Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action

By Nadja Millner-Larsen

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask.
 
With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.”
 
Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226820699

Book preview

Cover Page for Up Against the Real

Up Against the Real

Up Against the Real

Black Mask from Art to Action

Nadja Millner-Larsen

The University of Chicago Press   Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82068-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82424-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82069-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820699.001.0001

This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any view, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Millner-Larsen, Nadja, author.

Title: Up against the real : Black Mask from art to action / Nadja Millner-Larsen.

Other titles: Black Mask from art to action

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022026639 | ISBN 9780226820682 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226824246 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226820699 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Black Mask (Group of artists) | Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (Gang) | Anarchist artists—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Anarchism and art—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Art and social action—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Art—Political aspects—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC NX456.5.B54 M56 2023 | DDC 700.9747/109046—dc23/eng/20220721

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026639

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: The Revolution Will be Real

1  Direct Painting/Direct Action

2  The Subject of Black

3  Pure Activism in Theory and Practice

4  We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw

5  Sweet Assassins

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

The Revolution Will be Real

Ultimately, it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets, where daily life is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.

Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism¹

On a frigid February afternoon in 1967, a procession of masked protesters, dressed entirely in black, moved silently through the streets of New York’s financial district carrying oversize papier-mâché skulls. Two by two they walked down lower Broadway, past pawnshops and newsstands, construction sites and hair salons, to Trinity Church, where they turned left onto Wall Street. Their path was flanked by mounds of dingy snow, remnants of a blizzard that had blanketed the city three days earlier. The men at the front of the group carried a sign: WALL ST. IS WAR ST.

This funereal performance was the second protest organized by Black Mask, a group of anarchist anti-artists who began working together in late 1966. Their first action had protested the Museum of Modern Art’s complicity in the Vietnam war. This one drew a more direct connection between the violence of war and the violence of capital. A leaflet, passed out along the route, spelled out the analogy:

WALL STREET IS WAR STREET

The traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers—but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead WE DID NOT KNOW. Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom.

BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS!

If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street’s formula for the great society!²

Figure 1. Black Mask, Wall St. Is War St. protest, 1967. Photo © Larry Fink.

The ideology of freedom, Black Mask proposes, is a construct that undergirds the worst aspects of American culture, from consumerism to imperialism. It was providing an alibi for genocidal napalm attacks on the Vietnamese and a justification for President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, which identified freedom from poverty with the intensification of wage labor. Anyone with a television or a job in finance was complicit in the racialized violence of late capital. Black Mask rehearsed this critique in eponymous broadsides, produced sporadically between 1966 and 1968, when the group evolved into a countercultural gang called Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. Black Mask’s ten issues advocated total revolution, reprinting Dada and Surrealist manifestos alongside quotations from Black Power leaders H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. The group’s notoriety quickly spread, thanks to the New Left’s innovative distribution mechanisms.³ Members corresponded with Situationists in France and the UK and attracted a number of interlocutors circulating through downtown New York, including Jean-Jacques Lebel, Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, anarchist Murray Bookchin, revolutionary feminist Valerie Solanas, Fluxus renegade Henry Flynt, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party. With a core membership of just three people—Ben Morea, Ron Hahne, and Dan Georgakas—Black Mask became infamous in downtown circles for its belligerent forms of protest, like firing blanks at a poetry reading or storming the opening of a Jean Arp exhibition with noisemakers and masks.

