conner colorfully points to the his idea of a television tube that novelty of television as an art projected in a spiral, instead of form, yet cynically forecasts its a grid. Black Spiral (1969, Fig. future: “If the television tube 11) is a dynamic distortion of were simply an excellent light received television signals that machine, capable in the hands became an important piece in of artists of kinetic patterns of the repertoire of early television infinite variety, we would hardly art. The engineers involved with be startled to encounter it in a Tambellini spoke with enthusiasm modern museum. But it is also about his ability to conceive of that furniture from the living imagery from pure electronic room, massively haunted in 1970 waves, “He has taken the normal by the horror it has brought us, disorientation of electrons, put it by the global encounter for which together and come out with an (Fig. 11) Black Spiral, (1969), a modified TV Sculpture, Vision and Television we had all been Marshalled and Exhibition, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 1970 art form.” And, “he sees in a new McClued in but not prepared, dimension. He wants to create a bridge between the artist and and by all the numbing idiocy and vulgarity which has made the engineer.”29 it an inspiration to Pop artists, Camp followers and heads of advertising agencies.”30 The art establishment recognized the new dimension of television as a cultural medium and saw Tambellini and Piene, along with Tambellini realized that he must pursue telecommunications in Paik and Vostell as the innovators in this field. Responding to order to fulfill his fundamental premises conceived in the early 47

Aldo Tambellini

1960s: to create visual experiences with a diversity of media that would engage a mass audience and convey socio-political messages. From 1975 to 1984, as a Fellow at the Center for Advance Visual Studies, MIT, under Piene, Tambellini continued his experiments, working on intermedia performances with dancer Susan Dickinson, with Illinois Bell on a Picturephone Event (1977), and on a series of global telecommunications events (1980, 1981) that linked artists and individuals around the planet, in advance of related projects

by Paik. His Electromedia works were distinctive in the artistic revolutions of the 1960s and were recognized as such by the artists and critics of the day. Woody Vasulka, a video artist, who along with his wife founded the Kitchen performance space in New York, acknowledges, “I personally regard Tambellini’s and Paik’s concerns in the sixties as the true and direct inspiration to our generation of ‘synthesizing’ artists.”31 In the critical histories of cinema and new media during this period Tambellini is commonly characterized as a “pioneer” in the field (Fig. 12).32 In this period he crafted an artistic presence, introduced new forms, media and techniques that 48

advanced artistic expression beyond its precedents in modern culture.

His multimedia performances and installations departed from the traditional model of the artist and art object, subsuming the individual artist within collaborative and participatory actions that dissolve the art object into ephemeral, immersive, immaterial, sensory experiences. Tambellini’s artistic accomplishments have special relevance as we enter into a new era of the technological unknown with media that provide instantaneous global communication and access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. Over forty years ago, Tambellini created Black TV (1968) as a prophecy of this moment, “In the future we will be communicating through electronically transmitted images; Black TV is about the future, the contemporary American, the media, the witnessing of events, and the expansion of the senses. The act of communication and the experience is the essential.”33

(Fig. 12) Aldo Tambellini with Black Video 2, (1966), at the Festival of Lights Show, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, NY, 1967. Photo by Peter Moore.

Black Zero 1. Elsa Tambellini, “The Gate Theater,” Arts Canada, 24 (October 1967), p. 4; and Aldo Tambellini, “The Seed,” 1962. Aldo Tambellini’s Archives.

2. Günther Uecker, 1981, quoted in Günther Uecker: Twenty Chapters.

Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006, p. 12.

3. Press Release for “The Center,” 1962. Morea and Tambellini Collection, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University.

4. Nam June Paik quoted in John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik.

New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 2000, p. 113.

5. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1970, p. 82.

6. Aldo Tambellini, “An Autobiography,” in Aldo Tambellini, Black Is. Exhibition Catalogue. Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2010, p. 43.

7. Aldo Tambellini, “A Syracuse Rebel in New York,” in Clayton Patterson, ed.

Captured: The Film and Video History of the Lower East Side. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005, p. 42.

8. See Das Theater ist auf der Straße: Die Happenings von WOLF VOSTELL. Ausstellungs Katalog, Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen und Museo Vostell Malpartida. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2010.

9. Bourdon, David. “Group Center,” The Village Voice (January 14, 1965).

10. Elsa Tambellini in her article for Arts Canada, op. cit., noted that their studio was “like a total theatre,” p. 4.

11. Bourdon, op. cit.

12. Gruen, John, “Art Tour, a Critical Guide,” The New York Herald Tribune (January 16, 1965).

13. Ross, Don, “Rebellion in Art Form – Tambellini’s Black 2,” The New York Herald Tribune (June 13, 1965).

14. Elsa Tambellini, op. cit.

15. Aldo Tambellini, “A Syracuse Rebel in New York,” op. cit., p. 49.

16. Undated, unpublished manuscript by Dietrich Mahlow , “Otto Piene,” (c.

1976), p. 17, in Otto Piene Archives.

17. Glueck, Grace, “Art Notes: Keeping up with the Rear Guard,” The New York Times (November 7, 1965).

18. Mekas, Jonas, “On the Plastic Inevitables and the Strobe Light,,” (May 26, 1966), quoted in Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972, p. 242.

19. Vanderbeek, Stan, “Re: Vision,” Perspecta II (1967), p. 119.

20. Aldo Tambellini quoted in Jeremy Heymsfeld, “Space World in ‘Black Zero’,” New York World-Telegram and Sun (December 16, 1965).

21. Mekas, 1972, op. cit.

22. Junker, Howard, “Films: The Underground Renaissance,” The Nation (December 27, 1965). In his review of the festival Junker notes that Warhol presented a single screen film. This is in direct contradiction to David Bourdon, who, in his biography, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989), p.

218, published twenty years after the event, says that Warhol for his November 22-23 screening at the Festival presented a split screen film with a band accompaniment.

23. A good source for information on the development of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable consult Branden Joseph, “ ‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room, no. 8 (summer 2002), pp. 80-107.

24. Brodzky, Anne and Greg Curnoe, “A Conversation About Mixed Media from New York.,” 20 Cents Magazine (Toronto), November 1966.

25. Daniels, Dieter. “Is television an art?” www.medienkunstnetz.de.

26. Sullivan, Dan, “Gate Theater Screens a Psychedelicate Subject,” The New York Times (October 29, 1966).

27. The correspondence between Otto Piene, Wibke von Bonin at the WDR, and Aldo Tambellini, as well as the printed program for the WDR in January are in Otto Piene’s Archive.

28. Aldo Tambellini from a conversation with Otto Piene at a screening of Black Gate Cologne, December 3, 2009, Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA. 29. “Electromedia: On Impermanency,” Arts Canada (April 1968).

30. Conner, Russell. Vision and Television. Exhibition catalogue. Waltham, MA: The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1970, np.

31. Woody Vasulka. “Aldo Tambellini: Black Spiral (TV Sculpture), 1969,” Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art, David Dunn (ed.).

Linz, Austria: Ars Electronica, 1992, p. 110 32. See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, op. cit., p. 381, and Dieter Daniels, “Aldo Tambellini,” www.medienkunstnetz.de.

33. Tambellini quoted in Youngblood, op. cit., pp. 311, 313.

49

Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini with AC-3, 2010. Photo by Anna Salamone.

50

Black Zero

An Autobiography Aldo Tambellini

The Early Years1 My grandfather, Paul Tambellini had migrated from Sant’ Allessio near Lucca, (Tuscany) Italy to São Paolo, Brazil. At the time of my father’s birth, he owned a coffee plantation which made him quite wealthy. My father, John Tambellini, was born in 1896 in São Paolo, Brazil. He was the only male with three sisters one of whom, Isola, was adopted. He was the favorite in the family, played the mandolin, read music and also wrote poetry. My grandmother, Antonia (Tonina) Nicolini, whom I never knew, was born about 1864 in Daone (Trento) a northern Italian Region near Austria. She was the first of eleven children and at the age of 20 she went with her father to Brazil, looking for work. She was hired by Paul Tambellini, 30 years her senior, who later married her. The Tambellini family sold the plantations in Brazil and retired outside of Lucca where they bought property.

My mother’s Puccinelli family came from Massa in Tuscany near Carrara, famous for its marble quarries. I grew up with her side of the family. Her father was a tall, physically strong man who had worked in the foundry building the government’s railroad cars. He was a socialist, as his railroad co-workers were before 1922. As the young Fascist party members were campaigning, they ambushed my grandfather, and, because of his political affiliations, he was beaten with clubs and forced to drink a bottle of castor oil, a ritual reserved for those who opposed the Fascists.

My grandfather never liked Mussolini and never changed his mind about him. He kept his friendship with the railroad workers and very often I sat on the cross bar of his bicycle and he would take me to the railroad post where he would visit

with his old co-workers. My grandmother, also, came from Massa. Her father was a merchant captain who owned a vessel and sailed around the world. He would bring back souvenirs from his travels, some of which we kept in our living room. My mother, born in Lucca, one of two sisters, was studying to be an elementary school teacher. She was beautiful and was pursued by my father. Despite the objections from my grandfather, my mother decided to enter into a problematic marriage.

For some unclear reason, my father decided to take his new bride to Syracuse, New York where an uncle lived. I was the younger of two children, born in 1930; my brother, Paul, was four years older than I was. We were both born in Syracuse N.Y. My parents’ marriage was a difficult and unhappy one. Because of this, my parents separated. My father took my mother, my brother and me, eighteen months old, back to Lucca, Italy to live with her family. He returned to the United States while we all lived in a working class neighborhood outside of the seventeenth century wall which surrounds Lucca.

CHIRICO

I was brought up

in the piazza

among the aging marble

sleeping romanesque sculptures

train waiting departing

from the station

I used to stand as a child

by the wooden bridge filling up

from the black coal smoke

while manikins in the distance 51

Aldo Tambellini

formed mathematical equations

enigmas next to triangles

T squares & protractors

configuring metaphysical symbols

I tasted the round sweet chestnut bread

seasoned with rosemary

on the crust

seeing shadows elongating

climbing up slowly

cutting the stones

with the unique light

indigenous to tuscany

but I was born

in another land

in the cruel snow the mind

did not want to remember August 18, 1990 Being an artist came naturally to me. As a young child, I was very restless and rebellious, the opposite of my brother. I remember that around the age of three, after the evening meal, I would become very quiet concentrating on drawing on the kitchen table.

Aldo & brother Paul

52

the flame of the candle trembles

as the television blue light is on

leave each detail untouched

to preserve it as it is

a split second

lit with an antique light bulb

late when my grandmother

is mending some worn out garment

the heavy wood kitchen table

cleared of the evening meal

the cast iron stove the fireplace

the water pump above the stone sink

the quietness that hangs on tight

calm & surrounding

I take a thick pencil

me & the paper carefully intensely I draw

every object around holding still

to watch me absorbed in the act

a bit unusual

for a 3 year old child

that has gone through the day

full of restless movement

with a thirst for discovering the new

in hidden places

two separate movements one of perennial motion

Black Zero

the other totally deeply

absorbed in concentration excluding all

but full of precious meaning

in the act of drawing I knew then I was an artist October 16, 1990 I would copy images from magazines, particularly Walt Disney characters, or drew my own pictures. Perhaps the only other thing that kept me quiet was listening to the 78-RPM records playing on the antique Victrola in the living room. I also loved to sing. It was a love for visual images and music right from the beginning.

My mother was highly educated and she bought me books of Hans Christian Anderson and Grimm’s Fairy-tales, beautifully illustrated, and later bought me books on art. She encouraged and nurtured my natural talent to develop. Sometime around the age of five, my mother gave me a battery-operated projector called Lanterna Magica. It had short film clips of American Cowboys and slide strips projecting some stories. There was a long dark corridor in the house, which I used for my projections.

I later charged the neighborhood children 5 Italian cents to see the shows. A few years later, I became ill with pneumonia, pleurisy and bronchitis and was forced to stay in bed for several months. My mother gave me a marionette theater for which I wrote plays and painted scenery and later gave shows out on the terrace of the house for the neighbors.

Because of my interests in art and music, my mother was undecided whether to enroll me in art or music school.

Grammar school in Italy was for five years and so at the age of ten, I was admitted to the A. Passaglia Art Institute in Lucca.

The Art Institute was in the Piazza with Paulina Bonaparte’s statue, Napoleon’s sister, who once ruled the city and not far from where the composer Puccini was born.

It was around this time that Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, allied with Nazi Germany, entered WWII. This was a war that Italy fought without natural resources, asking its citizens to donate their inherited cooper pots and pans for shells, wool from the mattresses for uniforms for the soldiers in Russia, iron from the bedposts for cannons and, in a dramatic ceremony, the Italian women donated for melting their gold wedding bands in an exchange for stainless steel ones. It was a time of militaristic discipline, which was reflected in the Art Institute that I attended.

