Black Mask protesting on Wall Street, New York, 1960s
"There are many paths through the radical arts of the 1960s. Nadja Millner-Larsen's Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action takes one back alley and turns it into a bustling boulevard. Her central figure: Ben Morea, artist-activist and acolyte of the Living Theatre and of East Village anarchist Murray Bookchin; member of Aldo Tambellini's anti-commodification mixed-media Group Center; cofounder of the Neo-Dada provocateurs known as Black Mask (their name likely referencing the 1920s pulp magazine as well as eliding Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks); and de facto leader of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (UAW/MF), the notorious 'street gang with an analysis.' Born in 1941 and largely raised in Hell's Kitchen, Morea, a teenage heroin addict and aspiring jazz musician, was serving time in a prison rehabilitation center when an art therapist turned him on to painting. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionists as well as by his readings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Morea based much of his early work—iconic, often monochromatic abstractions—on a single circular form. Like the work of Jordan Belson, these totemic paintings anticipate the hippie modernism that would reach its oppressive apogee in Timothy Leary's multimedia Death of the Mind (1966) and George Lucas's movie mythos—but Morea was not exactly a hippie. As a member of Group Center, Morea contributed to the pioneering mixed-media assault Black Zero. Conceived by Tambellini as a meditation on blackness, the piece was first performed as part of the late-1965 New Cinema Festival organized by Jonas Mekas and John Brockman, an epochal event that was the forerunner of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Slides and films were projected on dancers, canvases, and, in some iterations, an expanding black balloon. A blinding shaft of white light was directed at the audience. Umbra poet Calvin Hernton declaimed his Harlem-riot-inspired 'Jitterbugging in the Streets.' Jazz musicians Bill Dixon and Alan Silva improvised on trumpet and bass, while Morea's 'clamorous machines' added to a cacophony described by one reviewer as 'a buzz saw gone berserk.' ..."
ARTFORUM: Up Against the Well - J. Hoberman
Black Mask, the Radical Collective Who Tried to Shut Down MoMA
Google: Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action
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