Barely a footnote to most histories of cultural leftism in the United States, Black Mask returned to relevance when, over forty years later, activists set up an encampment two blocks north of Wall Street at Zuccotti Park, sparking 2011’s Occupy Wall Street movement. The hunt for historical precedent commenced. Photos of Black Mask’s procession appeared in blog posts and on news sites as journalists and activists struggled to define the new anarchism of the twenty-first century; Occupying Wall Street in 1967, read the caption in the New Yorker.⁴ Rediscovered, the group was cast as a progenitor of numerous contemporary resistance tactics, from black blocs (antiauthoritarian protest groupings whose use of black clothing and masks was spectacularized in the alter-globalization movement of the early 2000s) to anarchist affinity groups (small cadres of activists who support each other during direct actions) to the very practice of occupation (the collective seizure of private or public space for strategic purposes).⁵ The image of the black mask itself served as a potent metaphor for a growing discourse about antirepresentationalism, in which the use of direct action, encampment, and the refusal to issue demands came to signal a new form of direct democracy.⁶ Resurrected as the original anarchist street fighters, Black Mask was suddenly legible within a historical present in which activists reexamined the uneven distribution of wealth under late capitalism by experimenting with new tactics of popular protest.

The characterization of Black Mask as primarily an activist group is, however, complicated by the fact that group members started out as artists and writers operating at the peripheries of postwar art movements. Examining the group’s trajectory through those practices—particularly abstract expressionism and early minimalism, experimental theater, avant-garde poetics, and a nascent expanded cinema scene—is a central task of this book. Tracing Black Mask’s iconoclastic relationship to the era’s new social movements as well as institutions of the art world, Up Against the Real asks how and why these artist-activists ultimately rejected art—and the identity of the artist—as politically nonviable. By mapping a set of activities that tested the limits of radical art and radical politics, this book reaches beyond the particularities of Black Mask as a historical object to offer another route through persistently intractable debates concerning political aesthetics.

The Call

The central paradox of Up Against the Real is best exemplified in a single piece of ephemera I encountered in the Tamiment Labor Archives at New York University. Rifling through boxes of uncatalogued material, I came across an open letter announcing the dissolution of the Black Mask broadside. The reason, Black Mask wrote, "is a direct result of our theory—the movement must be real or it will not be. Now the call is INTO THE STREETS. The group had transcended Black Mask and would now be called UP AGAINST THE WALL/MOTHERFUCKER."⁷ Lifting its new name from Black revolutionary writer Amiri Baraka’s poem Black People!, the group posited direct action as an explicitly antirepresentational project underscored by the unprintable expletive. But if real revolution was to be found in the streets, what disqualified the broadside as a productive tool in the ongoing struggles? What did the group’s rejection of representation mean for its engagement with art? And how, precisely, was this new turn a direct result of our theory?

Up Against the Real addresses these questions. In the chapters that follow, I analyze the attempt to eschew representation in favor of the real as both a formal and a political problem, and show that the turn against art and toward direct action should not be seen as an abandonment of theoretical questions about form, meaning, or aesthetic experience. Far from abdicating these questions, Black Mask enacted them in the public sphere through the development of incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. In tracing Black Mask’s trajectory, I demonstrate how the assumption of direct action was part of a struggle over theory and practice that responded to critiques of representation leveled by 1960s art movements and to the radicalization of new social movements. Questions raised by the group, including the problem of aesthetic autonomy and artistic identity, the status of art practice as an emergent space for political thought, and the relation between experimentalism and antiauthoritarian activism, remain as vexing for thinkers and artists as they were in the 1960s, when Black Mask charted its shape-shifting path.

Black Mask’s call also informs the structure of this volume, which follows the group’s progression from art to action while remaining aware of the porosity of these categories. The first half of the book primarily explores the group’s work in painting and expanded cinema; the second turns to its practice after art as Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAWMF). My aim is to consider how projects that begin from questions of aesthetics approach the sphere of the political in ways that are not entirely reducible to either art or politics. As Black Mask asserted, in becoming UAWMF, the group had not splintered or imploded but had transcended itself.

