thingist

thingist@mailman.thing.net

149 discussions

Black Zero
by Wolfgang Staehle 03 Feb '10

03 Feb '10

Performa09, White Box and THE THING present Black Zero by Aldo Tambellini and Group Center (1965-1968) featuring Aldo Tambellini (projections), William Parker (music), Ben Morea (noise machine), Maggie Clapis and the voice of Calvin C. Hernton (poet) A project by Christoph Draeger November 22 , 6 p.m. White Box, New York 329 Broome Street between Bowery and Chrystie Streets The critically acclaimed "Black Zero" (1965-68) by Aldo Tambellini was one of the very first multimedia performances. It will be re-staged in its original form by the artist who created it, Aldo Tambellini. We are very pleased to announce that the music for the piece will be improvised live by William Parker (double bass), whom the Allmusic Guide calls Free Jazz's pre-eminent bass player today. Aldo Tambellini wrote this synopsis for "Black Zero" in 1965: "At present, BLACK ZERO keeps on changing and growing with each presentation, just like the BLACK balloon which appears in the performance agonizingly grows, expands and disappears. In BLACK ZERO, you’ll be inside of the black womb of the Space Era. And in that womb, the Black poet, Calvin C. Hernton, the famous African American poet will read his poems. The plastic gas-masked figure floats like an astronaut under the expanding simultaneous motion of the stars. The television monitors pulsate in their insane cosmic dance. One day the light and the energy of the sun will become ice cold and the enormous sun disc will become BLACK." The last day of Performa’09 offers the unbelievably rare opportunity to see Tambellini's legendary 1968 "Electromedia" happening, Black Zero, for the first time in 41 years. The performance was painstakingly reconstructed by the artist himself (who is 79 now) in collaboration with Christoph Draeger. It will feature one more original member of Group Center, painter/activist/anarchist Ben Morea, and a rare recording of the voice of the legendary black poet Calvin C. Hernton, which had only recently been unearthed. His original poems for Black Zero, recorded by Tambellini in 1966, include the inflamatory “Jiggerbugging in the Street”. To see Black Zero at White Box not only offers the rare opportunity of a late glimpse into the tumultuous era of the mid-sixties, but is a truly mind expanding experience. Black Zero was created as an universal, abstract vision, intercellular and interstellar at the same time, yet symbolically, it was also a highly political account of racial tensions. It will be an exciting experiment to see how the political aspect of the piece, firmly rooted in the revolutionary culture of the decade when it was first created and performed, will impact on a contemporary audience. Black Zero was a radical precursor to Warhol's Plastic Inevitable and Rock music's psychedelic light shows. Whereas Warhol used The Velvet Underground, Tambellini collaborated with Free Jazz improvisers Cecil McBee, Alan Silva, Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp and the UMBRA poets Ishmael Reed, Norman Pritcher and Calvin Hernton. Tambellini’s philosophical views, recorded in the mid-sixties, are strikingly contemporary: "The concept of instability, impermanency, weightlessness, will become part of man or man part of it. Concepts will become instantaneous, not everlasting but ever changing." Press excerpts: "Black Zero, a Space-Light-Sound Event, is a live production in which the eye and the ear is charged with the shifting, changing, exploding images of our time. Flashing Lumagrams, hand painted projections by Aldo Tambellini, the rotations of Ron Hahne's Spiral Machine sliding across moving screens, Ben Morea's clamorous machines, the strident sounds of Alan Silva on bass, the hard reality of black poet, Calvin C. Hernton, flashing light and gas-masked heads form a continuous experience in Space, Light and Sound."-News from the Bridge, November 23, 1967 "The new avant-garde if cinema (light play) has moved 10 years forward into explorations....their dreams are so much farther advanced than the rest of the human activities that it will take at least another 10 years, maybe to catch up with the artist and to create proper tools to enable him to put those dreams into reality." -Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice, December 2, 1965 Aldo Tambellini (born Syracuse, 1930) Tambellini is a painter, sculptor and media-arts pioneer who made his first video in 1965, the classic "Black Is". The same year he began to experiment with multi-media performance ("Black Zero"), incorporating film, slides, music, poetry and dance-he called the new art form "Electromedia" . In 1967 he opened the Black gate theatre in the Lower East Side of New York, a forum for experimental film and video. In 1968, he collaborated with his friend Otto Piene in what is regarded as the first Television broadcast created by visual artists ever, "Black Gate Cologne", for the german national TV station WDR. In 1969 he won the Grand Prix at Oberhausen Film Festival for "Black TV" ("...an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through the television tube."). He was a fellow at the center of Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in Cambridge from 1975-1986. He lives and works in Cambrigde MA. William Parker (born New York City, 1952) In the early '90s, free jazz was kept alive by a fairly large group of Lower East Side musicians, many of whom gathered around the music's pre-eminent bassist, William Parker. Parker was the scene's major catalyst for musical activity. As a bassist, Parker is possessed of a formidable technique, albeit an unconventional one. Unlike a great many jazz bassists, Parker was not formally trained as a classical player, though he did study with three of the finest jazz players of the '60s. Consequently, Parker's style is based on a tradition of self-expression and experimentation. His arco work is possibly the most fascinating aspect of his idiom; Parker excels at the creation of dense, hyperactive streaks of color, gleaned from the inherent harmonic properties of the instrument. At bottom, he is a textural player. Parker's pizzicato style is overwhelmingly percussive, in intent and effect. Ben Morea (born 1941) Morea is a painter and activist, and he is an original member of Group Center. He was the founder of Black Mask in 1966 and started the radical East Village collective Up Against The Wall Motherfucker in 1967. He lives in Colorado. Calvin C. Hernton (1933-2001) Hernton, member of UMBRA was for many one of the greatest black poets in the 1960's. His radical politically charged poetry strongly influenced his friend Ishmael Reed (both men took part in Tambellini's first “electromedia” performance, Black, in 1965), as well a later generation of poets such as as Gil Scott Heron. Christoph Draeger (Born Zurich 1965) Draeger is a conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally since 1993 in museums and venues such as Paco das Artes in Sao Paulo, Kunstwerke in Berlin, Kwangju Biennial, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, Big Torino Biennial, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum in New York, Moscow Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, CCA in Warsaw and Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, among others. Christoph Draeger first moved to New York in 1996 on a one year-scholarship for the International Studio Program at P.S 1. He lives and works in NYC. This project has been made possible through generous support from Pro Helvetia. White Box is located on 329 Broome Street between Bowery and Chrystie Streets. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 7pm. The nearest subway stops are Grand Street on the B/D lines and Delancey Street on the F/J/M/Z lines. For more information please contact press(a)whiteboxny.org or call 212-714-2347. Links: http://aldotambellini.com/ http://www.christophdraeger.com/ http://www.whiteboxny.org/ http://thing.net/ http://performa-arts.org/