In what was called the school’s Galleria there was a large collection of sculpture casts from classical works of ancient Greece, some Roman and Renaissance. These were models for us to draw with charcoal. We made mural paintings and I, later, executed a fresco on the wall. In general, I received a classic art training. We studied ancient art history very extensively from books and projected lantern slides, beginning with the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Romanesque, Gothic, etc. We studied the Greek classics in Italian, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and Italian Literature. We memorized passages from Dante’s Inferno this, perhaps, along with my war experience, had an influence on my pessimistic and dark view of the world.

Because of the tragedy of war in my neighborhood, I lost a year of schooling.

In the beginning of the forties, the war was fought in North Africa and Russia, all battles taking place in faraway lands reported on the radio with propaganda and lies. Then, the 53

Aldo Tambellini

Allies, both American and British, landed in Sicily and Salerno.

The war had now entered the boot of Italy. Late 1942 and 1943 were among the most frightening times. The B-23 bombers passed through our sky frequently – air raid sirens, search lights at night; we would come out of our houses and run to some nearby fields hoping for the best. Anti-aircraft shells would explode in the sky. This went on quite often for several months.

At 1 p.m. on January 6, 1944, the Day of the Epiphany, when, in accordance with tradition children receive gifts from the benevolent witch, La Befana, I was on the street with my bicycle, when the B-23 unloaded their destructive cargo on my working class neighborhood. once

once

once

54

once

once

I heard mothers calling familiar names in desperation at the first detonation I jumped off the bike face touching my street laying under shattered glass falling walls ripped open

on epiphany day january 6 ’44* at exactly 1:00 p.m. we all looked at the sky knowing the american b29s were moving in our direction we did not move it was a numb fascination conditioned by months of false alarms the bombs dropped destroying the neighborhood that was mine in those details contained in childhood secrets I saw the earth hurled by force in chunks lifting to the sky friends & neighbors died others survived deformed

The Artist’s Mother, 1944, watercolor on paper, 17 x 22 inches

Black Zero

that once

is with the images on the cold screen

that see war in their faces that once

it is not a TV show

played for the ratings

in a town called Sant’Anna di Stazzema, there was a massacre of over 570 women, children, and old men. They gathered them in the church’s piazza, and along with the priest they were all massacred, the order being given by a twenty-nine year-old SS Officer. My mother, in terror for the safety of her two sons, was, and remained, psychologically damaged by the experience.

We were waiting for the American Army, then called the liberators. At a certain point shells were fired in our direction from the nearby mountains. We took shelter in holes we dug in the ground. The big German cannon with a camouflage net by the water well responded. Then, suddenly, everything became silent, and all of the German soldiers with their Polish prisoners disappeared. A day later, at noon, a row of jeeps came from the winding mountain road. It was the American Buffalo Division.

The populace came out to embrace the black G.I. liberators.

With liberation came the disintegration of the social structure.

Prostitution and the Black Market flourished.

August 22, 1990

Twenty-one friends and neighbors were killed, many wounded.

Lying down on the street, I miraculously survived; so did my family, who remained inside the house. Two bombs remained unexploded, falling on soft ground in back of the house. The building was damaged and so we moved about seven kilometers to my Brazilian aunt’s place. Her name was Isola, and she lived in an old mill with a waterfall in the countryside outside of Lucca, called Guamo. A few weeks passed, and then the last of the German youth army took over the area.

Hiding in the nearby mountains were the Partigiani, the Italian, anti-fascist, anti-Nazi freedom fighters who were sabotaging the German army. They were fighting for freedom and liberation of Italy from the oppressive occupying German army. We did not know it then, but the Germans were building the last resistance line waiting for the Americans and their Allies who were still below the line of Cassino in the South. There were surprise raids by the SS in order to take able-bodied Italian men and force them to build the resistance line which years later we found out was called the Siegfried Line. During one of those raids, I ran out of the house at 4 a.m. and hid in the cornfield alongside a neighbor, a farmer whose brother had been taken prisoner and who never returned home. The SS had ordered that if anyone were to help or give food or lodging to a Partigiano, ten members of that family would be executed. Not too far away from where I was,

We moved back to the city, and I went back to the Art Institute.

I volunteered to paint the scenery for a play written for the Italian Veterans in a hospital in Lucca. Most of them had fought in North Africa and were afflicted with tropical diseases. Besides the scenery, I had a small part in the play. I painted a mural for the American G.I. Club. As a US citizen, I had the right to return to America where my father was living. My brother, also a citizen, was drafted by the US Army while in Italy.

With my mother, I boarded the Marine Carp, a Liberty ship, for the 15-day trip to New York. On this long unusual trip, we ate cafeteria style with the sailors. I met a young poet from Rome, Gianni Cappelli, whose father was living in Chicago. This poet had been associated with the great modern Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti. My background had been Greek and Italian classic 55

Aldo Tambellini

epic poetry, and for the first time I was introduced by Gianni to modern poetry. My first experience writing poetry, first in Italian, then in English, began not too long after this.

The adjustment to the New World was very difficult, as I spoke very little English. The first morning, landing in New York Harbor, my father spoke about a separation from my mother.

For some time, I lived alone with my mother, who increasingly was becoming more paranoid, afraid of listening devices planted in the apartment in Syracuse, New York and the spying and monitoring of her thoughts while she was on the street. She was hospitalized in Rochester, New York and given shock treatments.

Not long afterwards, when she came back, she returned to Italy to live with my grandmother. I worked at small jobs including picking potatoes with the migrant workers. As I was learning the language, I took a job painting the big gasoline tanks in Oil City in Syracuse, New York. I painted fresh silver paint over dry silver paint. One day, stepping on wet paint, I slipped, fell down, and kept sliding towards the tank’s unsecured edges. The July-hot metal was burning my bare chest. I stopped only a few inches from the edge, the bottom, a concrete slab, was sixty feet below – another miraculous survival.

Self-portrait, 1953. Oil on canvas, 39 x 30 inches

56

I joined a group of Artists called Vedet, some from NYC, among whom were Hilton Kramer and James Kleege.

We were sharing a large loft on Salina Street (the main

street in town). There I used to go and do my art until late at night. They had many records of classical and jazz music, and for the first time I heard the haunting sound of Billie Holiday.

As part of the loft, there was a floor below that was used as a gallery, where we all exhibited. We also had art shows there from New York City. I brought some of my work to the old Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts and one of the teachers there, Lee Brown Coye, gave me a job teaching painting at the Museum. I was the teacher, and yet the youngest in the class.

I was enrolled in the local Vocational High School, primarily to learn English. A wonderful speech teacher asked me if I knew Italian songs and when I said yes, I was asked to sing in front of the class. From then on, I was invited to sing at every school assembly. I became very popular in that school. I took some art classes from a teacher who was very conservative. One year, at the Scholastic Art Competition, I won sixteen golden keys (first prizes) for various art media.

Some of the Artists at Vedet said that I should submit my art work to the scholarship competition at Syracuse University. I did, and I became one of the two winners of a four-year fulltuition scholarship.

The New York Years2 After graduating from Notre Dame, where I received a Masters degree in Sculpture and studied with the world-renowned Ivan Mestrovic, I made my way closer to New York. It was always my plan to go to New York City. I took a teaching job in Long Island, and soon I had enough money to rent an apartment in the City. In the late summer of 1959, I took over the lease of a friend’s $56 a month railroad-type apartment in the Lower East Side, on 10th Street and Avenue C, near where Allen Ginsburg lived. Although the neighborhood was then predominantly

Black Zero

Puerto Rican, it had once been a Jewish neighborhood and I could still buy a large round loaf of rye bread for 50 cents.

I soon joined the co-op Gallery called “The Brata” on 3rd Avenue and 10th Street, one of the remaining co-ops from the previous 10th Street Era. At The Brata, I had a one-man show and participated in group shows. At the 10th Street area Horses and Moon, 1950. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches I met the artists involved with the March Gallery, including Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie, with whom I was to share a long and close friendship.

When I developed my own method of making sculpture by using sand casting with Hydrocal, I needed a space on the ground floor. I found a single storefront at 217 East 2nd Street, near Avenue C, for $60 a month. The neighborhood looked dangerous and I quickly tried to establish a persona that would provide my companion, Elsa, and me with some protection. I took some cows’ skulls and bones which I had and hung them on the front store window next to a sculpture coated with black tar. To add to the voodoo-like installation, I lit it with candles at night. Gypsies were the only ones living in the neighborhood’s storefronts and one of them visited me to find out why I, who

was not a gypsy, would rent a storefront. I explained to her that I was an artist and showed her some of my work. My Puerto Rican neighbors and their children used to marvel at my window installation. They called me the “brujo,” – a sort of magician – and when they saw the black box I used for sand casting, I heard one of the children say, “That’s where the magician cuts the lady in half.”

The city was tearing down the old Jewish neighborhood around Delancey Street block by block. When I saw the demolition I thought it looked like a war zone, and I remembered the images of my past: World War II and my neighborhood in Italy bombed by the Allies. I can still clearly remember the only wall from an old Synagogue remaining standing, on which a big mural of the Lion of Judah had been painted. In the war-like rubble I found the inspiration for what became my rapid development in sculpture and provided me with the artifacts I would use in my large pieces. In a building being demolished I found a fence, which I moved to my storefornt and used to secure the empty lot outside, facing Houston Street. With the help of the Puerto Rican neighborhood teenagers and children, I cleaned the yard and created an outdoor studio and neighborhood outdoor exhibition space for my concave and spherical Hydrocal sculptures coated with epoxy to protect them from the elements.

The New York City Building inspectors threatened to evict us from our storefront because they claimed that the outdoor studio was illegal and my sculptures were “debris.” A reporter from the Syracuse Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York came to visit me: “Two weeks ago we went into the tough Lower East Side of New York City to visit a sculptor…32 year-old Aldo Tambellini, native of Syracuse, is a rebel with a following. He and his pleasant wife, Elsa, live in a drab, cramped little storefront studio at 217 East 57

Aldo Tambellini

2nd Street. In the back yard of this environment Tambellini uses concrete and jagged pieces of metal from junk yards to create dramatic often brutal sculptures. He creates raw, primitive forms from industrially created shapes… iron, steel nails, pieces of pipe.” 3 At this time, I was also working very intensely on painting in acrylic and black Duco on paper. The works on paper, if not cut in the round, had circles drawn freehand on them.

I worked with a blowtorch, burning large pieces of cardboard, sometimes applying paint. I also used fire in a series of Plexi-glass discs. There was something to “black” in New York. It became spontaneous to work in black.

Black. Calvin Hernton, the editor of Umbra, appeared in my later performances, including Black Zero. We frequented Stanley’s Bar, on Avenue B, there, we often formulated our philosophies and exchanged views, often having heated debates. There was a wealth of ideas and exchanges then on the Lower East Side, and many collaborations and things were developing in all sorts of political and creative directions.

I wanted, in some way, to provide a voice for the artists and challenge them into action for I understood well the manipulation of the Arts that I saw all around me. In 1961, I started to put my feelings down in poetry form and published a newsletter called The Screw. The Screw’s slogan was, “Artists in an Anonymous Generation Arise.” The six issues of the newsletter were mimeographed and each had a variation of a hardware screw drawn on its front page. These we distributed at local artists’ meeting places, among them The Club in the West Village. We accepted donations for the newsletter or sold it for ten cents, which we collected in a glass jar.

Across the street from the storefront lived Tom Dent, a poet and friend, whom I knew from Syracuse University. Other black poets used to go to his apartment where they held meetings. They were very political and they founded a magazine called Umbra.

They were new to the Lower East Side, too, coming from Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and the South. They were redefining the Syracuse Post Standard Cover “Black Identity.” The Umbra Poets The publication of The Screw led to included Ishmael Reed, H.N. Pritchard, Calvin Hernton, “The Event of the Screw,” a performance that took place on July and Roland Snelling, later known as Askia Touré. I thought 12, 1962, in front of the Museum of Modern Art. I was elegantly of using the poets in my multi-media performances, which I dressed in a black suit and tie with a gold-dipped screw tie-clip and called “Electromedia.” I would project hand-painted slides on read a piece I’d composed called the, “Manifesto of the Screw.” them while they recited their poetry. Ishmael Reed and Norman A group of Puerto Rican teenagers from my neighborhood, who Pritchard were the first to be part of my first performances of called themselves “The Belltones,” also dressed in suits and ties, 58

Black Zero

sang “The Song of The Screw,” a cappella. I had composed the song to satirize the “rules of the game” and the conformity of many artists. The event culminated with the presentation of “The Golden Screw Award” to the Museum of Modern Art and later that day, similar awards were given to the Guggehneim and Whitney Museums. The Museums were presented with hardware store screws which had been dipped in gold paint and placed on a black pillow for presentation.

My partner, Elsa Tambellini, moved around inside a fivefoot-tall papier-mâché screw, which, as mandated by City Ordinance, was topped by an American Flag. There were many reporters present who responded to the press release but not one of them wrote about this agitprop The Screw Newsletter performance. El Diario, New York’s Spanish-language daily, was the only paper to publish a photograph of “The Event.”

