Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
ALDO TAMBELLINI
January 10 – January 12
A multimedia artist par excellence, Aldo Tambellini is among the most dizzyingly inter-disciplinary and restlessly experimental cultural figures imaginable. With a training in traditional painting and sculpture, Tambellini arrived in the Lower East Side in 1959, and over the next decade established himself as a pioneer of early video art; experimented with painting on and otherwise directly manipulating 16mm film; organized a series of “Electromedia Performances” which brought together projected paintings, film, video, poetry, light, dance, and music; and founded the counter-culture group, “Group Center,” as well as two important venues: the Gate Theatre, which screened avant-garde cinema, and the Black Gate, New York’s first experimental space for live multi-media performances and installations.
This explosion of creative energy, and his focus not only on producing his own work but on establishing spaces for the presentation of alternative art of all forms, occurred in concert with the proliferation of artist-run galleries celebrated in the NYU Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965” (on view January 10-April 1). On the occasion of this exhibition, and alongside Anthology’s related film series, we are overjoyed to host Aldo Tambellini for two programs of his extraordinary film and video work of the 1960s, as well as a special, timely screening of his 1981 piece, INAUGURATION ’81.
Archival prints courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive. Very special thanks to Aldo Tambellini and Anna Salamone, as well as Mark Johnson (Harvard Film Archive) and Erik Piil.
