The Screw (1963)
Aldo Tambellini
5 min
In a perfect example of Aldo Tambellini’s wit and contempt for systems of power and Capital, we begin with Tambellini’s The Screw - a biting satire aimed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum who agreed to accept a new sculpture created by Tambellini in 1963. In true Aldo fashion, he assembled a group of local teenagers who wanted to learn how to perform as a barber shop quartet. He wrote a song for them to perform, split the commission, and created a public spectacle presenting both museums with “The Screw” - a literal “screw you” to the nihilistic institutions Tambellini called out for violating the ethics of artistic citizenship through their co-opting of commercialized, mainstream, docile, and apolitical art work. Tambellini’s performance incorporates the poetic, the spectacle, the musical, the satirical, and the scuptural.
Black Is (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini
4 min
Tambellini at first used 35mm slides as a means of projecting handprinted abstract images onto larger spaces, using a carousel projector to control timing. However, due to the limitations of this technique, Aldo sought an alternative method for exploring time. The result: Black Is uses a camera-less technique on 16mm film. The hand-painted surface of the analog film allowed Tambellini to expand his painterly practice of representing the unfolding cosmic geometries of the Circle and Spiral through the extremes of Black and White, using ink. The quick mechanization of the projector, and the resistance to/breaking of the frame, creates a percolating rhythm and an esoteric landscape, an expanse that both simulates the speed of memorialized, collective trauma and the extremes of cosmic (and Glorious) chaos.
Black Trip #1 (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini
5 min
Provided by the Harvard Film Archive and the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. Black Trip #1 expands upon the painted language of Black Is, now positing the film experience as similar to the sensorial destination of a hallucinatory zone. We see here the beginnings of Tambellini’s theories on multi-disciplinary media environments.
Black Out (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini
9 min
Provided by the Harvard Film Archive and the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. In the movie Black Out, Tambellini’s symbolic exploration directly on film reaches its chaotic heights as the painted circle and his iconic spiral intermingle with lattices, light leaks, and concentric circle patterns. Black Out is notable for its soundtrack, calling upon the violence of the political now inside of a cosmic hereafter.
M. Woods Lecture
10 min
Discussing Aldo Tambellini’s early works, films, and tying his artistic practice to his notes on installation design and innovations in proto-virtual reality, while discussing Tambellini’s history of radical political art practices. M. Woods was provided with full access to Tambellini’s notes and archives, where Tambellini’s ideas about “media centrifuge” as an art installation was discovered.
Black Trip #2 (1967, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini
3 min
One of Tambellini’s first forays into representational imagery in cinema. Black Trip #2 is a nail- bomb of a movie. A fitting companion to Black Plus X and Black TV.
Black Plus X (1969)
Aldo Tambellini
9 min
The duality of negative/positive, of Black and White, is what led Aldo quite naturally to the film stock of Plus X, a B&W film stock issued by Kodak until the 2000’s. Aldo used the camera and the film to celebrate a day in Brooklyn, documenting Black children enjoying the amusements of Coney Island. While the rumbling of the cosmic noises permeates the sound design, underpins the sense of terror that all Black children will come to understand in the centrifuge of white supremacy, the piece seeks to affirm “Black Power.” Tambellini flips the positive and negative and brings his subjects into the cosmic, spinning in multiple exposures, and eventually crashing to the waves of Ocean as they proclaim “Black Power! Black Power!” Tambellini creates a record of all layers of his theory in one film, combining his sociopolitical militance, with one of his first forays into the represented figure, both documentary of a real time and place and the “centrifuge” that controls the orbiting invisible elements as if the amusement park rides are part of the scaffolding of a multi-tiered reality. The work is sculptural in its analog presentation on 16mm film, its titular self-reference to its own film stock, and its narrative arch. It captures real events without a clear referent in static space, creating one of the most beguiling cinematographic experiments of in-camera multiple exposure. The work is situated in the body and emanates from the central concern of personhood, love, collective unity in the infinite, and an attack at the nihilism inherent in Capitalist institutions and their malignant forgery, represented by the ominous clowns and figures built into the careening rides and strobing footlights. Black Plus X speaks from a place of deep-felt sincerity, inner-reflection and exploration, and reflects what it is to be a loving accomplice in the struggle for Civil Rights and universal human decency.
Listen (2007)
Aldo Tambellini
15 min
Provided by the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. After spending years working at MIT and having left the NYC art scene of the 1960s, Tambellini, like many artists, experienced a time of less prolific output. However, his association with his second wife, Anna Salamone, led to their collaboration on Listen, a politically militant anti-Bush attack on the illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Tambellini used the low-fidelity of digital media, interspersed with long frames of Black, to poetically respond to the atrocities once again committed by the US military industrial complex. Winner of the Syracuse International Film Festival.
Black Video 3 (1981)
Aldo Tambellini
24 min
*NEWLY DISCOVERED!
Provided by the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. This work was recently discovered. A free-wheeling, long-form trance as Tambellini distorts the imagery from a Cathode ray television, recording the results.
Black TV (1969)
Aldo Tambellini
10 min
Black TV is Aldo Tambellini’s most famous work. A dual-projection sensorial hell that projected the waves of terror over the repetitive death proclamation of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. Despite the contemporary political context, Black TV is a mirror into the depths of the void that is universally familiar. This program ends with Black TV to commemorate the 50 years since Tambellini won an honorable mention at the 1969 Ann Arbor International Film Festival. Winner of the 1969 Oberhausen Film Festival.