In keeping with my interest in forming groups with other artists to challenge the status quo, I founded what was called “Group Center,” with Elsa Tambellini, Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, Don Snyder, Jackie Cassen and, later, Peter Martinez. We had no money but were full of ideals and a vision for a future when artists would be connected and share and work for the good of all society. The goal of Group Center was stated in the flyer we distributed: “For the purpose of forming a community of the arts, of individuals and groups, of poets, actors, dancers, painters,

musicians, photographers, sculptors, film-makers, and all those vitally interested in the creative expression. We believe that the artistic community has reached a new stage of development.

In a mobile society, it is no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation. We feel the hunger of a society lost in its own vacuum and rise with an open active commitment to forward a new spirit. Creation is not the commodity of a status-seeking class.

Creation is the vital energy of society. We believe that the ‘our system’ is an enormous dinosaur extinguishing at a fantastic rate which opposes truth and freedom and that it has squeezed out the El Diario Vol. XV, (July 18, 1962). p. 1. essential vitality which made one part of the human race.” Group Center consciously and intentionally became part of the counter-culture, an underground group working towards the freedom of expression for all.

David Bourdon posted an article on the Group’s activities in the Village Voice saying, “The Group has made itself known in original ways. They picketed a Monday night opening at the Museum of Modern Art…passing out hand-bills protesting the taste-making policies of the museum. Last March they paid a stealthy 3 a.m. visit to the most powerful up-town galleries and museums;

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Aldo Tambellini equipped with a masonite stencil and a can of spray paint, and disguised as workmen, they branded the sidewalks with a circle about two feet in diameter containing the word ‘centerfuge’. Centerfuge was the term used for many of the activities of Group Center.”4

Group Center organized a Festival-of-the-Arts in collaboration with LENA (Lower East Side Neighborhood Association). I wanted to spotlight the young artists who were beginning to live on the east side. Art shows went on continuously for two weeks. Poetry readings, underground films and jazz concerts were organized and held at and around St. Mark’s Church inthe-Bowery. This festival proved Group Center to be a catalyst in the artistic movement in the area. This was the first time the press and the public became aware that something new and meaningful was happening among the creative people in the Lower East Side, sometimes called it the “New Bohemia,” as it was referred to in the seminal book by John Gruen by the same name.

As a result of the successful festival, Michael Allen, Minister of the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, appointed Group Center as the official organizer of the artistic programs at St. Mark’s. artscanada took notice and published an accounting of these events, beginning in October 1963.

“Aldo selected the largest sculpture and drawing show ever independently organized in New York City. Interest in the show grew as time neared its opening. Forty living U.S. sculptors were brought together with work ranging from forty-foot-high pieces to small indoor works and drawings.” 6

This show was unique because it brought together well-known artists such as Peter Agostini, Phillip Pavia, Marc De Suvero, and Richard Stankiewicz while giving less known and obscure local artists the opportunity to gain exposure by exhibiting.

The sculpture show lasted well over a month, and was the first outdoor sculpture show in New York.

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The artist Ad Reinhardt, showing support for Group Center, gave a lecture at the church on the topic, “The Next Revolution in Art.” I designed the flyer for this event. Jazz performances were planned by Freddie Redd, known for his original musical work in the play, The Connection, at the Living Theatre. Among the jazz artists who played outdoors among the sculptures was Booker Irving, saxophonist from the Mingus Group. Elsa Tambellini concludes in the same artscanada article, “It was another way of bypassing the establishment.”7 Many of the activities of Group Center were held in a large space I used as a studio on Forsythe Street near Broome. We used this space to present programs sponsored by Group Center and to hold fund-raisers to support our activities, including jazz concerts, a memorable one of which featured avant-garde musician, Archie Shepp, with Freddie Redd on piano.

Among the most memorable activities was the event, which brought Julian Beck and Judith Malina from the legendary Living Theatre to hold an open discussion on March 10, 1962.

The topic was “Revolution as an Alternative.” Admission to the program was only 50 cents. I designed the flyer with the title of the event using a photo taken by Don Snyder of my large Hydrocal concave sculpture with two East 2nd Street PuertoRican children inside of it. Elsa and I, at 2:00 a.m., with a double coating of wall-paper glue, attached these flyers in long rows on Lower East Side buildings. The next day the posters had been either defaced or scratched out. Some landlords threatened to sue us. The word “Revolution,” which later on became the rallying cry of the 60s, was at this time a fearful and disturbing word for many people.

One day, in about 1963, I took a stack of 35mm slides, which had been discarded and impulsively used needles and other

Black Zero

implements to mark the emulsion.

I scratched spirals and other round forms, and pierced holes in them.

I used a Kodak Carousel Projector, which could turn a small two inch slide into a large painting when projected onto the façade of the building across the street from a tenement rooftop on 6th Street and Avenue D. I was excited by the image and the light and began thinking about other ways I could use projected slides. This could be considered the beginning of my involvement with multi-media.

I also included my poetry in the show, written in spiral and circular forms on silver discs suspended and revolving, hung from the ceiling by strings. The exhibition was reviewed by the critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who remarked, “Aldo Tambellini, leader of the ‘Center,’ shows enormous canvases where the circle becomes a sun – a source of energy.” 8

Concurrently with the Quantum Shows, I presented my first Electromedia performance, Black, at the International House, Columbia University, New York. Black became In late December 1964 and early a work in progress, culminating January 1965 with Group Center, with Black Zero at the Brooklyn I curated two large art exhibits, Academy of Music (1968). These Quantum 1 and Quantum 2, which performances brought together ran simultaneously at the Noah poets, experimental dancers, Goldowsky and at the A.M. Sachs concrete sounds, lights, improvised Galleries. Quantum 2 presented music, inflatable screens and American and European artists. I projected paintings (lumagrams), exhibited The Echo, a spatial black films and videos. Electromedia to painting 14 by 8 feet. I represented me was the fusion of the various Group Center with Hahne and Broadside Advertisement for Quantum I, 1964 arts and media; it broke media Morea, while Piene, Mack and away from its traditional role and brought it into the area of Uecker represented Group Zero from Germany. Peter Agostini, Louise Bourgeois, Ad Reinhardt, and Charles Mingus Jr. (the son a new art by bringing the other arts, poetry, sound, painting, of the musician), and many other young and unknown artists and kinetic sculpture, into a time/space re-orientation toward were also included. Members of Group Center became friends media, transforming both the arts and the media. This created a sensation in the East Village. Many newspapers covered the with Irene Rice Pereira and borrowed her painting with layered events, including David Bourdon at the Village Voice, who wrote: corrugated glass from the Metropolitan Museum for this show.

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Aldo Tambellini “Black is a ‘Hypnotic Bounce’. Black was an overlapping series of evenly pitched performances by a painter, a dancer and two poets. Handsome poet Norman Pritchard chanted nonsense words in sequences in groovy repetitions like a stuck record, bouncing hypnotically at the same time…Ishmael Reed’s oratorically delivered poetry was more traditional in form and marked by raw powerful imagery. Lovely Carla Blank performed two dances. In the first, she writhed, choked, and coughed as though she had a sore T-Zone, then rose slowly on tiptoes to emit a big scream; she also hurled one of the two folding chairs into the auditorium. Returning in white tights she improvised a dance before a sequence of slides projected against the back of the stage by Tambellini.” 9

Jerry Wakefield at the downtown magazine wrote, “Aldo is looking to a future in which art objects are no longer purchased by a collector, for Electromedia is kinematical and must be experienced.”10 Don Ross of the New York Herald Tribune said that:

“Some of the lumagrams are reminiscent of slides of diseased tissue…Tambellini said he is interested in evolving an art form from the revelation of the microscope.

He is also interested in the revelation of the telescope in the cosmos, and some of the lumagrams are reminiscent of sidereal space. Others have a kind of fetal, placenta look…I work from intuition, [Tambellini] says, and not from intellectualization.”11

My relationship with the Bridge Theatre at St. Mark’s Place began when I was invited by Elaine Summer, the Bridge’s special program director, who was in the audience, invited me to 62

repeat the performance of Black. Black continued to grow with each performance through the highly creative exchange of the participants involved.

“In Tambellini’s ‘Electromedia’ there are images which are like microscopic or sidereal visions, telescopic, space-like I would say, nuclear at the same time, circles, biological, cellular organisms. Later expanding these forms to include improvisational, avant-garde musicians, experimental dancers, his handpainted films, his experimental videos on TV monitors, “lumagrams” and even gas-masks, machine sounds, sirens, recorded improvised vocal sounds and inflatable screens, hand-held projectors, all to create a unique multimedia experience. Each time Black was performed, Tambellini added new elements making it a ‘work in progress.’ The inflatable screen burst at the end of the performance. It is a space-like experience, the dramatic birth of a universe.

This also appears to be an ‘inflatable sculpture’ when it is incorporated with the other media and with the performance. For Tambellini black is a sort of womb of the space era. But in the performance ‘Black’ is joined with the civil rights movement of the blacks, a growing planet but still oppressed in a fight for social emancipation.”12

“Aldo Tambellini has survived, thanks to his toughness, his belief in himself and his vision of life…Tambellini is an artist and a rebel…he’s not only a rebel but a leader of rebels. Last Monday as producer and director, he put on a hour-and-twenty minute show called Black 2 at the Bridge Theatre, 4 St. Mark’s Place…the performance brought into an organic form…the fusion of abstract and social commitment. Among those associated with Tambellini in this enterprise are Lorraine Boyd, a dancer (a student of Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham), Cecil McBee (formally with Dianah Washington), who thumbs a bass, Calvin, C. Hernton (editor of the poetry magazine Umbra), a poet who reads his own poems of racial conflict with a flashlight. Tambellini has made what he calls lumagrams…he projects 200 of them during the performance, sometimes while Ms. Boyd, dressed in black tights, is dancing in a way that seems to represent the plight of the Negro and while Mr. McBee is thumping and bowing his bass beautifully…Tambellini dressed in a black shirt, black pants…the largest of his paintings (14 x 7 feet) [sic] in the loft studio is a double image of a black circle within a larger white circle in a vast black space. Black fascinated him. Recently, the double image, or, as he calls it, the Echo, has been reoccurring in his work. ‘This two in one thing appeals to me,’ he said, ‘it seems to be happening in my work. I have no explanation why this is.’…He is an easy mark for ridicule for those who don’t know him.

Black Zero Those who do respect him. They may not know what he is doing and they might even doubt that he does, but they will know that he will not swerve from his path. In a time of opportunism, they find something splendid in this principled obstinancy.”13

which naturally grows. Black Zero is the cry from the oppressed creative man. There is an injustice done to man, which is not forgivable.”14

I made a dedication for the performance of Black Zero at Expanded Cinema Festival in the Film-Makers Cinematheque: “Black Zero began and grew in New York but it will grow out there somewhere outside of New York; for America rejects that

“Black Zero (the major work of the Tambellini Intermedia Program) is an environment to be experienced in a room, a barn, a giant balloon, or a theatre by seated audience, as it was at Talbot College’s new theater in London, Ontario. The whole work is kinetic, a 20th Century cosmic dance…

It constantly crossed the pain threshold. I agree with Gerry Trottier who said to me, ‘it overpowered you, and a couple of times I had to physically bring myself back to my seat.’ Tambellini in Black Zero is exploring his preoccupation with the relation of man and nature. Nature observed under a microscope or through the windows of a space capsule. And the relation between these, one keeps asking, ‘Is it a monstrous birth or a death?’ For me the whole of Black Zero is negation and affirmation, constantly in conflict.

And counterposed the wonder of the rhythmic harmony of Galaxies, wombs.

Cellular growth, wheeling suns, sperm, and spiral nebulae. Aldo Tambellini is an artist – sculptor, painter, filmmaker – is an outrider and his work is prophetic.”15

In 20 Cents Magazine, published in Canada, Ann Brodzky and Greg Curnoe held a public conversation about Mixed Media from New York City. Both had seen my Black Zero and Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in the space of less than a week and discuss the two works. Curnoe states, “Both Tambellini’s and Warhol’s had distinct New York Styles. However it was obvious that the Exploding Plastic Inevitable had taken a lot of very effective devices from Tambellini’s and other filmmakers’ and packaged them for mass consumption (this is how their styles differ…Madison Avenue versus the Village). With Warhol you are drawn in and then excluded; with Tambellini you are engaged in a dialogue.” Brodzky added, “Yes. But I cannot agree that Tambellini’s work is representative of any ‘style.’ ”16

Broadside Advertisement for a performance of Black Zero, 1965

The last performance of Black Zero culminated the program Intermedia ’68 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on a double bill with Carolee Schneemann. Intermedia ’68, produced by 63

Aldo Tambellini from four TV screens. The mounting tension produced incredible orgasms of continuously searing sight and sound. Its success is founded on the subtle sexual response it elicits from non-resisting populace willingly experiencing the stimuli of the electromedia. It is obscure. It is so sensual. Interference runs and bugs statistically between the rushes. French films are outmoded, black TV is beautiful.”18

Black Zero was restaged using all of the original film and lumagrams in 2009 at the White Box Theater, NYC for Performa 09, curated by Christoph Draeger, with Ben Morea, William Parker, and Ishmael Reed.

