Today, the 87-year-old artist Aldo Tambellini is known primarily to researchers of alternative and anarchist movements for his associations with 1960s counterculture. After arriving in New York’s Lower East Side in 1959, he co-founded Group Center: an alliance of writers, artists and activists, including Ron Hahne and Ben Morea, who later launched the Situationist-inspired anarchist groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. From 1966, Tambellini also ran the cross-genre, cross-media project spaces Gate Theatre and (with ZERO co-founder Otto Piene) the Black Gate in Manhattan’s East Village. The Gate Theatre hosted the Theatre of the Ridiculous and its late-night productions: debuts by up-and-coming directors (such as Brian De Palma and Robert Downey), underground films (by Jack Smith and the Kuchar brothers) and multimedia performances (by Yayoi Kusama and Nam June Paik). Tambellini was shown at the Italian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and his 1965 multimedia performance Black Zerowas revived at the 2009 edition of Performa, New York – yet it is surprising how little awareness exists of him as an artist today. ...

Tambellini’s aim in basing his pictorial experiments on the non-colour black was a conceptually motivated reduction. With a preference for spiral or circular motifs, it runs the risk of symbolic overloading, yet brings a chaos and creativity he would later extend beyond painting to intermedia formats. In the mid-1970s, through his contact with Piene, Tambellini came into contact with MIT, where from 1976 to 1984 he worked at the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies, expanding into new media, video technology and seeing his central artistic challenge in television as a communications medium. Hans-Jürgen Hafner

https://frieze.com/article/aldo-tambellini (16.10.2018)