This trajectory is reflected in Black Mask’s shifting membership and alignments. Painters Ron Hahne and Ben Morea first met in 1962 as part of a loose assembly of artists working under the name Group Center to organize exhibitions, discussions, protests, and expanded cinema events. Group Center was driven by the artist Aldo Tambellini, who, dissatisfied with the Tenth Street gallery scene—a series of cooperatively run spaces initiated as an alternative to the museums and galleries of Uptown Manhattan—wanted to combine artists’ aesthetic concerns with a commitment to social action.⁸ It was through Tambellini’s guidance that Hahne and Morea began working in intermedia and expanded cinema. By 1966 the two had formed Black Mask with their friend Everett Shapiro and, soon thereafter, were joined by the Greek-American poet Dan Georgakas. Georgakas arrived from Detroit, where his first poems had been published by the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s journal, Correspondence, led by Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, with leftist revolutionaries James and Grace Lee Boggs.⁹ An influx of new participants, some affiliated with the French and British Situationists and others with the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, came into the fold in 1967. Black Mask eventually stopped making broadsides when Hahne and Georgakas moved on to other pursuits and the group’s direct actions drew increasing attention from law enforcement.¹⁰ The group first took the UAWMF name in February 1968, when members flung uncollected trash into the fountain at Lincoln Center during a citywide sanitation strike—an action that signaled a shift in the style, scope, and authorship of their activities. Still, the announced self-transcendence was not instantaneous or definitive; for months events and ephemera produced by the new Motherfuckers continued to be attributed to Black Mask. Between late 1968 and the fall of 1969, UAWMF maintained a loose and fluctuating membership of about fifteen to twenty people at a time. Core founding members included Morea, Allan Hoffman (a follower of the anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin), Tom (Osha) Neumann, Larry Myers, and many anonymous participants. Numerous women were involved from the beginning, including Mary Alpern, Carol Fineman, Mama Bernadette, and others, and by the end of 1968 UAWMF welcomed an influx of younger, more racially diverse participants who had arrived on the Lower East Side in search of the counterculture.¹¹

While this book addresses each of these groups—Group Center, Black Mask, and UAWMF (and the dizzying array of groupings affiliated with the latter, including the East Side Services Organization, International Werewolf Conspiracy, ACID, the Family, and Armed Love)—the subtitle gives priority to Black Mask because it is under this name that the politico-aesthetic concerns of the others emerged. It is difficult to trace precisely when group members entered or exited the fold, as much of the history must be gleaned from ephemera, rumor, and hazy memories. The archive is always a space of gaps, elisions, and inconsistences, and its living narrators offer us a set of situated knowledges valuable more for their affective tenor than for any necessarily infallible truth. The marginality of Group Center, Black Mask, and UAWMF has made the details of participants’ lives just barely, always incompletely extractable. Such is the case for minor figures, as Branden Joseph has written, who often appear from the point of view of major history to be an unruly and indistinct mob.¹² But my goal here is neither additive nor exhaustive, and my narrative is driven much less by biography than by events, which I read through a myriad of ephemeral traces (leaflets, underground and overground press reportage, photographs, and films). I chose this course largely because these collectives took anonymity as their preferred mode of shared authorship. But I have also made the actions of Group Center, Black Mask, and UAWMF the propulsive force of this book because action itself was, for them, a central theoretical, organizational, and aesthetic concern.

Another reason for privileging Black Mask in this conglomeration of interrelated histories is the significance of the black mask as a metonym for the group’s antirepresentationalism. A creative inversion of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the name reflects a critique of representation that was particularly responsive to the radicalization of 1960s racial justice movements.¹³ The sole image included in the first issue of Black Mask, published in the wake of the Watts uprising of 1965, is of the Black Panther emblem leaping over an announcement for Stokely Carmichael’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization voter drive in Alabama.¹⁴ Black radicalism remained a constant source of inspiration for Black Mask’s analysis of the postindustrial conditions of protest, which amalgamated the insights of Rap Brown and Carmichael, for example, with an array of libertarian socialisms, Marxisms, and anarchisms.¹⁵ The membership of Black Mask was entirely white—a fact about which they were not always reflexive, even as UAWMF became more racially diverse—but the group’s relationship to Black Liberation is not easily reducible to simple fetishization. Its primary goal was to radicalize white leftists, although members’ attempts to build solidarity with Black militants ran the gamut from thoughtful structural analyses to brash emulation. On the one hand, the influence of Black revolutionary movements resulted in Georgakas’s return to Detroit to study the struggles of Black autoworkers and Morea’s being offered honorary membership in the Black Panthers by Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver.¹⁶ On the other hand, the group’s occasional adoption of racial slurs and even the use of the name motherfucker participated in some of the more egregious patterns of appropriation common to white radicals of the 1960s.¹⁷

