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Black Matters is the first full solo exhibition of American artist, Aldo Tambellini, who is one of the pioneers of intermedia art of the 1960s and 1970s. Aldo Tambellini (born 1930 in Syracuse, NY, USA) lives and works in Cambridge. Together with Otto Piene, he founded the Black Gate Theatre in 1967, which was the first Electro-Media theatre of New York. Between 1976 and 1984, he was a fellow at the legendary Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the MIT in Cambridge.
To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests as Tambellini says, “seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.”
Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.
Black TV is the title of Tambellini’s best-known videographic film, which is part of a large intermedia project about American television. Compiled from filmed television news programs and personal experimental videotapes, Black TV has been seen in many versions during the four-year period in which Tambellini constantly re-edited it (1964-68).
Often cited as the first television program made by artists, "Black Gate Cologne" is a live event involving films, light objects and the participation of the studio audience, comprised of footage from two consecutive 45-minute broadcasts with different audiences filmed at the WDR "Electronic Studio' in Cologne, Germany.
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.
This film, like an action painting by Franz Kline, is a rising crescendo of abstract images. Rapid cuts of white forms on a black background supplemented by an equally abstract soundtrack give the impression of a bombardment in celestial space or on a battlefield where cannons fire on an unseen enemy in the night.
7-inch reel, 1/2-inch videotape.
This videotape was originally made in the television studio in Rochester, NY on a 2-inch Quad broadcast tape in 1969 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts as part of a program series which was produced and aired by New York State Educational Television. I created a live event in the television studio using an urban classroom of children and my films and videos. The sound was the children’s spontaneous songs mixed with the repeated countdown of a rocket launching; the conversation between the astronauts and Mission Control and U.S. troops engaged in battle in the Vietnam War. This tape is shown as a non-scripted improvisation. The studio environment and the children were bombarded by media.
Video by Aldo Tambellini.