Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action

by Nadja Millner-Larsen

Overview

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask.
 
With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.”
 
Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.
 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226820699
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Nadja Millner-Larsen is visiting assistant professor of experimental humanities at NYU.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Revolution Will be Real
One Direct Painting/Direct Action
Two The Subject of Black
Three Pure Activism in Theory and Practice
Four We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw
Five Sweet Assassins
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

In Up Against the Real, Millner-Larsen introduces us to Black Mask, a group of downtown New York anti-art saboteurs who blasted out of the world of experimental painting and cinema and onto the streets, insisting that the abstraction of late modernist art heralded a new, liberatory, antirepresentational politics. With an acute understanding of the historical and theoretical stakes at play, Millner-Larsen restores their cultural revolution to its rightful place alongside the Situationists, the Young Lords, and other exemplars of ’60s radicalism.

Tom McDonough

"[Addresses] the highly understudied area of guerilla, legally risky, and often iconoclastic art practices in the US during the latter half of the twentieth century. [Its] release could hardly be more timely. . . . Up Against the Real, focused on one group and its milieu, takes us through a chronological biography of the group from roughly 1962-1969, its debates and transformations, with contextual sidesteps to discuss other related work, such as that of Group Center or Valerie Solanos (something expanding from UATWMF’s work, exploring the work of underground comic-book artist Spain waits to be written). Meanwhile, the narrative orients readers with nods forward to resonances into the present as well as back to their surrealist and dadaist forebearers. . . . highly attentive not just to gaps and complexities in the historical narrative, but to the risks and complexities for the institutional spaces of art history and museums in recording and discussing this work, and, even more importantly, what all this might mean for future generations of militant and guerilla artists."

Art History

"Millner-Larsen’s frequently brilliant analysis by no means isolates the era of Black Mask as separate from our own. Her commentary is effective in its ability to link our present Zeitgeist to both general Black Mask & Up Against the Wall, MF!
impressions and specific memories of the 1960s. . . . Up Against the Real offers an expertly crafted documentation of Black Mask paired with a deeply impressive contextualization of this group within a larger picture of post-World War II American art and oppositional communities. It is undoubtedly a masterful contribution to the literature on this subject and anyone interested in Black Mask should take a sojourn in its pages, which are clearly the result of years of breathtaking effort."

Fifth Estate

"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. . . . Millner-Larsen’s book is lucidly written and densely reasoned. The author doesn’t romanticize Morea’s flame-throwing ideas; she takes them seriously. Up Against the Real is also impressively researched, with a bit more than two hundred pages of text followed by forty-five pages of notes."

Artforum

"Millner-Larsen reproduces examples of Black Mask alongside Abstract Expressionist paintings and images of expanded cinema events and political protests, mapping how the debates laid out in the broadsheet emerged in the ‘real’ world through Black Mask’s commitment to direct action. . . . Though Black Mask and UATWMF are remembered as a vigilante street gang, Millner-Larsen’s historically and materially grounded study specifies the ways in which the group’s commitment to direct action was rooted in an interest in the political and philosophical uses of aesthetics and abstraction, one that was maintained even after their edict to cease artmaking following their name change."

Art Review

Up Against the Real is an original, highly informed, and scholarly examination of a fascinating segment of contemporary art history. Millner-Larsen treats the complex milieu of 1960s radical politics and art as a living force within culture. She weaves a brilliant and scholarly narrative that on one level treats the anarchist art collective Black Mask as an anomaly, but also serves to illuminate the cultural politics of this tumultuous era.

Gregory Sholette

"In the afternoon of October 10, 1966, six members of a radical anti-arts arts group marched in front of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) handing out leaflets while two members unraveled a large canvas sign announcing, 'MUSEUM CLOSED.' . . . The demonstrators were with the Black Mask and were offended by MoMA’s exhibition, 'Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,' which they felt violated the Dadaist and Surrealists very creative visions. . . . Nadja Millner-Larsen brilliantly tells the story of this now nearly all-but-forgotten group and how they pushed art beyond representation into activist demonstrations, foreshadowing the eclipse of the 1960s counterculture."

New York Journal of Books

"Through an excellent and exhaustive use of primary sources, Millner-Larsen locates the collective in a network of radical and radicalized agents belonging to the fields of culture, the arts, politics, and student and worker movements in New York City, the United States more broadly, and even internationally. . . . Millner-Larsen’s book is an admirable work of scholarship on the 1960s artistic ultraleft. I highly recommend it for scholars interested in such a topic, particularly for its wide approach, which crafts a tapestry of movements and currents worthy of further research on their own and in general. The argumentative problems around anticolonialism and the relation between aesthetics and politics are, in the end, subtle complications of an extremely specialized field of study, and they should not prevent readers from fully taking the work in as an important advancement in this area. On the contrary, I hope they prove to be fertile ground for further discussions and explorations of radical 20th-century avant-gardes marginalized in the historiography at large."

CAA Reviews