Aldo Tambellini — Black — Tambellini's expanded cinema series

1963

Artists: Aldo Tambellini · Year: 1963 · Medium: Expanded cinema — multi-projector environmental installations using film, video, slides, and performance · Substrate: 16mm film (hand-painted), video, slides, multiple projectors; performance and audience participation · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Black Gate Theater (founded 1965); independent Aldo Tambellini began the Black series in 1959 as paintings — large black-on-black canvases that Tambellini described as "gestational," the lights of a cosmos before the light. By 1963 he had begun to make them move. He hand-etched and painted directly on 16mm film leader, scoring and perforating the emulsion so the projector light would punch through in bursts of white on the black field, and projecting the results onto multiple walls at once in the first of his loft performances on the Lower East Side. Black is the medium here in exactly the way that white paper is the medium of a drawing: it is the starting substrate from which something is taken away. Tambellini was working with light as a subtractive material. Where the emulsion had been scratched, light emerged. The film was not a vehicle for a filmed image; it was an operated surface. He would sometimes layer four projectors on the same wall, each running a different reel of his hand-worked film, and push the viewer into a dense, flickering field of emergent dots and streaks. What makes the Black series belong in this archive is its articulation of a general move: treat the carrier of the image — the film strip, the cathode ray, the pixel — as the material of the work, not as the transparent delivery mechanism for a pre-composed image. By 1966 Tambellini was making the same argument with television. Black TV (1966–68) is the first American single-channel video artwork to win a Golden Lion at Oberhausen; it composed sequences of abstract pulses and scan patterns by running modified electronics against a closed-circuit CCTV. The argument was identical to the hand-scratched films: television's signal, left alone, had things to say, and the artist's work was to remove everything that prevented those things from being heard. Tambellini's lineage runs forward to Nam June Paik's electronic television, to Steina and Woody Vasulka's instrumentalized video synths, and, much later, to every glitch-art work that treats the codec or the raster as a medium in itself. Lore Tambellini ran the Black Gate theater on Second Avenue with Otto Piene in 1967 — the first dedicated intermedia venue in New York, later rolled into Piene's work at MIT CAVS. The Black Gate's loft was built around four 16mm projectors and a rack of television monitors, and Tambellini would sometimes run a piece for three hours, unannounced, to whoever happened to be in the building. He was almost entirely written out of American art history for thirty years, partly because he refused to make discrete objects that could be bought, and partly because his work was too black for the gallery photography of the era to reproduce. A Tate retrospective in 2012 began the corrective. He continued to work until his death in 2020. Sources • Tate Modern — Aldo Tambellini: Black Matters (exh. 2012). • Joseph, Branden W. — Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone, 2008; context for NY downtown scene). • Electronic Arts Intermix — Aldo Tambellini distribution catalogue.