Calo Scott playing amplified cello during Black Zero, 1968

John Brockman, toured several venues in upstate New York.

Grace Glueck of the New York Times reviewed the performances: “…it gradually built up visual and aural imagery – sound, word, music, lights, and slide projections to a shattering crescendo…as a symbolic comment on the explosive racial situation in this country. Tambellini’s work was a painfully literal experience. On another level, as well, it was a highly effective piece of abstract theatre.”17

Susan Asch reviewing the show in the S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook Statesman, remarked: “Sunday night Intermedia ’68 presented a superb example of existentialism through electronic art. Throbbing and pulsating vibrations of blinding images of black and white and shattering explosions flashed simultaneously

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Black Zero during Performa 09, White Box Theatre, New York, NY, 2009

I was invited by Rudy Stern to perform Moondial at the Dom on St. Mark’s Place. I had admired the dancer, Beverly Schmidt, and later becoming her friend, I asked her if she wanted to collaborate on an Electromedia performance. Beverly had been a principal dancer in the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company at the Henry Street Settlement House in Manhattan.

I made Beverly’s costume and a mobile head-piece from clear plastic with silver round discs.

Black Zero

For the performance I created an original set of 160 hand-made slides (lumagrams), which were projected from two carousel projectors. These slides all had a black circle split down the middle leaving a band of light in the center. The dancer used the black space and the light area to improvise movement in and out of the light. She also used a big loop to create the image of a circle within a circle. At one point a 16mm film, from the Black Film Series, added a faster kinetic movement.

Drummer, Lawrence Cook, improvised the sound. Later, Calo Scott, with his amplified cello “A Far-Out Five,” The New York Times, June 12, 1966 replaced Lawrence Photo by Bob Greene Cook. It was all an intense improvisation. One of the key voices of the Lower East Village, Jonas Mekas, responded favorably in his Village Voice review: “The piece fell in that category which is known (by now) as Intermedia – in this case dance plus slides, plus movies, plus sound, plus costumes. It was one of these few cases where everything seemed to work perfectly. The SchmidtTambellini piece had a classical perfection and beauty about it. It was often a breathtakingly beautiful performance. In the middle of the performance, during one of its most culminating passages, I turned around for a moment and looked where the slides and projectors were set behind the audience’s backs. And I saw this amazing, almost phantastic thing happening: I saw

both Tambellinis immersed in a deep dance trance of their own, moving, with hand–held projectors and slides, shaking, and trembling, no more conscious of themselves. And I looked at their faces. They were going through similarly phantastic changes and it seemed that the things on stage were directly connected with their fingertips, their face movements, their very flesh…every light change, every light trembling, every motion that took place onstage was produced directly by their bodies, by this phantastic action-reaction.”19

It was a natural progression to expand my art to film-making. I started to treat my films in a physical way by experimenting with painting, drawing, and burning on clear leader and scratching,

Moondial Performance, Beverly Schmidt dancer, The DOM, New York, NY 1966

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punching holes, and eating away the emulsion on black leader, later using chemicals which caused me to develop severe allergies.

I used found material for most of my films including Japanese leader, documentary footage, and computer cards I got on the sidewalk close to my loft on West Broadway near Spring Street.

The holes on the cards held data in an early computer language, a language I transferred onto clear leader by using the cards as stencils, spraying the holes with black paint. The movement of the projector (30 frames per second) determined the animated rhythm of the film. This work produced the seven films of my Black Film Series.

times, I projected the films onto the bodies of performers and objects such as inflatable screens (black weather balloons), and at other times, the films were projected onto split screens or in simultaneous multiple projections.

Very often I was asked, “Why black?” Anne Brodzky, the new editor of artscanada, asked me this question in a October 1967

I produced my first four-minute film called Black Is. The Grove Press Film Catalog, which later distributed almost all of my films, says about Black Is: “To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests, says Tambellini, ‘seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.’”20 Black Is was reviewed by Dan Sullivan in the New York Times, and called, “the most interesting…a dazzling succession of black-on-white and white-on-black splotches, dots, zig-zags and starbursts painted directly on the film…suggested that action painting might have found, in film, a home that suits it far better than canvas ever did.”21 I began to use my films in many ways, not only showing them in the movie theatre as traditional projected films, but also as part of my Electromedia performances, de-materializing the space where it was projected and producing a dislocation of the senses of the viewer. The pulsating, repetitive sound of the films added to the whole experience. Sometimes the films were used as an environment projected onto a given space, or just into the air to be seen wherever the image landed, and sometimes the films and the zooming of the hand-painted slides became one image. At 66

Lumagram on the cover of the artscanada“Black Issue,” artscanada, 24, no. 113 (October 1967)

Black Zero

special issue on the subject of On September 16, 1966, Elsa “Black,” to which I answered: and I opened the 200-seat Gate “Black to me is like a beginning.

Theatre on 2nd Avenue and 10th A beginning of what it wants to Street, whose sign is still carved be rather than what it does not at the entrance of the building, want to be. I am not discussing which is now a Presbyterian black as a tradition or nonTabernacle Church. The Gate tradition in painting or as having Theatre was the only theatre to anything to do with pigment or show avant-garde, underground as an opposition to color. As I films in continuous showing, am working and exploring black till midnight, seven days a week. in different kinds of dimensions, The theatre charged $1.50 I’m definitely more and more admission. The Gate was dubbed convinced that black is actually the “Radical Underground in the beginning of everything, Film.” We advertised our weekly which the art concept is not. programs in the Village Voice Black gets rid of the historical and New York Times. The outside definition. Black is a state of of the theatre had a flag, which being blind and more aware.

I designed with the word Gate Black is a oneness with birth. inside of a black circle. Our wall Black is within totality, the marquis held huge Photostats oneness of all. Black is the of the programs. We displayed expansion of consciousness in photographs of artistic events all directions.” I continued, and poems on the walls in the “Black is one of the important lobby. Young and old, educated reasons why the racial conflicts and uneducated flocked to the “The Gate Theatre, New York, 10th and 2nd Ave.” Photo by Jesse Fernandez are happening today, because Gate Theatre. We were trying it is part of an old way to look at a human being or race in to expose the general public to a type of film that was usually terms of color. Black will get rid of the separation of color reserved for small and more sophisticated audiences as well at the end. Blackness is the beginning of the re-sensitizing of as supporting up-and-coming filmmakers who had a difficult human beings. I strongly believe in the word ‘black power’ as time finding a theatre that would risk showing their features a powerful message, for it destroys the old notion of Western because they were not established. Among these filmmakers man, and by destroying that notion it also destroys the tradition were Bob Downey and Brian De Palma. of the art concept.”22 67

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The Gate Theatre opened with a protest. As the Press Release of that event states, on September 13, 1966, “The New Visions Festival, an unexpurgated and controversial series of American Underground films will be the initial venture of the Gate Theatre, starting Thursday, September 15. It will be a protest of Lincoln Center’s indifference to the wide variety of American film-makers, their forms of expression, and ideological content. We have initiated this festival as a rejoinder to Lincoln’s Center’s alarmingly superficial representation of American independent filmmakers. Many of the works which will be shown in the festival were deemed unsuitable by Lincoln Center because of their erotic, political or stylistic content. In addition, the Gate’s directors feel they are fully and honestly representing American Avant-garde cinema today…Among the works presented at the New Vision Festival will be two special Mixed-Media Events, Black Round by Aldo Tambellini and Quatriptych by Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, an evening of Stan Brakhage, who refused to contribute to the Lincoln Center’s Festival in protest of their callous handling of the filmmakers’ art and Scotch Tape by Jack Smith.”23

An example of a typical special, sold-out program, which we had at The Gate was “Psychedelia Tune In.” This program brought Dr. Ralph Metzner, chief associate of Dr. Timothy Leary, on stage with a discussion entitled “Psychedelic No-Art.” Richard Aldcroft presented his Infinity Machine, which had been featured on a cover of Life Magazine in 1966. The rest of the program included the screening of experimental films by Jud Yalkut and Bruce Conner, and my Black films.

it great affinity with my own work. We both favored circular forms – he in smoke and me in Duco paint – and while I was doing my Electromedia work in New York he was doing light shows in Germany. When we met in March of ‘67 we decided to open a space for multimedia performances, installations, and experiments, so on March 17, 1967, in the large space above the Gate Theatre, Otto Piene and I founded The Black Gate Theatre, the first Electromedia Theatre in New York City.

I painted the three-inch-thick wooden platform covering the floor in black. Someone made black cushions, which were placed on the platform and used by the audience to sit on. The space had three large, rectangular pillars. The room had no overhead lights but had several AC outlets in which one could plug numerous projectors.

“The vibrations of the Black Gate room seem to be about thinking.”24

.

The Gate became the home of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, directed by Charles Ludlam, which performed there every weekend between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. Some of the members of the cast included Mario Montez, Black-Eye Susan, and Jack Smith. Their outrageous plays – When Queens Collide, Dracula and Grant Hotel to name a few – were parodies of familiar titles, and most of their female parts were played by men, and they played to sold out houses every weekend.

By this time, Otto Piene, who along with Heiny Mack founded the Group Zero in Germany, and I had become good friends.

I had seen Otto’s work long before meeting him and found in 68

The Gate Theatre, Lobby, 1966

Black Zero

The first Black Gate Program showcased Otto’s and my work.

My piece was called Blackout, the simultaneous showing of my hand-painted film, projected slightly out of synch, and four carousel projectors zooming lumagrams of concentric circles continuously onto the environment, covering the entire wall. Otto Piene’s The Proliferations of the Sun was a series of hand-painted slides projected around the room as the audience sat on the floor. The program notes given to the audience included Otto’s description of his presentation, and I wrote a series of philosophical statements such as “blackout – man does not need his eyes but to function with 13 billion cells in his brain.”

Future programs featured performances by, to name a few: Nam June Paik, who performed without the use of video, and Charlotte Moorman, who zipped herself inside a bag and played the cello; Kosuki, made an installation experimenting with radio sound; the USCO group, with Gerd Stern and Jud Yalkut, did an installation projecting on balloon screens; Preston McClanahan

“We are an expanding generation: in our minds, in our arts, reflecting a progress of promise, departing from the continuum of stupidity which has marked man’s behavior. Artists are expanding their media: and in their attempts to create the artistic effect have mixed medias. They are not using a single canvas, or a single design, or a single object. We are traveling towards intermedia: and the Black Gate…has the meeting place and the performing center for the multiple light projections…Art historians beware! We remember that half a century or more ago, Picasso had a showing of cubist paintings and everyone laughed. But today no one laughs: we have caught up with Picasso. Let’s not play the same I-told-you-so game: let’s catch up with the Tambellinis and the Pienes and the McClanahans. Intermedia is at the Gate: truth and beauty is not far behind.”25 “Aldo Tambellini’s Black Gate at 10th Street and Second Avenue was founded in 1967. Tambellini has made the Black Gate a testing ground for radical avant-garde experiments. For Tambellini Black is a color, experience, and space is a source of constant imagination. Born in 1930 and having grown up in Italy, Tambellini is in New York today, the most decisive opposition against the uptown “art establishment” that I have encountered so far. For him, the artist is responsible for the mutation of mankind and its environment.

Tambellini puts the creative energy of man above all. This creative energy is no longer represented in the galleries which are only oriented economically to a wealthy “in” group. Tambellini’s Black Gate is the base for his own work, the film he started to realize in 1965 and 1966 and his creative and unique work in the media: television.”26

Poster of Black Gate opening, 1967

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used light and fog for an installation which surprisingly was visited by anthropologist Margaret Mead; Jürgen Claus brought an evening of short German films on conceptual work; other German art included an early work by Hans Haacke shot on a Berlin Street and a performance with video by Takahito Iimura.

for example, what occurs behind the scenes, the formats, the decisions which govern the programming. The work of Tambellini is an example of how with experimentation we can (and we all can do it) regain ownership of the medium. Let us not forget that Tambellini, again, became a pioneer in this medium also.”28

“I dropped in on a rehearsal of composer Jacques Beckaert’s (from France) piece of tape, viola, and voice last Saturday. Composer-violinist David Behrman owned the electronic equipment and was whipping out just the right box with the right switch to get the right sound all afternoon. An Intense work of strong musicality and social statement on the black man’s plight seemed in the making.”27

Memorable was Yayoi Kusama’s performance called Obliterations, with music by Joe Jones, a Fluxus artist, and thirty frogs in a tank of water whose bellies were to be rubbed to provide the music.

In keeping with the concept of Media at the Black Gate, I published two newspapers in the form of posters called The Black Gate. The first had philosophical statements by Otto Piene and me and announced the future programs. The second one had a circle in the center, with a statement about the social reorientation of America in the Space Era that I wrote, surrounded by still photos of my first videotape.

“The medium which has influenced the second half of the 20th century more than anything before the onset of computer technology was the television.

One can observe that television has been a private and public phenomenon.