3 5

Hanging Fire
by yasir ~يا سر 09 Dec '09

09 Dec '09

Hanging Fire ***** Contemporary Art from Pakistan till Jan 2010 at Asia Society in NYC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QUQ2Vs23KM

1 0

16beaver, THE THING, and Laura Palmer Foundation present:
by Wolfgang Staehle 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

Public-Art Projects in the Ex-communist Stadium and in the former Warsaw Ghetto Joanna Warsza and Warren Niesłuchowski / Laura Palmer Foundation / Warsaw, Poland Talk, Screenings, Book Launch and Discussion Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:00 pm 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor New York Free and open to all http://the.thing.net http://www.16beavergroup.org/ www.laura-palmer.pl The 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-ruined Warsaw. It was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years, by the mid-'80s, it fell into ruin, becoming a post-Communist phantom. It was 'revived' by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. An open-air market called Jarmark Europa became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies, a major tourist attraction, a primeval forest, a realm of precarity and discount shopping, or a work camp for botanists. Its heterogeneity, its longstanding (non)presence in the middle of the post-Communist city, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority, the debate around the new National Stadium here for the Euro 2012 football cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland's post-war architectural legacy — inspired Joanna Warsza's curatorial project Finissage of Stadium X. A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium (2006); Boniek!,a one-man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists, activists and athletes into the reality of a Stadium 'no longer extant'. The result were projects of a participative and semi-documentary nature (a walk, a football match, a Sunday radio station, a spectacle on a building site, an exhibition featuring real people) which touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, the power of imagination, ambiguities, and the future, as well as on the problematic exoticism of a disappearing place. The readerStadium X-A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site's deterioration and its existence as a 'city within a city' and also documents the series of live art projects. The Stadium and its parasites functions, which are now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was. Stadium X — A Place That Never Was: A Reader Edited by Joanna Warsza Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Ewa Majewska, Daniel Miller, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Van Tuong, Tomasz Zimoch Design by René Wawrzkiewicz Photos by Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik Published by Bęc Zmiana Foundationand Ha!art, Warsaw and Kraków,2008/2009 U. S. distributor Textfield; European distributor Motto Laura Palmer Foundation takes its name from the character whose absence organizes the plot of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The label produces actions, conceptual events, and performances. Incorporating real life and fictitious or staged events, and its representation, it seeks out new collaborative models. Joanna Warsza, a curator and artist on the cusp of the performing and visual arts, also directs the Laura Palmer Foundation. She works mostly in public space with the invisible, the ephemeral or staged situations — around the Vietnamese community in Warsaw, Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland or post-Soviet architecture legacy in Georgia and Armenia. She has collaborated with AICA Armenia, CCA Kaliningrad, CCA Kiev, the Centre Pompidou, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Building in Berlin or Performa in New York, among many other projects. Warren Niesłuchowski was born in a Polish refugee camp in Germany after World War II and was raised in the United States. While a deserter in Paris in the late ’60s, he performed with the Bread and Puppet Theatre throughout Europe and in Iran. For the last many years, after studies in linguistics and social theory at Harvard College, he has been working with and for artists, first at P. S. 1 in New York, and then independently, as a writer, speaker, translator, editor, and collaborator. The book and the events were created with the generous support of the City of Warsaw

