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The Black Films of Aldo Tambellini &
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Introduced by SAIC Professor Bruce Jenkins | Sunday, Sept 26, 2010 7:30pm | ||||||
The Nightingale Theatre - Independant Cinema | 1084 N. Milwaukee Ave. | Chicago, IL 60642 | ||||||
White Light Cinema is pleased to present these films in new digital transfers (prints in the U.S. are currently unavailable), along with one of only a few screenings thus far of Tambellini and Otto Piene’s pioneering television broadcast BLACK GATE COLOGNE, which only had its first public US screening in 2009. We are also extremely pleased to have School of the Art Institute Professor Bruce Jenkins introducing the program. "A central figure in the East Village art scene that thrived during the 1960s, poet, painter, sculptor and pioneering multi-media artist Aldo Tambellini (b. 1930) has only begun to be recognized for his prescient and innovative art. Throughout his long career, Tambellini has worked in a staggering range of media - from his early Arte Povera-style sculptures and abstract drawings done in Italy and America in the 1950s and 1960s, to his experimental work in early video and television art, which he pioneered alongside his close friend and occasional collaborator Nam Jun Paik, to the series of abstract films he made in the 1960s. Beginning in 1965 with Black Is, Tambellini launched a series of politically charged experimental films that explore the expressive possibilities of black as a dominant color and idea. For the most part Tambellini’s seven "black films" are made without the use of a camera but rather by carefully manipulating the film itself by scorching, scratching, painting and treating the film stock as a type of sculptural and painterly medium. Beautifully austere and hypnotically immersive, Tambellini’s films are also important expressions of an artist critically aware of the emergent Information Age and its possibilities. Often using found footage and filmed television, Tambellini’s films take a crucial pulse of the new moving image culture being formed in the Sixties." (Harvard Film Archives) “As a key figure of the 1960s Lower East Side arts scene, Aldo Tambellini used a variety of media for social and political communication. In the age of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, Tambellini manipulated new technology in an exploration of the "psychological re-orientation of man in the space age." He presented immersive, multi-media environments and, having made his first experimental video as early as 1966, participated in early collaborations between artists and broadcast television. His dynamic Black Film Series (1965-69) extends from total abstraction to footage of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and black teenagers in Coney Island. Tambellini worked directly on the film strip with chemicals, paint and ink, scratching, scraping, and intercutting material from industrial films, newsreels and TV. Abrasive, provocative and turbulent, the series is a rapid-fire response to the beginning of the information age and a world in flux. "Black to me is like a beginning … Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.'" (Mark Webber, Evolution 2007 PROGRAM: BLACK IS (1965, 4 mins., b/w) BLACK TRIP (1965, 5 mins, b/w) BLACK TRIP 2 (1967, 3 mins., b/w) BLACKOUT (1965, 9 mins., b/w) [All works above 16mm screening from digital video.] BLACK GATE COLOGNE (1968, 47 mins., b/w, video) by Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene The original long version will be screening. |
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