Tom McDonough in dialog with Nadja Millner-Larsen

Up Towards the Actual: Black Masks from Artwork to Motion

Ebook Launch and Dialogue at Printed Matter Chelsea

March 30, 2023

6-8pm

Up Towards the Actual: Black Masks From Artwork to Motion by Nadja Millner-Larsen follows the historical past of the anti-art group Black Masks and its acrimonious relationship to the New York artwork world of the Nineteen Sixties. The group shut down the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, fired blanks throughout a poetry studying, stormed the Pentagon throughout an antiwar protest, and dumped rubbish into the fountain at Lincoln Middle. Black Masks printed a Dadaist broadside till 1968, when it modified its identify to Up Towards the Wall Motherfucker (after a line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and got here to categorise itself as “a road gang with evaluation.”

Millner-Larsen will current the ebook in dialog with professor Tom McDonough, who writes, “In Up Towards the Actual, Millner-Larsen introduces us to Black Masks, a bunch of downtown New York anti-art saboteurs who blasted out of the world of experimental portray and cinema and onto the streets, insisting that the abstraction of late modernist portray heralded a brand new, liberatory, antirepresentational politics. With an acute understanding of the historic and theoretical stakes at play, Millner-Larsen restores their cultural revolution to its rightful place alongside the Situationists, the Younger Lords, and different exemplars of ‘60s radicalism.” With an introduction by Lindsay Caplan.

Copies of the ebook will probably be accessible for buy.

Nadja Millner-Larsen Nadja Millner-Larsen is a visiting assistant professor within the Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York College. Nadja’s writing has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Homosexual Research, Vital Correspondence, Gray Room, Ladies’s Research Quarterly, Artwork Month-to-month, Triple Cover, and numerous exhibition catalogues. Nadja was an NEH postdoctoral scholar on the Getty Analysis Institute and a Helena Rubinstein fellow in crucial research on the Whitney Unbiased Examine Program. Earlier than becoming a member of NYU, she taught within the Division of Visible Cultures at Goldsmiths, College of London, and on the Middle for Curatorial Research at Bard School.

Tom McDonough Tom McDonough is a professor of artwork historical past at Binghamton College, the place he teaches histories of contemporary artwork and Twentieth-century French cultural and mental life. He writes ceaselessly on up to date artwork for journals and exhibition catalogues. His books embody the anthology Boredom (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2017), The Situationists and the Metropolis (Verso, 2009), and “The Lovely Language of My Century” (MIT Press, 2007).

Lindsay Caplan Lindsay Caplan is an Assistant Professor at Brown College the place she teaches trendy and up to date artwork historical past. Her writing has appeared in Gray Room, ARTMargins, Piano b, Artwork in America, The Scholar & Feminist On-line, and e-flux, in addition to exhibition catalogues and edited collections. She has acquired fellowships from The Middle of the Humanities at The CUNY Graduate Middle (2010-14) and the American Council for Realized Societies (2015-16); and he or she was a Helena Rubinstein fellow in crucial research on the Whitney Unbiased Examine Program. Her ebook Arte Programmata: Freedom, Management, and the Laptop in Nineteen Sixties Italy acquired a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the School Artwork Affiliation and was just lately printed by College of Minnesota Press.