Historians have long grappled with the complicated relationship between Black revolutionary politics and the whiteness of the student New Left. Here, I draw on the literature of Black studies and visual studies to consider how Black Mask’s work across art and action responded to, and sometimes rehashed, forms of racist representationalism that structured debates about the politics of color. My account shows how the circulation of the ideas of Frantz Fanon through white oppositional culture, along with the visual strategies of Black Power and the experimentation of Black artists in downtown New York, produced a discursive landscape in which race became a new technology of vision animating the boundaries of politicized art practice.¹⁸ In successive chapters, I examine how the shifting symbolic economy of Black militancy informed Black Mask’s work in painting, expanded cinema, and direct action. While group members’ early artwork suggested that new aesthetic experiences might contribute to the project of transforming audiences into antiracists, the escalating war in Vietnam and the experience of the Watts, Newark, and Harlem rebellions made abstract methods of intervention increasingly unsatisfactory. Moving beyond the terrain of individual perceptual experience, Black Mask’s antirepresentational project developed into a militant, collective endeavor. In my reading, this project was displayed through the black mask, a tactic of militant (largely anarchist) resistance movements that emphasizes an anonymous, common identity. The use of the black mask thus signals an antirepresentational practice whose origins can be traced to the civil rights movement, which foregrounded the explicitly visual pathologies of racism, as well as to anarchist political theory. Anarchist historian Andrew Cornell has traced the roots of such tactics to the years between 1964 and 1968, when the insurrectionary strategies of Third World Marxist national liberation movements, theorized by figures such as Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, were hotly debated and the Black freedom struggle engaged in more overt confrontations with police and other white supremacists.¹⁹

The antirepresentational imperative signified in the black mask has only expanded since the 1960s. From the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s to the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, to more recent tactical media projects, antisurveillance interventions, and Occupy Wall Street’s refusal to offer coherent demands, anticapitalists have repeatedly used tactics of obfuscation, abstraction, and anonymity to make their political claims in the public sphere.²⁰ Each of these movements understands that, as Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos argue in their 2008 book Escape Routes, Naming and representing—the core moments of the egalitarian principle—are the primary political tools for controlling and policing society.²¹ One can hear echoes of Black Mask’s 1968 call Into the Streets! in the insurrectionary anarchism(s) that erupted in the wake of the alter-globalization movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. In their 2004 pamphlet The Call, for example, the French ultraleftist group the Invisible Committee writes, "This is a call. That is to say it aims at those who can hear it. The question is not to demonstrate, to argue, to convince. We will go straight to the evident.²² While nearly forty years apart, these two calls summon strikingly similar critiques of representation. They reject existing forms of political organization and representation (political parties, unions, and demonstrations), refuse to assert a coherent counteridentity (like that of the worker, proletariat, or artist), affirm the vocabulary of the riot, and promote anticommunicational practices of withdrawal.²³ While the Invisible Committee was not directly influenced by Black Mask (though its writing is dominated by Situationist theory, also important to Black Mask’s activities), its antirepresentational politics is coincident with the new anarchism" that brought Black Mask’s history back into view in the mid-2000s.²⁴ In contrast to protest strategies that privilege visibility or coherent demands, these projects do not target new recruits by arguing, persuading, or rationalizing. Black Mask’s call into the street was not an explanation but a summons that cut straight to the evident, crying out to a collective already poised to join the project of direct action. As contemporary artistic and social experiments continue to find new ways to act antirepresentationally, the historical emergence of such projects commands further attention.²⁵