In the 50s in small towns people would go to bars or to friends’ houses to watch in groups important programs, films and the broadcast of important events; then we closed ourselves in our homes with the TV set which became our communal way of life for many years after its appearance, up until the implosion of the distinction between public and private (implosion means a mixture that sees its core losing a differentiation of its various components).

This instrument is still not understood by the people who most watch it, I mean the spectators. The spectator is like an illiterate being in regard to the language that we often don’t understand and the rules that we don’t know,

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Images of Black Video 2, The Black Gate Paper

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In 1966, at Willoughby’s on 32nd Street I purchased one of the first model of video-recorder on the market, a Sony CV2000. At the Gate Theatre, I mounted the camera on a tripod, set up a microphone, created feedback with the sound, took a portable light and created simultaneous live movements by shining the light directly into the camera. The recording of these movements, in 1966, was my first videotape. These lights slowly began to burnout the vidicon leaving permanent black spots that showed on the recorded tape. That day on the Lower East Side, I produced the first half hour segment and the following day it became an hour.

6673, black & white CV tape from 1966 reprocessed in 1973

This tape was shown on Channel 7, ABC TV News in New York on December 21, 1967 and its images became part of the second Black Gate newspaper.

It was difficult at that time to find labs where I could make copies of this tape. I did find a place near La Guardia Airport called Video Flight that was transferring movies onto tapes for the airline companies. They copied the tape. As they were duplicating the tape, I saw test patterns and other electronic images on the monitors that excited me. I spoke with the young engineers and decided to collaborate with them, returning to make a second tape of the electronic images. This manipulation of the test patterns became my second tape. The sound heard on the tape was from an oscilloscope which I controlled and, through the sound, manipulated the images. Further into the tape the sound is my own voice improvising as I reacted to the images. I called this tape 6673. 6673 was part of Circuit: A Video Invitational at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, N.Y., curated by David Ross in 1973, and it traveled extensively to other museums in the United States.

In the issue of the East Village Other, the art critic Lil Picard asked me, “Why is it television?” I answered: “Because television is no longer a painting or a form which could work on a canvas which can only be owned, which can only be seen, which can only involve a small, limited amount of people. I am looking for the many. I am looking for the multitude. I am looking for the simultaneous. I am looking for humanity as humanity…

To me humanity is the sharing, the exchange, the giving of my particular experience for Man to have. For Man to have it there should be no dictatorship or owning a particular work as if owning someone’s particular life. Like somebody might say ‘I own a Van Gogh.’ I want to say that somebody does not own anything, but he has the same experience, the same life, the 71

Aldo Tambellini

same fucking heart, the same human concept as anybody else can have.”29 In November 1968, I met Tracy Kinsel, an engineer from Bell Laboratories during the show at the Brooklyn Museum called Some More Beginnings, sponsored by EAT (Experiment in Arts

and Technology) organized by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver. I showed Black Video 2, a video sculpture assemblage.

I approached Tracy Kinsel who later introduced me to Hank Reinbold, because I wanted to alter a black-and-white television set in order to have it broadcast in a spiral configuration. A set was re-circuited for me so that all regular broadcast imagery was transformed into a constantly moving spiral that is drawn into the center of the tube. After many attempts, we finally got the results I wanted. To me it was nature as we will see it in the future, in circular or spiral form. No Up-No Down-No Gravity.

Floating. I called the piece, Black Spiral, a television sculpture.

It was exhibited at the first television show in an art gallery, TV as a Creative Medium, at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York City in 1969. In his Arts Magazine review of the show, Jud Yalkut described Black Spiral as, “a high-contrast spiraling white light, [which] shimmers, radiates, contracts, twists in orgasmic ecstasy, dwindles to nothing, and blazes forth again on the black video field,”30 and Gene Youngblood in his Expanded Cinema called it, “…a beautiful example of aesthetically manipulated video circuitry. The normal rectangular raster of the TV picture was transformed into a circular raster by modification of the circuitry from a xy coordinate system to a polar coordinate system. As a result, the broadcast picture appeared as a flowing spiral; any movement in the picture caused the spiral to swoop and explode in giant gaseous curls of glowing phosphors. The sound was transformed by modulating normal audio signals from the television station with a random audio signal.”31

I also published my own ideas about what I was doing with television in the catalogue for Howard Wise’s landmark exhibition, TV is a Creative Medium,

Tambellini manipulating images of Black Video 2, Black Gate Theatre, 1968

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“And what we are going to do through the media – let’s say we are going to keep it open and whatever I think is possible. I would like to do whatever one might dream of – that which somebody would not want. If I had the

Black Zero possibility to do it, let’s break all the rules – let’s open up the possibility which everyone else says to you, this is not right and this is not feasible…and I would like to start there: from a reality. So what one wants to do is more like an attitude rather than the specifics of what one wants to do.”33

In Radical Software in 1970 I wrote: “We will be of television vision we will be of television memory we will be of television instant extending in an all total network communicating toward unknown living existing planets extending a totality of self reaching for the ever expanding human aspect given to television…”34

I felt that we needed to take on television, that it was important because as a new medium, a new type of artist could have access in a new way, and with a new audience: “Television is not just an object. It’s a live communication medium. Black Spiral brings you live information. One day we will look at nature as the floating astronauts do in a spiral or circular form where no up or down or gravity exists.” 35 The video artist Woody Vasulka, understanding this manifold vision, wrote in 1992, “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 manifesto, 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 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. We would discuss the presentation of a frame in painting, photography, film and of course in video. The regularity of drawing a frame of video from left to right, from top to bottom was always

suspect as the most unimaginative, traditional ‘reading of the book.’ Aldo’s concept challenged that.”36

“When Nam June Paik and Aldo Tambellini began working with electronic media in the 60’s, video meant one thing: TV. Both artists came to video by way of sculptural and environment-based art, and it was the physical TV set which was their port of entry. Although Paik is the more widely recognized of the two, both featured in the seminal 1969 installation exhibition, TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, in which TVs were put into all sorts of unlikely sculptural and environmental contexts. The impetus for environmental-based art was generally a desire to break down the traditionally passive and disengaged structures of the art exhibition. The introduction into this context of that most passive and 2D of forms was seen by artists as a way of reclaiming and (sometimes literally) redesigning an incredibly powerful and dominant form of communication. As Paik put it ‘Television has been attacking us all our lives now we can attack it back.’

The inherent problem with this kind of project, was finding ways to subvert and circumvent technology that has been designed for reverse aesthetic and political purposes. The critic David E. James has argued that ‘since video depends on advanced technology and on technological systems integrated at the corporate level, it is always possessed by the corporation, always besieged by its values.’ As both Paik and Tambellini became more engaged in creating their own video content, their response to these problems tended to oscillate between the destructive and the constructive – on one hand critiquing and destructing TV’s conventional modes, and on the other hand attempting to invent alternative ones.”37

Black Spiral at the Rose Art Museum, Christian Science Monitor, January 31, 1970

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Aldo Tambellini

In the winter of 1967, I came upon the idea tapes were then edited to make one final tape. of photographing an image directly from the Live audiences sat on the floor like they would TV screen without using the camera and finally at the Gate. Otto’s part – inflated polyethylene figured out how to do it in 1968. Upstairs, at tubing which tempted the audience to get up the Black Gate Theatre, next to the projection and play along, and light sculptures which booth, I placed the emulsion side of the photo dispersed images around the room – fused with paper in front of the TV monitor in the dark, my part, which was a barrage of media work turned on the TV set, and when the beam – projections of films on monitors and walls, flashed on the paper, I immediately shut it hand-painted slides that traveled the room, off. I developed the paper in the sink and a television news clips showing Robert Kennedy’s black dot appeared as the captured image of a assassination, the war in Vietnam, Race Riots television beam. I made many variations using and Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral with the this method. One of them was a self-portrait haunting voice of Mahalia Jackson – bombarded made by playing back a pre-recorded tape of the audience with light and sound and sense. myself, stopping the recorder and reproducing In 2007, Black Gate Cologne was digitized and on photo paper my self-portrait. I called these along with an accompanying book became part prints “Videograms.” They were exhibited with of the 40jahrevideokunst.de (40 Years of Video other works of mine about television, including Art in Germany). It traveled extensively around Videogram, a cameraless TV image, on photo paper, 1967 Black Spiral, from January 21 – February 22, Museums in Europe and in the catalogue they 1970 at the Vision & Television Show at the describe Black Gate Cologne: Rose Art Museum, the first acknowledgement of television as “It was a live event involving films, light objects, slides, sound, and the an art form by a museum in the United States. Kenneth Baker participation of the studio audience. A comparable event took place in reviewed the show in the Christian Science Monitor and said, New York in 1967, the inter-media piece Black Gate Theater, which was “The result is a TV that swallows images, almost as a metaphor now expanded by the possibilities of the new ‘Electronic Studio’ of WDR for what television does to the distinctions that our ordinary television, whose electronic video mixing facilities could now be creatively perception of the world trains us to make.”32 I was also in the deployed for the first time. The close co-operation between artists and TV crew created a synthesis of live atmosphere, Light Art, experimental film first show of video at the Whitney Museum, called a “Special and electronic image aesthetics. Two consecutive 45-minute broadcasts with Video Show” in 1971. This was the first New York Museum to different audiences were recorded in the studio, and then in part copied one acknowledge video tape as an art form. on top of the other to intensify the transmitted product.” 38 Otto Piene and I were invited to make the first ever broadcast by artists at WDR-TV, German television in Cologne, Germany in 1968. Black Gate Cologne was recorded on two different evenings at the studio of WDR, Cologne, Germany and the 74

I stated my ambitions in my personal notes for the project, written while on the airplane flying to Germany: “We must make a new world through communication - as human - as beings - as people - as space - as nature - as the living plant - as the sound as the light

Black Zero image that passes in the speed of an idea / moscow - peking - cologne - new york / we are there in the flash of a thought you and I and all that black space that’s what we will do tomorrow and friday in cologne – BLACK GATE COLOGNE.”

Subsequently, in 1969, six artists were invited to work with television technicians for the creation of The Medium Is the Medium, the first broadcast in the U.S. by artists making use of television as an art form, on WGBH, Boston. The program was nationally broadcast.

“Aldo Tambellini’s work Black features images from slides, films, and television monitors and the responses of children. The work, which is black-and-white, opens with abstract circular designs and moves into street scenes and images of children’s faces. At one point the children are heard discussing blackness and racial identity.”40

Black Gate Cologne, 1968 WDR-TV, Cologne, Germany. Photo by Peter Kliem

Many consider this video to be a landmark in television art.

Christine Mehring described its significance in October Magazine: “The viewer effectively experiences television as it develops at this moment from a medium for making self-reflexive abstract art to one that conveys, structures, and manipulates information, particularly that of a political nature. Black Gate Cologne figured the transformation of television’s capabilit to reflect ambivalence toward the German economic miracle into an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the medium in Western Europe at large, as television maintained its public nature but began to be Americanized. The significance of Black Gate Cologne as the first work of art to make full-scale use of television thus coincided with its embodiment and representation of the end of television art’s abstract starts.”39

WDR Studio set up for Black Gate Cologne Notebook drawing by Tambellini, 1968

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Aldo Tambellini projected on and around the children in the studio, creating an overwhelming sense of the black man’s life in contemporary America. Images from all three cameras were superimposed on one tape, resulting in a multidimensional presentation of an ethnological attitude. There was a strong sense of furious energy, both Tambellini’s and the blacks, communicated through the space/ time manipulations of the medium.” 41 “In the past few years, Tambellini has been concerned with the color black as a concept of time and space and as a social concept. He works in black and white. His films and slides include abstract images created in videotapes (from a series of ‘Black’ tapes made since 1966) and images filmed directly from the ‘television screen.’ Tambellini’s intent is, ‘to experience TV as a medium itself, and to bring a direct relation between the audience and the characteristic elements of TV in a total involvement of the senses.’ One of Tambellini’s short films, Black TV, was awarded the Grand Prix of the International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, 1968.”42

The Syracuse Rebel in Cambridge I was invited by Otto Piene to participate in Arttransistion, at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, at the Massachusetts Instititute of Technology in 1975. I created 10 Second Delay with Sarah Dickinson performing. It was later performed at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, in 1976 in a one-

Tambellini, Black, The Medium is the Medium, WGBH, 1969.

Photo by Ron Merions

“In 1969 [Tambellini] was one of six artists participating in the PBL program The Medium Is the Medium at WGBH-TV in Boston. The videotape produced for the project, called Black, involved one thousand slides, seven 16mm film projections, thirty black children, and three live TV cameras, which taped the interplay of sound and image. The black-and-white tape is extremely dense in kinetic and synaesthetic information, assaulting the senses in a subliminal barrage of sight and sound events. The slides and films were

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10 Second Delay, Sarah Dickinson performing, Everson Museum, Syracuse, 1976

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man exhibition, Aldo Tambellini Photography and Video Work.

a Vietnam War documentary, Apollo 8’s mission to the moon and other electronic sounds.

