ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nadja Millner-Larsen is visiting assistant professor of experimental humanities at NYU.

REVIEWS

“Up Against the Real is an original, highly informed, and scholarly examination of a fascinating segment of contemporary art history. Millner-Larsen treats the complex milieu of 1960s radical politics and art as a living force within culture. She weaves a brilliant and scholarly narrative that on one level treats the anarchist art collective Black Mask as an anomaly, but also serves to illuminate the cultural politics of this tumultuous era.”

— Gregory Sholette, author of The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

“In Up Against the Real, Millner-Larsen introduces us to Black Mask, a group of downtown New York anti-art saboteurs who blasted out of the world of experimental painting and cinema and onto the streets, insisting that the abstraction of late modernist art heralded a new, liberatory, antirepresentational politics. With an acute understanding of the historical and theoretical stakes at play, Millner-Larsen restores their cultural revolution to its rightful place alongside the Situationists, the Young Lords, and other exemplars of ’60s radicalism.”

— Tom McDonough, author of The Beautiful Language of My Century

"In the afternoon of October 10, 1966, six members of a radical anti-arts arts group marched in front of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) handing out leaflets while two members unraveled a large canvas sign announcing, 'MUSEUM CLOSED.' . . . The demonstrators were with the Black Mask and were offended by MoMA’s exhibition, 'Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,' which they felt violated the Dadaist and Surrealists very creative visions. . . . Nadja Millner-Larsen brilliantly tells the story of this now nearly all-but-forgotten group and how they pushed art beyond representation into activist demonstrations, foreshadowing the eclipse of the 1960s counterculture."

— New York Journal of Books

"Millner-Larsen reproduces examples of Black Mask alongside Abstract Expressionist paintings and images of expanded cinema events and political protests, mapping how the debates laid out in the broadsheet emerged in the ‘real’ world through Black Mask’s commitment to direct action. . . . Though Black Mask and UATWMF are remembered as a vigilante street gang, Millner-Larsen’s historically and materially grounded study specifies the ways in which the group’s commitment to direct action was rooted in an interest in the political and philosophical uses of aesthetics and abstraction, one that was maintained even after their edict to cease artmaking following their name change."

— Art Review

"There are many paths through the radical arts of the 1960s. Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action takes one back alley and turns it into a bustling boulevard. . . . Millner-Larsen’s book is lucidly written and densely reasoned. The author doesn’t romanticize Morea’s flame-throwing ideas; she takes them seriously. Up Against the Real is also impressively researched, with a bit more than two hundred pages of text followed by forty-five pages of notes."

— Artforum

"Millner-Larsen’s frequently brilliant analysis by no means isolates the era of Black Mask as separate from our own. Her commentary is effective in its ability to link our present Zeitgeist to both general Black Mask & Up Against the Wall, MF!
impressions and specific memories of the 1960s. . . . Up Against the Real offers an expertly crafted documentation of Black Mask paired with a deeply impressive contextualization of this group within a larger picture of post-World War II American art and oppositional communities. It is undoubtedly a masterful contribution to the literature on this subject and anyone interested in Black Mask should take a sojourn in its pages, which are clearly the result of years of breathtaking effort."

— Fifth Estate

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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