The Art Left and the New Left

The story of art activism in 1960s New York, and the United States more broadly, is dominated by the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), which formed in 1969 to lobby for museum reforms. The AWC and affiliated groups—the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), and Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), among others—were by far the most visible and effective artist groups rallying against the museum system over the course of the long 1960s. Recent scholarship on the Black Arts Movement has, however, complicated this picture, showing how the cultural wing of the Black freedom struggle raised questions about the relation between art and politics typically submerged in genealogies of the art left.²⁶ Up Against the Real builds on this work, while deemphasizing the AWC, in order to consider the challenging questions at the heart of Black Mask’s engagement with art as a sphere of political actualization.

While the goals of individual artists within the Art Workers Coalition varied, as Julia Bryan-Wilson has shown, the group generally focused on democratizing the museum system by opening up public access and diversifying curation to include more artists of color, more women, and more non-Western artists. It also rallied to expand the rights of artists regarding the use and display of their artwork and agitated to make museum leaders more accountable for their role in the ongoing atrocities of the Vietnam war. While for some artists these goals demanded a radical questioning of the category of art (Lee Lozano, another infamous art world dropout, in a statement issued at the AWC’s 1969 Open Hearing, called for something like a total revolution)²⁷ and many saw the eradication of the art industry as a distant utopian prospect, for the most part members of AWC retained the category of the artist as an agent of political struggle. As Bryan-Wilson has theorized, by self-consciously designating themselves art workers—thus adjoining the artist to the worker—these artists were able to formulate a viable activist identity, drawing on Marxist ideas to legitimate their art practices as meaningful forms of labor that should be remunerated like other work. As leftists, they imagined a wage system for artists along socialist or communist lines, eventually channeling their efforts into the formation of MoMA’s union, the Professional and Administrative Staff Association (PASTA).²⁸ This history has informed contemporary projects to spotlight the labor conditions of artists (such as WAGE, Working Artists for a Greater Economy), to organize art workers to advocate for a more equitable regulation of the art economy, and to unionize museums.²⁹

This position—upholding the identity of the artist as a practicable site for political organizing—was adamantly rejected by Black Mask, which saw art as an increasingly compromised site of political engagement. The group raged against the commodification of the art world, a phenomenon it observed in the rise of Andy Warhol and Pop art, and even excoriated Happenings for retaining their frame as artworks. Yet while Black Mask does not fit neatly into the genealogies of institutional critique that typically attend AWC’s art historical trajectory, it is, on occasion, included in less conventional accounts of the coalition’s history. For example, artist Simon Leung’s theatrical production Actions! (2013), which chronicles the role of art workers in agitating against museums, begins with Black Mask’s 1966 closing of MoMA.³⁰ The group also entered, albeit obliquely, into one of the AWC’s foundational scenes, the 1969 Open Hearing, when art worker David Lee quoted the Motherfuckers’ Return of the Long-Hair leaflet in his statement: The hip revolution is a product of history and exists in this time and space: it is not a replaying of ‘bohemianism’; it is not an artistic ‘drop-out’ class open only to the bourgeoisie. . . . It grows out of real change in technological possibilities. . . . Before sophisticated electronics, total unemployment was only a dream—now it is only limited by fear and that fear becomes a new class distinction—those who have it and those who don’t. Following this provocation, Lee suggests another goal for the coalition: total communized unemployment.³¹ While works by many of the artists involved in the AWC (especially instances of process art, minimalism, and conceptualism) questioned the role of art in commodity production, the discourse of total unemployment is somewhat at odds with the coalition’s prevailing political claims.³² One of its most lasting legacies is curator Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement (1971), which upholds the value of artwork as private property even though, as Alex Alberro has shown, that result is at cross purposes with the AWC’s attempts to limit the interference of capital in the making, exhibition, and distribution of art.³³ The AWC has certainly produced a vibrant discourse on the politics of artistic labor that maintains the figure of the artist as a central political subject.