This work illustrates television’s I walk to the lit area and with a ability to control and manipulate piece of chalk draw a wide circle one’s perception of time. In this around the performer. The piece the mime enacts the act of image of Leonardo’s drawing floating in space – re-enacting of the Vitruvian Man within an astronaut’s experience of a circle becomes apparent in weightlessness. The performer is the projection on the screen. being taped live and the video is Slowly, the performer begins shown on a monitor. On another creating movement. The two monitor the tape is delayed 10 cameras which she has on seconds, so that the audience also her wrists capture random sees a replay of the past action. The images. She moves as if she two dimensions of time – past and Moonblack, Sarah Dickinson performing, Carpenter Center Harvard, 1977 were surveilling the audience, present – are at once visible, and the sending the images into the monitors.

The recorded audio performer is seen simultaneously moving in two different times begins, followed by the films and then the live drummer joins and spaces. in, improvising. The program reaches a frantic crescendo and Moonblack, an homage to Leonardo, was performed as part then abruptly stops. of Centerscreen in 1977 at the Carpenter Center, at Harvard In keeping with my interest in working with the manipulation of University, Cambridge, MA. Sarah Dickinson was the mime space and time, I created Pierrot in Time, which was performed performer, joined by a drummer. at the Global Village, NYC, on December 17, 1977. Sarah Dickinson, as a mime, executed my concept. The program was In a large empty space the performer lies on the floor. She is described in an issue of Videography Magazine: wearing a parachute suit. Her two arms are outstretched and have two small video cameras strapped to her wrists. The cables “Topsy-turvy time. In addition to manipulating space, video can also create distortions of time. Impossible to do on stage live, it is simple with from the cameras feed into three monitors. A camera suspended camera, deck, and monitor. Performers have employed various techniques from the ceiling above the performer projects her image through such as tape delays, tape loops, prerecorded materials that come in and out a video projector onto a suspended large screen. The audience of synch with the live performance, and so on. With them, the past is as sits on the floor outside a circular lit area around the performer. available as the present, and can be repeated indefinitely. Pierrot in Time There are three 16mm movie projectors with footage of television was an example of an abstract and highly conceptualized use of video. The medium was primary, an indispensable component of the piece. But video images of the 60s and an audio tape recorder with sounds from 77

Aldo Tambellini has on occasion functioned merely in subordinate role to enhance and clarify abstract performance concepts. It’s still a new form and it has endless room to grow. And performers seem to be increasingly enthusiastic about video because of its great ability to help them reach beyond the conventional and to implement new ideas.”43

When I became a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, with Otto Piene as director, I found a fertile environment where interactive ideas could be actualized. As a Fellow, I collaborated and participated in many projects held at CAVS. During this period I became very involved with the concept of “Communicationsphere” with the intent of creating an interactive network between artists (me and others), engineers, and technicians from different parts of the world. This connection was a kind of social networking and a precursor to today’s internet. The work of Communicationsphere was exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, MA in 1983 and 1986.

Communicationsphere Exhibit at Boston Now ‘83, June 14-August 14 1983, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

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“Technology and culture are interrelated: from an industrial-electronic society we are moving to a communications-information society. Telecommunications brings the world screen to screen and we become one with the new perception of the world; the electromagnetic spectrum is to be considered a natural resource for creative activity. Transmitted information is a new form of art. This is the age of mass media and technology. This is the age of satellite and instant global communications. This is the age of networks, the age of interactive media. The human system is in the process of globalizing itself. We live in a reality defined by the structural invention of the mass media – printed and electronic images are the building blocks of our cultural evolution. New imaging systems are being invented, new storage capabilities are being invented, reality is being constantly reinvented.”44

Exhibition Poster for Boston Now ‘83, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

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The Communicationsphere Group, under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Educational Video Resources, MIT created or participated in the following projects (selected list):

conference in San Francisco. This event utilized a live international audio and video link. Each location had two separate telephone lines, one coupled to a computer terminal, the other to a slow-scan transceiver, the Robot 530.

Picturephone Event, 1977

Interface Event, 1981

I represented the CAVS, MIT with Sonia L. Sheridan, participants from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Illinois Bell Picturephone System, June 8, 1977. This event was the first two-way live Picturephone event by artists.

The Illinois Bell Telephone Company made two experimental communications systems available. The goal was to see what new applications artists would bring to the technology currently used by businesses to communicate. The sites generated multiple visual media connected with the live Picturephone interaction.

The event used two spaces, one at CAVS, MIT and the other, at the American Center for Artists and Students in Paris, France. The sites and transmissions were supervised by two for the transmission. The MIT site was supervised by French artist, Roland Biladi, who had come from Paris for the event, and I supervised the Paris location. The goal was to create a simultaneous “exchange” of leadership by creating two large ten feet by fourteen feet murals, one at each of the sites. The pictures transmitted were of the “Heads of State,” President Reagan of the United States and French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Specific photos of the Presidents were chosen and divided into 16 sections. Each section was transmitted via slow scan by transatlantic telephone cable at a rate of eight seconds per frame, each frame being a part of the picture. Each frame was photographed as it was received by the site by a Polaroid camera and the negative was brought to a darkroom to be printed. The pictures then were assembled in front of an audience and became part of a mosaic mural.

TV to TV, 1979 This project was done in cooperation with the CAVS, MIT and Educational Video Resources and the Architectural Machine at MIT. Using the facilities at MIT, I created an installation for an interactive outdoor/indoor community event. Flyers were distributed to members of the Cambridge/Boston community soliciting participation from performers and interested individuals. The installation allowed interaction between two locations on the MIT campus as well as made use of the cable facility connecting other departments of the institution. This created a level of excitement within the community and brought out the importance and meaning of interaction among people.

Artists’ Use of Telecommunications, 1980 I organized a group at MIT to participate in this international communication interactive project which exchanged among Tokyo, Vancouver, Vienna and other locations with a live

Telesky, 1981 A slow-scan event between CAVS, MIT with Sarah Dickinson, performing and interacting with artists from Sydney, Australia as part of the Sky Art Conference of 1981.

5 Minutes in Pittsburg, 1984 A collaboration with the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Each participant was located with different media in different 79

Aldo Tambellini

parts of Pittsburg. At exactly at 12 o’clock, each used whichever medium he had been assigned to record 5 minutes of activities.

After this activity, the group came together and shared their results digitizing all of them into a newspaper, which was called “5 Minutes in Pittsburg.”

After the Center for Advanced Visual Studies I was sent by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT to the Biennale 83 in Brazil with works from my telecommunication projects. I ended up not returning after the program; but, rather, staying on in São Paolo to learn about my Father’s birthplace, its culture, language and history. I spent nearly a year traveling around Brazil and searching for living relatives. I returned to the United States to meet some obligations of a Media Workshop I was conducting at Carnegie Tech.

While walking one night in my neighborhood in 1989, I found several discarded rolls of architectural paper which had graphic lines and symbols. Selecting certain pages, I laid them on the floor of my apartment and painted as traditional Chinese or Japanese artists would do – the paper on the floor, I on my knees, using black acrylic paint, wax, and powder graphite and no white.

I responded intuitively with quick automatic gestures, being aware of the printed symbols and other signs existing on the paper and integrating these into the process allowing for no change. Sometimes, I used to make incisions on the surface.

Each image which I worked on led to the next painting in a sequential order as I had painted the circles in the 60s or each frame of the “Black Film Series”. I call this series of nearly 250 pieces, “From Black Energy Suspended.”

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When I completed this series, I spent a year waking up each morning, sitting at my typewriter and writing poems and prose for the book I entitled Brainscan 90. Anna Salamone wrote in the introduction to the book, “…Some through automatic writing; some through images captured as if they were frames of a film; others engaging thoughtful processes, Aldo Tambellini was able, in a process which lasted almost a year, to come up with a scan of the contents of his brain in this appropriately named collection.”45 The exercise of writing poetry brought me back to my old way of expressing myself. My first poems were written when I was sixteen and I continued to use verse as an expression through the 60s, when I published The Screw newsletter in poetry form.

Encouraged by my poetic expression, I entered the world of poetry which was very active in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I read in many poetry venues. I used to read to the homeless people in Cambridge’s Central Square and to the veterans who spent their days sitting on benches. In 1998 I organized a venue of my own called the People’s Poetry. This became a workshop for new poets; a place where they would feel comfortable to recite their works; a performance space where poetry, at times, was combined with song and music.

Maybe because the talk was about war and the United States moved to attack the Middle East and the broadcast news was about death, destruction and collateral damage; perhaps because the poetry I was writing brought up images of World War II which I had experienced first-hand as a teenager, surviving and witnessing the destruction of my neighborhood, I returned to the work I had done in the 60s. I used a drill and burned and attacked the surface of cardboard painted with black acrylic, wax and graphite. My new pieces were done in series, as if looking down on Earth from space. I became aware that I was dealing

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with destruction, a bombardment of the creative field, and therefore called the series “Destruction.” Some of this work also uses cosmic imagery. I worked intuitively, creating one image after another and made nearly a hundred pieces.

War, 2005-2011, 7 loose photographs mounted on cardboard, each 12 x 12”, housed in a munition box, 19 x 17 x 6.25”

As the war raged in my work so were the airways full of talk about war. I began to oppose the constant aggression of the United States and joined other like-minded poets. I complied a book of poetry called 12 Poems, originally published by an internet site called Voices in Wartime.46 In 2000, I co-founded the Liberation Poetry Collective which was multi-generational, multi-racial and multiethnic. We have read extensively as a group and as individuals and have published two anthologies of our poems: Poets Against the Killing Fields and the Anthology of Liberation Poetry.47 My poems in both anthologies used visual means to deliver their message.

In 2004, I started to work digitally on a computer, and using a photographic process to create 24 x 24 inch political pieces.

These became my digital political pieces which have been published in issues of avant-garde magazines in Russia, poetry collections and have been exhibited. A smaller version of six of these images became part of a unique book which I produced for the exhibit, One of a Kind (2011) at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Heide Hatry as curator.

This piece, WAR in a BOX, held digital images perforated and destroyed, this time, shot with real bullets.

In 2004-2005, I returned to taping footage from television, as I did when I made Black TV in 1968. I taped about fifty hours about the wars in the Middle East. I was looking for a way to create a film where I could use my anti-war poems and these television images to make a statement. The result was a fifteen minute experimental anti-war digital film entitled, LISTEN. To the war footage taped from television I added animated text and other images, including an animation of Iraqi children’s artwork smuggled out of Iraq and a black child asking, “Why War?” This film won prizes for “Best Experimental Short Film” at both the New England Film and Video Festival (2006) and the Syracuse International Film Festival (2005).

As I thought about the work done in the early 60s and its counterpart in the 90s, I saw the circular forms which had become so much part of my art. The spirals, the spheres, the suspension, the tension, the void, and the black mysterious matter that filled my old work also filled the sketches in my new notebooks. In 2008 I started to gather together my poems about space, written in the 60s and 70s, with some new poems, and made a short digital experimental film called Black on Black. At the time of the recording, I was unable to read my poems because I was afflicted with Bell’s Palsy, so I asked Askia Touré, a friend from the 60s and a member of the UMBRA Poets, to do the reading with the poet Neiel Israel. The film premiered at the Harvard Film 81

Aldo Tambellini

Archive, on February 22, 2010, the night of a retrospective of my work. Black on Black is a poetic statement about an obsession which was part of me long before I first painted my round black forms, before I first scratched and pierced the leader in my Black Films, before I first scorched and perforated my paintings – my obsession with Black and with the universe.

“Tambellini’s background is unusual only perhaps in his thorough knowledge of techniques acquired at the Art Institute of Lucca, Italy, where he lived for his first fourteen years before returning to this country in 1946; Syracuse University (BFA, 1954); the University of Oregon, and Notre Dame University (Teaching Fellowship, MFA, 1959).

To this formal study, he has wedded a vibrant sense of art, and a McLuhanistic desire to completely explore the possibilities of technology in communication.

Tambellini defines his role as an artist through the expression of a world-view based on the concept of “Black.” For Tambellini, Black leads to the exploding of a rigid sense of the universe based on fixed beliefs and knowledge, and finding instead a sense of wonder, awe, and tingling freshness. It is a vision of art that seeks its inspiration in nature – but in the nature of the Twentieth Century: the shape of cells, the nucleus of an atom, a barrage of cosmic rays and the infinitude of outer space as described by a Russian cosmonaut.

It is also a social concept, evoking the energy of the Black people and all people who have been mentally and physically entrapped by the smugness and certitude of establishments – be they political, social or artistic. Through the dynamic interplay of Black and Light, he seeks to free his audience to recapture the sense of mystery and striving that is at the heart of man’s nature.