1 0

tashkent تاشقند
by yasir ~يا سر 10 Oct '09

10 Oct '09

hello I'll be in Tashkent, Uzbekistan 13-22, If you would like to meet up. its the biennale. we have an installation. or if know someone there, please let me know. best yasir

1 0

Re: [thingist] Hanging Fire ***** Contemporary Art from Pakistan
by yasir ~يا سر 05 Oct '09

05 Oct '09

"Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan," at Asia Society (Sept. 2009-Jan. 2010) is billed as the first major U.S. museum survey of contemporary art from Pakistan. http://maujmedia.blogspot.com/2009/09/hanging-fire-contemporary-art-from.ht… Producer: Robert Knafo A visit at the media preview features an interview with curator Salima Hashmi and spotlights work by Hamra Abbas, Bani Abidi Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Faiza Butt, Ayaz Jokhio, Naiza Khan, Huma Mulji, Asma Mundrawala, Imran Qureshi, Rashid Rana, Anwar Saeed, and Adeela Suleman. -- Posted By yasir ~ to :: Mauj ~ موج // at 9/21/2009 11:13:00 AM --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ \\ Mauj _ Collective for Open Technology, Art & Culture

4 4

Mauj and Ars Electronica
by yasir ~يا سر 13 Jul '09

13 Jul '09

From: Atteqa Malik <atteqa(a)gmail.com> For those of you in the Linz area pls. check out live broadcasts from Mauj in Karachi to the pinhole in the box project at Ars Electronica http://www.80plus1.org/blog/801-%E2%80%9Cbasecamp%E2%80%9D-plans-announced-… we will be starting probably by next weekend, every Friday Saturday Sunday, uptil mid August 14.00 Austria time for 2 hrs and we will hook up our camera to public places in Karachi given that Karachi is a VERY unpredictable megacity, we are prepared for surprises and a few rude shocks!!!! but not too many I hope Atteqa --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ \\ Mauj _ Collective for Open Technology, Art & Culture

1 0

Social networking software or sites for artists
by yasir ~يا سر 02 Jun '09

02 Jun '09

dear thingys i am looking for your suggestions for social networking softwares and sites (existing). This can be contrued in a wide sense also meaning google apps as a whole as well. and if anyone is up to it what kinds of apps and functionalities - affecting both quality of interaction and ease of expression - are its good features. on the other hand if you dont know of any any existing ones, then what could be desirable .... thanks, best yasir

1 0

intro
by yasir ~يا سر 30 May '09

30 May '09

hello everyone ran into thingist online around 98-99 and joined sometime around 2000-01 Our latest thing is the Mauj Collective which wants to grow into a cultural centre. We do art that is socially engaged. yes art tech culture, last most useful to think in. Mauj is also setting up networks of architects doing envirionmentally sensitive architecture as well as helping out in a sufi shrine (dargah) project. The list of things we are doing is long, We've also just started working on a social networking site which will also work as a mapping thing for artists and works and institutions, besides promoting interaction .. we love to link people and orgs...and are always looking for collaborative ideas, projects I am primarily a theorist as surprised as other people that i still defy categories. so its not uncommon for me to be digging south asian intellectual streams which have gathered over time a very thin covering of western ideas, trying to find the missing areas of why currently dwelled theory / concepts are awkward, and what democracy and theory meant in the old streams of muslim, indian, hindu, indus valley, persian, arab thought which make their presence felt extremely strongly in their absence from current life. I have lived in New York, Bangkok, Islamabad and Karachi, where i think i have spent most time. The Pakistani environment is difficult and rich. one is tempted to leave and one stays. i dont remember New York being any different. I also do things with traditional media (tv, journalists, reporters). This could be an interactionist or research mode or, in my activist mode especially, for the citizen org, the People's Resistance, which as a pressure group with disparate elements across society was in a small way instrumental in bringing Musharraf out of his uniform and finally down. we currently oppose not just the taliban but the army action as well, relates to blunt and blunting US policy (no revelation here). I also take jokes seriously just like james allan. so where are murph, the francophones and St blackhawk greetings from Karachi yasir