Nonetheless, the AWC’s mobilization of the art strike, a form of work stoppage demonstrated in Robert Morris’s closure of his 1970 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in response to President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, resonates with Black Mask’s early activities. While Morris’s withdrawal was a less totalizing gesture than that advocated by Black Mask, the art strike does raise conceptual questions about the political ontology of the artwork and the art world’s institutional authority, and has been taken up by other figures much closer to Black Mask in character and tone. Gustav Metzger (in 1974) and Stewart Home (in 1990), for example, both proposed that artists stop making, distributing, and exhibiting art for a period of three years, thus moving beyond the withholding of artwork in protest of particular political situations.³⁴ These propositions were formulated, rather, to challenge the special status of the art object and the ideological conception of the artist as part of a privileged social class.³⁵ Metzger’s and Home’s art strikes, in contrast to Morris’s gesture or other artists’ withdrawals from exhibitions in protest of specific museum policies, are performative strategies whose durational quality and perceived impossibility (both were technically failures due to low participation) present the total destruction of the art system as their utopian horizon.³⁶ (Similarly, even as the AWC offshoot New York Art Strike Against Racism, War and Oppression issued most of its demands to city museums, some members proposed getting rid of art altogether.³⁷)

As provocations, these projects recall the more sweeping claims of historical avant-gardes—Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, and Constructivism—that, in differing ways, attacked art’s institutional apparatuses and the museum in particular. We will destroy the museums, proclaimed the Futurist manifesto of 1909, an aspiration echoed, in 1966, in Black Mask’s foundational manifesto: DESTROY THE MUSEUMS.³⁸ The repetition, this time capitalized, evokes the oft-repeated arguments (the most infamous being that of Peter Bürger) that the 1960s neo-avant-gardes merely repeated the tendencies of those that had stalked Europe a half century earlier. While Bürger argued that those repetitions evacuated the historical avant-garde’s critical substance, Black Mask’s uppercase directive suggests little compromise.³⁹

Black Mask’s DESTROY THE MUSEUMS appeared first as part of an action and was then printed in the Black Mask broadside—as if to say, they didn’t hear us last time, so we’ll make our attacks louder, more audacious and insistent. This book proposes that the history of Black Mask presents a much more complex and challenging set of questions than any simple account of tragedy and its obligatory farce. Like the AWC, Black Mask targeted New York’s most powerful cultural institutions, but its position was markedly different. Not only was Black Mask uninterested in legitimating its participants’ activities as work (waged or otherwise), its rejection of the artist was part of a wider project of disaffiliation from available categories of revolutionary subjectivity, including those of the worker, the student, and even the hippie.

If Black Mask’s history can be said to unsettle accounts of the 1960s art left, neither does it fit particularly well within the history of the New Left, a constellation of social movements that emerged from the decolonization efforts of the 1950s and, in the US, the civil rights movement, and grew increasingly radical over the course of the Vietnam war. These struggles generated a liberationist politics against imperialism, racism, authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist exploitation that extended far into the 1970s and beyond. The movement was new in part because it eschewed the organizing principles of the old Left and its affiliations with labor unions and the Communist Party. Rejecting the industrial worker as the ideal subject of revolutionary politics, the New Left put forward as paradigms the student, the Black liberationist, and the anticolonial militant. That said, its new forms of protest coexisted with old forms. From boycotts to sit-down protests, riots, occupations, and strikes, activists in the 1960s used an incredible range of protest tactics.⁴⁰ Histories of the American New Left are reasonably dominated by accounts of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the principal student organizing body of the 1960s, founded with the adoption of the Port Huron Statement of 1962, which declared the organization’s commitment to participatory democracy and decentralized methods of organization. The predominance of SDS has generally relegated small groups such as Black Mask to a footnote, even when they and other anarchist groups also had a significant impact on the trajectory of direct democracy in the United States.⁴¹