Tambellini is an innovator. Were he not such a competent and rational technician with so profound a sense of measure and discipline, one might almost call him – to paraphrase his own words – a primitive of the new era.”49

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1. This chapter on Aldo Tambellini’s autobiography is drawn from several sources and first person accounts. This section is adapted from “Ishmael Reed Interviews Aldo Tambellini.” Konch Magazine. Fall 2010. http://www. ishmaelreedpub.com/interview/tambellini.html 2. Autobiographical narrative contains some excerpts from Walter Carroll, “A Syracuse Rebel in New York,” The Syracuse Post-Standard Sunday Pictorial Magazine (January 27, 1963); and Aldo Tambellini, “A Syracuse Rebel in New York,” Clayton Patterson, ed., Captured: A Film and Video History of the Lower East Side. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005, pp. 41-56.

3. Ibid.

4. Nury Hernández. El Diario, Vol. XV, (July 18, 1962). p. 1.

5. David Bourdon, “Group Center,” The Village Voice (January 14, 1965).

6. Elsa Tambellini, “The Gate Theater,” Artscanada (October 1967), pp. 3-4.

7. Ibid.

8. John Gruen. “The Galleries - A Critical Guide.” New York Herald Tribune (January 6, 1965).

9. Bourdon, Village Voice, op. cit.

10. Jerry Wakefield, “The Black Gate,” down town magazine (October 7, 1967).

11. Don Ross, “Rebellion in Art Form – Tambellini’s Black 2, New York Herald Tribune (June 13, 1965).

12. Paolo Antognoli, “Retrospective: Aldo Tambellini – Electromedia,” in Mash-Up: European Media Art Festival. Exhibition catalogue. Osnabrueck, Germany, 2010, pp. 102-119 13. Ross, New York Herald Tribune, op. cit.

14. Expanded Cinema Festival, Filmmakers Cooperative, 1965. Aldo Tambellini Archive.

15. Anne Brodzky, ed., ““Black Special Issue,” Artscanada, 24, no. 113 (October 1967).

16. Anne Brodzky and Greg Curnoe, “A Conversation About Mixed Media from New York.” 20 Cents Magazine, (November 1966).

17. Grace Glueck, “Brooklyn is Host to ‘Intermedia ’68,” The New York Times (March 9, 1968).

18. Susan Asch, “Intermedia ’68 – Unique Art” Stony Brook University Statesman , V.11, n. 18. (February 16, 1968).

19. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal.” The Village Voice (June 23, 1966).

20. Grove Press Film Division. Film Catalog. New York: Grove Press, 1971. pp. 60, 61.

21. Dan Sullivan, “Gate Theatre Screens a Psychedelicate Subject,” The New York Times (October 29, 1966).

22. Anne Brokzky, artscanada, op. cit.

23. Press Release for opening of The Gate Theater, September 13, 1966, Aldo Tambellini Archives.

24. Carmen Moore, “Music: Spaces.” The Village Voice (December, 5 1968).

Black Zero 25. Sal Fallica, “Intermedia at the Gate,” The Torch (May 1, 1967).

26. Jürgen Claus, “The Establishment and Its Opposition,” #50 (Munich) (September 9, 1968).

27. Carmen Moore, The Village Voice, op. cit.

28. Antognoli, Tambellini Retrospective, op. cit.

29. Lil Picard, “Art: Child Is Black.” The East Village Other, (January 26 – February 1, 1968), pp. 16-17.

30. Jud Yalkut, “TV as a creative medium at Howard Wise.” Arts Magazine, (September-October 1969). p. 22 31. Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970.

32. Kenneth Baker, “Levine, Tambellini and TV: Tuning the Tube in an Art Museum,” Christian Science Monitor, (January 31, 1970).

33. Aldo Tambellini quoted in TV as a Creative Medium. New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969.

34. Aldo Tambellini, “Simultaneous Video Statements.” Radical Software. The Alternate Television Movement, Volume I, Number 1, Spring 1970. p. 17.

35. Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema. op. cit.

36. Woody Vasulka. “Aldo Tambellini: Black Spiral (TV Sculpture), 1969,” Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art, David Dunn (ed.).

Linz, Austria: Ars Electronica, 1992, p. 110 37. Donal Foreman, “TVs & Bodies: a selection of work by experimental video artists,” Experimental Film Club Blog. September 8, 2009. http:// experimentalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html 38. Frieling, Rudolf und Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., 40jahrevideokunst.de – Teil 1: digitales Erbe: Videokunst in Deutschland von 1963 bis heute. Exhibition catalog.

Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006.

39. Christine Mehring “Television Arts Abstract Starts; Europe Circa 19441969,” October Magazine, No. 125, Summer 2008. pp. 29-64.

40. “The Medium is the Medium - New Television Workshop.” WGBH Open Vault. September 1, 2011. http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/ntw-mla001515medium-is-the-medium-the 41. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, op. cit.

42. John E. Margolies, Art in America, “TV – The Next Medium,” SeptemberOctober 1969.

43. Peter Z. Grossman, “Getting into the Act: Video in Live Performance,” Videography Magazine, March 1978.

44. Aldo Tambellini quoted in Fallica, Sal. “Excerpts from Tambellini’s Black Electromedia, an interview by Sal Fallica with Otto Piene, Elizabeth Goldberg and Vin Grabill,” Centervideo: Film, Video, TV and Telecommunication, 19681981. Cambridge, MA: CAVS, MIT, 1981.

45. Anna Salamone, “Introduction,” Aldo Tambellini brainscan90, Cambridge, MA: n.p., 1990.

46. Aldo Tambellini, 12 Poems (Italy),2005. http://www.voicesinwartime.org 47. Liberation Poetry Collective. Poets Against the Killing Fields. Cambridge, MA: Trilingual Press, 2007, pp. 68-88; Liberation Poetry Collective. Anthology of Liberation Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Trilingual Press, 2011.

48. Anne Brodzky, ed., “Black Special Issue,” Artscanada, 24, no. 113 (October 1967).

83

Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini, 2008. Photo by Anna Salamone.

84

Black Zero

Curriculum Vitae Education 1941-1945

Art Institute, Lucca, Italy

1950-1955

Syracuse University, Bachelors of Fine Arts, Painting, Cum Laude

1955-1956

University of Oregon, Graduate School of Architecture & Allied Arts

1956-1958

University of Notre Dame, MFA, Sculpture

Academic and Professional Experience 1976-1984

Fellow, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA

1977

Director, Media-Environmental Workshop, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

1976 Visiting Artist, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL 1970-1972

Director, Pilot Program in Video in Harlem, New York Department of Education

1969-1970

Television Artist in Residence, Creative Video Tape Recording Project, New York State Department of Education

Summer ‘56 Painting and Design Instructor, Catholic

University of America, Washington, DC Summer ‘55 Director of Art Seminar, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 1954-1955

Art Instructor, Rosary Hill College, Buffalo, NY

1948-1949 Art Instructor, Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, Syracuse, NY Filmography Black Is (1965), 4:00, 16mm, b&w, sound Black Trip 1 (1965), 4:30, 16mm, b&w, sound Black Trip 2 (1965), 3:00, 16mm, b&w, sound Black Plus X (1965), 4:00, 16mm, b&w, sound Blackout (1965), 9:00, 16mm, b&w, sound Moonblack (1965), 13:00, 16mm, b&w, sound Black TV (1965), 10, 2 x 16mm split screen, b&w, sound Winner of the Grand Prix at Oberhausen Film Festival ‘69

1964-1965

Sculpture Instructor, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

Black Gate Cologne (1968), in collaboration with Otto Piene, Electro-media performance broadcast by WDR-Köln

1959-1963

Painting and Sculpture Instructor, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY

Black (1969), segment of The Medium is the Medium, WGBH, Boston, MA 85

Aldo Tambellini

A Digital Triptych: -1 (1969 and 2005), 24:00, video

Art and Film Exhibitions and Screenings

Atlantic in Brooklyn (1972), multi-channel presentation, 300:00, video, in camera editing

2011 Aldo Tambellini: The Black Films, Emerson College, Boston

The Brooklyn Bridge (1972), 23:00, video, in camera editing

2010 Aldo Tambellini’s Black on Black-2009 & Black Film Series-1965-69, Harvard Film Archive-Carpenter

Center, Cambridge, MA

Inside Loft and Self-Portrait (1972), 23:00, video, in camera editing Margarita at the Chelsea Hotel (1972), 23:00, video, in camera editing 6673 (1973), 55:00, first video from 1966 reprocessed in 1973 with the Paik-Abe Synthesizer Clone (1973), 41:38, video The Day Before the Moon Landing (1973), 23:00, video from series A Day in the Life of Television March 27, 1980 8:00 PM-1:00 AM (1980), 13:00 video from series A Day in the Life of Television Ronald Reagan Inauguration (1981), 35:00, video from series A Day in the Life of Television The Royal Wedding (1981), 25:00, video Listen (2005), 18:00. Winner of New England Film & Video

Festival for Experimental Short Film (2005). Winner of the Syracuse International Film Festival for Best Experimental Short Film (2006)

Black on Black (2009), 10:00, video and poetry

2010 Aldo Tambellini: Black Is, Pierre Menard Gallery,

Cambridge, MA 2009 Film and Video Retrospective as Featured Artist, in Mash Up, International Media Festival 2009, Osnabruck, Germany 2009 Black Zero (1966), PERFORMA 09, The White Box

Theatre, New York, NY 2009 Black Gate Cologne, Otto Piene & Aldo Tambellini,

Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA 2008 Aldo Tambellini: Film and Video Retrospective, Circuit Off program, Anthology Film Archive, New York, NY 2008 Masters of Texture, Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, France 2007 Aldo Tambellini: Film and Video Retrospective, Syracuse

Film and Video Festival, NY. Awarded Lifetime Achievement Award.

2007 Aldo Tambellini: Film Retrospective, Evolution 2007,

Leeds, England 2007 Aldo Tambellini: Film and Video Retrospective, Lucca

Film Festival, Lucca, Italy

86

Black Zero

2006 Listen, Syracuse International Film and Video Festival,

NY. Winner, Experimental Film Short

1975 10 Second Delay performance for Arttransition, Center

for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA

2005 Premiere of -1 (Minus One), 3rd HOWL Festival, New

York, NY

1974 Aldo Tambellini: From Film to Video, Anthology Film

Archives, NY

2005 Screening of Listen, New England Film and Video

Festival, Brookline, MA. Winner for Experimental

1972 The Kitchen Video Festival, Mercer Center, New York, NY

Short Film by Independent Filmmaker International Film Festival for Best Experimental Short Film

2004 Aldo Tambellini: Retrospective of Film and Video, Debut

screening of computerized film Listen, 2nd HOWL

Festival, New York, NY 2003 Aldo Tambellini Film Retrospective, 1st HOWL Festival,

New York, NY 2003 A Syracuse Rebel In New York, Outlaw Museum, New

York, NY 2003 Debut screening of video Birds in Flight, a homage to

Balla and Price, Charley Parker Festival, The Gathering

of the Tribes, New York, NY 1979 Aldo Tambellini: Two-way Live, Boston Film and Video

Foundation, MA 1977 Moonblack – An Homage to Leonardo. Centerscreen,

Visiting Artist Series, Carpenter Center, Harvard

University, Cambridge, MA. 1976 Aldo Tambellini, Media Studies Center, Buffalo, NY 1975 Aldo Tambellini: Photography and Videowork, Everson

Museum, Syracuse, NY

1972 First National Videotape Festival, Minneapolis Art

Institute in collaboration with Walker Art Center, MN 1971 Aldo Tambellini: Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art,

New York, NY 1971

Aldo Tambellini, Jewish Museum, New York, NY

1969 Black TV, screening at Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany, Grand Prix for Black TV 1969

Black Zero, multi-media, split-screen performance for Sights and Sounds in the Arts Now, New York State Education Department, Albany, NY

1969

The Medium is the Medium, Television program with Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini broadcast by WBGH, Boston, MA.

1969 Black Gate Düsseldorf, performance in collaboration

with Otto Piene, Düsseldorf, Germany 1968 Black Gate Cologne, multi-media performance in

collaboration with Otto Piene, broadcast on WDR-TV,

Cologne, Germany 87

Aldo Tambellini

1968 Black Zero, performance at Intermedia ’68, Brooklyn

Academy of Music, NY

1966 Black Zero and Moondial, performance at University of

Western Ontario, London, Canada, Arts Festival

1968 Black TV, Yale Film Festival, Yale University, New

Haven, CT. Honorable Mention

1966 Black Round, performance at Washington Park, New

York, NY

1968 Black Sound, mixed media concert with electronic

composer David Berman

1965 Black Zero, performance at Expanded Cinema Festival,

Filmmakers Cinematheque, New York, NY

1968 6th Annual Avant-Garde Film Festival, New York, NY

1965 Black, performance at Columbia University, New York, NY

1968 Film Festival, San Francisco State College, CA

1965 Black, Black 2, Black Zero, and Moondial, performance

at The Bridge Theatre & Open Space, New York, NY

1968 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan 1967 Black Air, Blackout and Otto Piene’s Proliferation of the Sun, performance to inaugurate the Black Gate Theatre,

New York, NY

1962 Black and White by Aldo Tambellini, Brata Gallery, New

York, NY 1968 X Screen, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln, Germany

1967 Black Zero and Moondial, performance at Princeton

University, NJ

1955 Drawing Painting, Coffee Encores Gallery, Buffalo, NY

1967 1st Festival of North American Cinema, Cinecity,

Toronto, Canada

Group Exhibitions

1967

Sogetsu International Experimental Film Festival, Sogetsu, Japan

1967

2nd Underground Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan

2011 One of a Kind: A Unique Artists’ Book Show, curated by

Heide Hatry, Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA 2010 Zelluloid- Camerless Films, Schirn Kunsthalle,

Frankfurt, Germany

1967 EXPO ’67, International Festival of Film for

Young People, Montreal, Canada

2010 Changing Channels, Kunst und Fernsehen 1963-1987,

MUMOK, Vienna, Austria

1966 Moondial, performance at The Dom, St Mark’s Square,

New York, NY

2010 Artium, Vitoria, Spain

1966 Moonblack, performance at Syracuse University, NY 88

2008 The Writer’s Brush: Artwork by Writers, Menard Gallery,

Cambridge, MA.