1 0

Peaceful Anti-War Protestors Harrassed & Arrested !
by yasir ~يا سر 30 May '09

30 May '09

People's Resistance ** Peaceful Anti-War Protestors ** Harrassed & Arrested ! Saturday 30 May 2009 Karachi, Pakistan *People's Resistance*, a civil society coalition of students, professional and ordinary citizens strongly condemns police violence and arrest of peaceful anti-war protestors in Quaidabad, Karachi today, on grounds that the right to peaceful dissent has been violated. The march had been organized by The Jang Mukhalif Committee (Anti War Committee) comprising several local groups that have been protesting the army operation since August 2008. The committee included the Bajaur Committee of Peoples Resistance, Labor Party Pakistan, International Socialists, Swat Quami Ittehad, Anjumani-i-Buner, and many neighbourhood groups. At 6:15pm a disproportionately large police force, several hundred in number, baton-charged the protestors and even the cart-pullers and other people present in Quaidabad and later near Gul Ahmed Chowrangi. Fifteen protestors were arrested and shifted to the Shah Latif Police Station and Quaidabad Police Chowki. Panic spread in the area. Seven of the fifteen people - the exact number is unclear - were arrested from Quaidabad Chowk, in front of Hamid Hospital, and taken to Shah Latif Thana. After the arrests, the police lathi charged and dispersed the crowd. The vicious and prompt action has been videotaped. Rehana of International Socialists climbed into the policewagon as they were taking Ali Hassan, Riaz, Salaam, and others away. Later Adaner and Shaukat were picked up and taken to a Police Chowki, while they were only standing around. They were later brought to Shah Latif. Later, a few more people who were protesting the arrests were picked up from Gul Ahmed Chowrangi, and taken to a police station The update from Tanvir who is at the Police Station is that they have issued FIRs under Sectioin 188 of the PPC. But they have also said the decision will be made by higher ups. It looks likely that they will be in the Police Station all night long. Shah Latif Thana is beyond Landhi, on the right, on Shahrah e Faisal a couple of kilometers past FAST Institute. There are reports that they may be moved to anothet police station during the night. Those arrested include Dr. Riaz, Ali Hassan, Rehana Channar, Ali Leghari, ,Asim Jaan of International Socialists, Adaner, Shujaat Zaheer Khan and Salam of Labour Party of Pakistan, and Shoukat from Jang Mukhalif Committee. Rehana Channar was later released. The protest was held to demand that the government halt its operation in Swat, Dir, Buner, and Waziristan. As the government tries to divert attention towards just relief efforts, the Committee presses that the war, the root cause of this immense human suffering, must be stopped. According to Sartaj of International Socialists, “the operation has resulted in the large scale expulsion of more than 2 million people from their homes. These people demand a peaceful return to their homes and lands and relief work will only provide them with temporary solutions.” Moreover, he states that there are no official counts of civilian deaths, estimated in the thousands, and there is absolutely no hope that these people will ever be compensated for their loss. Salaam, a member of the committee, says that the Taliban, the target of this operation, will not be eliminated by military heavy handedness; if anything, the operation will exacerbate the presence of these militias which will regroup and find new recruits. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Resistance strongly condemns the brutal suppression of Peaceful Dissent and violent harrassment on ordinary Citizens on the part of the concerned authorities, and demands the Immediate Release of those arrested. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

fussball mit george best
by Wolfgang Staehle 22 May '09

22 May '09

sunday at 8:30 pm we'll show "fussball wie noch nie" by hellmuth costard (1970) at the white slab palace (in the secret lounge) on delancey and allan, nyc. this came about by talking with john - who's from manchester - two weeks ago over beers at the bar. i told him about this movie and we spontaneously decided to screen it in the unfinished room behind the bar. yesterday heidrun sent me an email informing me that cabinet magazine is also showing it in brooklyn on tuesday, followed by a discussion with simon critchley. it's one of these weird coincidences. well, at least, you have a choice...

1 0

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

thingist