Black Mask was actively hostile to the student movement and regularly taunted New Leftist students and hippies for being insufficiently militant. It also refused to accept uncritically the positions of Third Worldists aligned with the Soviet Union, whereas many New Leftists were willing to champion an authoritarian regime as long as it was anticapitalist. These positions put them in conflict with both the Marxist Progressive Labor faction and the proto-Weatherman Revolutionary Youth Movement, which jockeyed for control of SDS in the later 1960s.⁴² Some Black Mask members attended SDS’s 1967 convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they urged the organization to adopt more anarchist organizing methods such as affinity groups.⁴³ When UAWMF succeeded Black Mask, the group did join SDS as the only nonstudent chapter and exerted pressure on the organization to radicalize its tactics from nonviolent demonstrations to more confrontational forms of civil disobedience.

The group’s critique of the student movement dovetailed with its critique of the predominant model of political participation favored by the New Left: the mass demonstration. Both Black Mask and UAWMF considered demonstrations to be unacceptably representational. At best, they were a spectacular display of moral outrage; at worst, a futile exhibition that would never take an active role in changing real material conditions.⁴⁴ The group’s rejection of the student paradigm and the demonstration intervened in a broader debate among New Leftists regarding the reconstitution of an ideal revolutionary subject at a time when the culture industry had neutralized the structural antagonism previously afforded to the working class.⁴⁵ Where SDS elevated the figure of the student as the new revolutionary subject, Black Mask, no doubt influenced by Murray Bookchin’s analysis of postwar America as a post-scarcity society in which all subjects were becoming declassed as a body of lumpenized individuals, saw the surplus populations expelled from the economy—the unemployed, the homeless, the indigenous, Black and brown populations, and even the very young—as far more radicalized. The new proletariat, so Black Mask witnessed, was fueling new methods of protest—namely, the riot and the breakaway contingent—which it saw as a pivotal departure from the formal apparatus of the peace march.⁴⁶ Black Mask’s critique of demonstrations comes up repeatedly in its broadsides, leaflets, and correspondence, making for a practice that was somewhat anomalous within New Left narratives, though some others did share its view.

Black Mask’s praxis is thus entangled with histories of New Leftism, Black radicalism, and countercultural lifestyles that rarely figure in art historical studies of downtown New York experimentalism in the 1960s. In what follows, excursions into histories of protest cultures illuminate the ways in which issues that emerged from the field of the aesthetic were productively, if messily, rerouted through questions of political struggle. Up Against the Real nevertheless stays close to New York’s downtown scene. I situate Black Mask within the culture of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, while the global history of the New Left emerges in writings, ideas, images, and people arriving from Paris, Britain, Algeria, and Cuba.⁴⁷ The discourse of decolonization as it was translated into the US context via Third World independence struggles was central to Black Mask’s project, as it was to the rest of the global New Left, which, following Frederic Jameson, can be viewed as beginning from the Algerian Revolution.⁴⁸ Black Mask picked up on the language of decolonization, particularly the thesis of internal colonialism, which cast the experience of Black Americans as one of living under the colonial rule of the US government. The comparative analysis of American cities and Third World colonies as two sites of violent disinvestment allowed group members to politicize their relationship to the urban territory of their local neighborhood, although they often elided issues of racial difference animating such discussions. Black Mask’s project became increasingly localized over the course of the 1960s as early signs of New York’s 1970s financial decline began to show themselves in the poorer areas of downtown Manhattan they frequented. While this book examines the activities of a small group of people over a short period of time in a single neighborhood, Black Mask’s history reaches far beyond that spatiotemporal site to enfold a number of debates, movements, and projects into its narrative.

The Minor and the