Black Zero

2008 Text in Video, Axiom Gallery, Boston, MA 2008 Interstitial Zones: Historical Facts, Archaeologies of the

Present & Dialectics of Seeing, Argos, Brussels, Belgium 2007 History of Syracuse, ThinC Gallery, Syracuse, NY 2006 Guerilla Art-art as activism, Altered Esthetics Gallery,

Minneapolis, MN 2005 Art of the Festival, ThinC Gallery, Syracuse, NY 2004 NO! ART, Berlin, Germany 2003 Howl Festival Exhibition, Fusion Art Museum, New

York, NY 1987 The Artist In the Computer Age Part II, The MIT

Museum, Cambridge, MA 1986 The Artist in the Computer Age Part I, Owens-Illinois

Art Center, Toledo, OH 1986 Communicationsphere Show, Institute of

Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 1983 Boston Now ‘83, Institute of Contemporary Art,

Boston, MA 1983 São Paolo Biennale, Brazil 1982 ARS Electronica, Linz, Austria 1981 Copy Art, Oce, Netherland, Amsterdam; exhibit toured

througout Europe 1979 Numbers, Galleria Nova 13, Alessandria, Italy

1979 International Biennial Exhibition of Graphic and Visual Art, Vienna, Austria 1978 Aesthetics and Technology, The Institute of Design, Offenbach am Main 1977 Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany 1977

New Work in Abstract Video Imagery, Everson Musuem, Syracuse, NY; North Carolina Museum of the Arts; Tweed Museum, University of Minnesota; Flint Institute of Art, MI; and the Memphis State University Museum, TN

1974 Projekt ’74, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Germany 1973

Circuit: A Video Invitational Everson Musuem, Syracuse, NY; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

1973 15 American Visual Artists, Center Cultural American,

Paris, France 1971 A Special Video Show, Whitney Museum of American

Art, New York, NY 1970 Vision and Television, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis

University, Waltham, MA 1969

Television as a Creative Medium, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, NY 89

Aldo Tambellini

1968 Some More Beginnings- Experiments in Art and Technology, Brooklyn Museum in Collaboration with

Museum of Modern Art, New York 1967 Projected Art, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, 1967 Festival of Lights, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, NY 1967 Kompas 3 Exhibition, van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Holland 1965 Quantum 2, Noah Goldowsky & A.M. Sachs Galleries,

New York, NY. Curated by Aldo Tambellini.

1964 Quantum 1, Noah Goldowsky & A.M. Sachs Galleries,

New York, NY. Curated by Aldo Tambellini.

1964 Loft Show, first recorded loft exhibition by artists in

what is now SOHO. Curated by Aldo Tambellini.

1961-1963 Sculpture and Drawing Show, outdoor sculpture,

painting and drawing show on Saint Mark’s Place on

the Bowery, NY. Curated by Aldo Tambellini.

1962 Originals, Nighttime Art Gallery, New York, NY 1960 Sculpture Show, Cirinno and Aldo Tambellini. Buenvita

Gallery, New York, NY 1960 Sculpture Show, Nonagon Gallery, New York, NY

90

Public and Private Collections Georgina Alexander Collection, NY Jack Birnbaum Collection, NY Harvard Film Archives, Cambridge, MA James Kleege Collection, NY Gerard Malanga Collection, NY New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT Mal and Ise Schuester Collection, NY The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Black Zero

Selected Bibliography Books Liberation Poetry Collective. Anthology of Liberation Poetry.

Cambridge, MA: Trilingual Press, 2011.

Peter Z. Grossman, “Getting into the Act: Video in Live Performance,” Videography Magazine, March 1978 Art and the Future, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973, pp 8485, 89.

Aldo Tambellini: BLACK IS. Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2010.

Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971. New York: Collier Books, 1972. pp.

215, 217, 247, 250.

Aldo Tambellini: We are the Primitives of a New Era. Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2010.

Kultermann, Udo. Art and Life. New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1971, pp 58, 101,104, 132.

“Retrospective: Aldo Tambellini – Electromedia,” in Mash-Up: European Media Art Festival. Exhibition catalogue. Osnabrueck, Germany, 2010, pp. 102-119.

Grove Press Film Division. Film Catalog. New York: Grove Press, 1971. pp. 60, 61.

Liberation Poetry Collective. Poets Against the Killing Fields.

Cambridge, MA: Trilingual Press, 2007, pp. 68-88.

Frieling, Rudolf und Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., 40jahrevideokunst.de – Teil 1: digitales Erbe: Videokunst in Deutschland von 1963 bis heute. Exhibition catalog. OstfildernRuit: Hatje Cantz, 2006.

Ruhrberg, Manfred, et al. ART of the 20th Century, v. 2.

Cologne: TASCHEN, 2005, p 592.

Woody Vasulka. “Aldo Tambellini: Black Spiral (TV Sculpture), 1969,” Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art, David Dunn (ed.). Linz, Austria: Ars Electronica, 1992 Fallica, Sal. “Excerpts from Tambellini’s Black Electromedia, an interview by Sal Fallica with Otto Piene, Elizabeth Goldberg and Vin Grabill,” Centervideo: Film, Video, TV and Telecommunication, 1968-1981. Cambridge, MA: CAVS, 1981.

“Aldo Tambellini: Black TV,” in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. New York: 1970, pp. 308-314.

Vision and Television. Exhibition catalogue. Waltham, MA: The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, 1970.

TV as a Creative Medium. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969.

Periodicals Streitfeld, Lisa Paul, “(R)evolution in Art & Physics: The AllRound Genius of Aldo Tambellini,” Huffington Post (November 29, 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-paul-streitfeld/ revolution-in-art-physics_b_789069.html Reed, Ishmael. “Ishmael Reed Interviews Aldo Tambellini.” Konch Magazine. Fall 2010. http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/interview/ tambellini.html

91

Aldo Tambellini

Mehring, Christine, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe Circa 1944-1969,” October 125 (Summer 2008), pp. 29-64.

Brodzky, Anne, ed. “Black Special Issue,” aArtscanada 24, no.

113 (October 1967).

Shirey, David L. “Video Art Turns to Abstract Imagery,” The New York Times (July 4, 1972).

Wakefield, Jerry, “The Black Gate,” down town magazine (October 7, 1967).

“Simultaneous Video Statements.” Radical Software. The Alternate Television Movement, Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1970.

Glueck, Grace, “Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message,” The New York Times (September 16, 1967).

Baker, Kenneth, “Levine, Tambellini and TV: Tuning the Tube in an Art Museum,” Christian Science Monitor, (January 31, 1970).

McDonagh, Don, “Mixed Media Given at the Black Gate,” The New York Times (June 2, 1967).

Yalkut, Jud, “TV as a creative medium at Howard Wise.” Arts Magazine, (September-October 1969). p. 22 Margolies, John E., “TV-The Next Medium,” Art in America (September-October 1969).

Moore, Carmen, “Music: Spaces.” The Village Voice (December, 5 1968).

Fallica, Sal, “Intermedia at the Gate,” The Torch (May 1, 1967).

Brodzky, Anne and Greg Curnoe, “A Conversation About Mixed Media from New York.” 20 Cents Magazine, (November 1966).

Sullivan, Dan. “Gate Theater Screens a Psychedelicate Subject,” The New York Times (October 29, 1966).

Claus, Jürgen, “The Establishment and Its Opposition,” #50 (Munich) (September 9, 1968).

Mekas, Jonas. “Movie Journal.” The Village Voice (June 23, 1966).

Gluck, Grace. “Brooklyn is Host to ‘Intermedia ’68,” The New York Times (March 9, 1968).

Ross, Don. “Rebellion in Art Form-Tambellini’s Black 2,” New York Herald Tribune (June 13, 1965).

Glueck, Grace. “The More the Media,” The New York Times (February 4, 1968).

Junker, Howard. “Films: The Underground Renaissance,” The Nation (December 27, 1965).

Picard, Lil, “Art: Child Is Black.” The East Village Other, (January 26 – February 1, 1968).

Carroll, Walter. “A Syracuse Rebel in New York,” The Syracuse Post-Standard Sunday Pictorial Magazine (January 27, 1963).

Tambellini, Elsa, “The Gate Theater,” artscanada 24 (October 1967), pp. 3-4.

Gruen, John. “The Galleries - A Critical Guide.” New York Herald Tribune (January 6, 1965).

92

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Bourdon, David. “Group Center,” Village Voice (January 14, 1965).

Heymsfeld, Jeremy. “Space World in ‘Black Zero’,” New York World-Telegram and Sun (December 16, 1965).

Nury Hernández. “La Cancion del Tornillo,” El Diario, Vol. XV, (July 18, 1962).

93

catalogue

Aldo Tambellini

Manifesto Series

We are the Primitives of a New Era, 1961. Monoprint and Duco on paper, 22 x 35 inches

96

Black Zero

The Cell Grew, 1961. Monoprint and Duco on paper, 22 x 35 inches

97

Aldo Tambellini

The Black Seed of Cosmic Creation Series

The Seed 2, 1961. Duco on paper, 26 x 26 inches

98

Black Zero

The Seed 3, 1961. Duco on paper, 28 x 32 inches

99

Aldo Tambellini

The Seed 4, 1962. Duco and sand on paper, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

100

Black Zero

The Seed 11, 1962. Duco and graphite on paper, 19 x 25 inches

101

Aldo Tambellini

The Seed 12, 1962. Duco on paper, 28 x 32.5 inches

102

Black Zero

The Seed 13, 1962. Duco on paper, 19 x 25 inches

103

Aldo Tambellini

To Be Enveloped by Black Series

Black 4, 1961. Duco on paper, 23 x 23 inches

104

Black Zero

Black 5, 1961. Duco and sand on paper, 26 x 26 inches

105

Black Energy Burns with Fire Series

Black Energy 1, 1962. Acrylic and Duco on cardboard, 30 x 38.25 inches

Black Energy 2, 1962. Acrylic and Duco on cardboard 30 x 38.25 inches

Aldo Tambellini

On Becoming Series

On Becoming 1, 1962. Acrylic and distressed paper on paper, 30 x 38.25 inches

108

Black Zero

On Becoming 2, 1962. Acrylic and paper on paper, 29 x 48 inches

109

Aldo Tambellini

On Becoming 3, 1962. Acrylic, printers’ ink with cuts on paper, 30 x 42 inches

110

Black Zero

Destruction Series

Destruction 20, 1961. Graphite on cardboard with incisions and burns, 29 x 39.5 inches

111

Aldo Tambellini

Destruction 7, 1961. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, diameter: 29.875 inches

112

Black Zero

Destruction 21, 1961. Graphite on cardboard with incisions and burns, 28 x 36 inches.

113

Aldo Tambellini

Destruction II Series

Destruction 9, 1988. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

114

Black Zero

Destruction 11, 1988. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

115

Aldo Tambellini

Destruction 15, 1988. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

116

Black Zero

Destruction 16, 1988. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

117

Aldo Tambellini

Black IS

Black 4, 1989. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

118

Black Zero

Black 9, 1989. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 14.5 x 19.5 inches

119

Aldo Tambellini

Black 5, 1989. Graphite and wax with perforations on cardboard, 31 x 39 inches

120

Black Zero

Black Energy Suspended Series

AC-1, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

121

Aldo Tambellini

S-5, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

122

Black Zero

A-2, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

123

Aldo Tambellini

A-5, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

124

Black Zero

AC-3, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

125

Aldo Tambellini

E-2, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

126

Black Zero

B-4, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

127

Aldo Tambellini

B-1, 1989. Acrylic and graphite on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

128

Black Zero

B-2, 1989. Acrylic and graphite on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

129

Aldo Tambellini

A-410, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

130

Black Zero

AC-11, 1989. Acrylic on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

131

Aldo Tambellini

E-7, 1989. Acrylic with incisions on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

132

Black Zero

S-5g, 1989. Acrylic and graphite with incisions on architectural paper, 30 x 42 inches

133

Boris Lurie and Aldo Tambellini at the HOWL! Festival, New York, NY, 2005 Photo by Anna Salamone

Black Zero

135