Aldo Tambellini - Back to Black

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Black Video II (Aldo Tambellini, 1966)Aldo Tambellini - Back to Black
January 6-8 2012
Centre Pompidou, place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris

The Italian filmmaker and multimedia artist Aldo Tambellini is the protagonist of a six-programme retrospective at the Centre Pompidou next January 6-8. This event is an historic one since not only is the greatest retrospective of Tambellini's visual works to date, presenting his famous  'Black film' series, a compilation of his performances and cathodic works; it also includes many works unseen until now and that have been recently 'rescued' and restored from the artist's personal archive. The retrospective closes with a 'carte blanche' programme curated by Tambellini, where he presents a selection of films that he screened at the historic Gate Theatre.

During the retrospective, on January 7th, a double DVD released by the Italian label VON will be presented, including hours of video experiments by Tambellini from the years 1966 to 1976. Another DVD compiling Tambellini's 'Black Film' series will be published by French label Re:voir later this year.

All the screenings with the presence of the filmmaker.

This cycle has been curated by Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi, in collaboration with Light Cone/Scratch, La Camera Ottica-CREA (University of Udine) and the Harvard Film Archive

Programme 1: Black films
January 6 2012, 20h
Aldo Tambellini (Syracuse, 1930) left his hometown where he trained as a painter and sculptor and moved to New York in 1959. Fascinated by the audiovisual broadcasting and experimentation, he produced électromedia performance, then he began to paint directly on film for the Black Film Series.
A pioneer of video art since 1966, Tambellini from 1974 to 1984 taught at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT under the direction of Otto Piene, where he will continue his research on the technological aspects of television transmission.

In the mid-1960s, Aldo Tambellini chose to translate the abstract expressionism of his paintings and sculptures of the material on the film. In four years, he produced a series of films in 16mm around the concept of "black" - some painted with India ink, other implementing mixed media - in which the line painting on celluloid merges with the sound that the artist search continues in parallel. These films will significantly change his job, getting them to practice the television medium experimentally and expand the cinematic apparatus. Based on the experiences of "sensory destruction" of his films, his work will open at combining different media forms.
- Black is, 1965, 4'
- Black Trip, 1965, 4'30
- Black Trip 2, 1967, 3'
- Blackout, 1965, 9'
- Black Plus X, 1966, 4'
- Black TV, 1968-2008, 10'
- Moonblack, 1969, 5'

Programme 2: Unreleased works from the 60s
January 7 2012, 14h

While the Black Film Series is presented as a closed set, the unreleased works from the 60s, however, go literally to pieces: few films, though mounted, will never sonorized or distributed. Some works even deepen visions and techniques used by the artist during the 1960s, while others are designed more like paintings, from which Tambellini can build their live media. Recently discovered, digitized for the occasion and presented by the public for the first time, these films are not only the visual complement of finished works, but experience necessary to understand the evolution of the work of Tambellini, the day after his transition to the video.
- Sun Black, 1965-1968, 6'30
- Fire Sun, 1965-1968, 6'
- Negative Drawings, 1965-1968, 3'
- Black 67, 1967, 5'
- Spot Black, 1965-1968, 5'
- Black Round, 1965-1968, 5'
- Faces of War, 1968, 12'

Programme 3: Electromedia performances
January 7 2012, 17h

Aldo Tambellini makes electromédia performances in 1964: they are as the experiences of expanded cinema at which the fusion between art and kinetic sculpture is resolved into pure dramatic interaction. Tambellini turns the film into sound architecture, light and paints lumogrammes on glass, the physical action in abstract movement, sound on tactile matter.
This selection documents some of the collaborations are most representative of the Black Gate Theatre in which Tambellini is with artists like Jud Yalkut and Otto Piene, with whom he will join after experiencing the underground New Yorker, the station WDR-TV German national for the completion of the first broadcast performance in 1968.
- Proliferation of the Sun (performance by Otto Piene) and Black Out (performance by Aldo Tambellini), Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 10'
- Moondial (performance by Aldo Tambellini), Jud Yalkut, 1966, 4'
- Black Gate Cologne (performances by Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini), Aldo Tambellini, 1968, 47'

Programme 4: Experimental childhood
January 7 2012, 20h

Interaction childhood-art is a dominant theme of the work of Aldo Tambellini, from his first photographic research and the Black Film Series. After the episode of The Collective Medium is the Medium and a video series for TV in Syracuse and New York, Tambellini is up to the silver to make a film about art education in the county of Albany. Edited by Mike Kuchar, it is the only documentary produced by the artist, presented for the first time with some other unique projects.
- Black, 1969, 5'30
- Minus 1, 1969, 17'
- Untitled (working title: Unmarked 4 minus 1) 1969, 4'30
- Sight and Sound of Youth, 1970, 30'

Programme 5: Cathodic works
January 8 2012, 14h

For Tambellini, the camcorder Portapak quickly becomes a new tool he uses to complement his 16mm Bolex. It focuses on the study of the video signal and highlights its flexibility. While in his early films, the pictorial processes and composition were associated with sculptural techniques of experimental film, in his cathodic works, the aesthetic dimension of the television picture is lost in the electronic device that generates it, and that the artist changes using a system of magnets and an oscilloscope.
Since 1973 Tambellini works with the Paik-Abe video synthesizer. Elements undergo a new mutation and the body of the image is lost in abstract form.
- Interview Black Gate Theatre ABC TV dec 21 1967, 1967, 2'00
- Clone, 1976, 20'
- Black Video II (extracts), 1966, 10'
- 6673 (extracts), 1973, 10'
- Black Spiral, 1969, 17'

Programme 6: Carte blanche to Aldo Tambellini
January 8 2012, 17h

In September 1966, Tambellini opens the Gate Theatre, between 2nd Avenue and 10th Street on the Lower East Side in New York, with a daily program devoted to avant-garde theater and experimental theater (as well as to jazz the black poetry and multimedia performance). Over the years, the Gate (which became the Black Gate and the Tambellini's Gate) is a symbol of the underground culture of the East Coast. To honor this important place in limbo, we submitted to the artist a list of movies he had scheduled at the time, not necessarily for a representative selection of its dual activity as a filmmaker and programmer.
- Hurry Hurry, Marie Menken, 1957, 3'
- Lifelines, Ed Emshwiller, 1960, 7'
- Scotch Tape, Jack Smith, 1962, 3'
- Ai (Love), Takahiko Iimura, 1962-1963, 13'
- Pejote Queen, Storm de Hirsch, 1965, 8'
- Dirt, Piero Heliczer, 1965, 12'
- Jerovi, José Rodriguez-Soltero, 1965, 11'
- Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, George Kuchar, 1967, 15'

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Eileen langley's picture

Aldo I luv n miss u,evelyn bottino daughter