PRIMITIVE OF A NEW ERA: Remembering Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini, counter-culture icon and rebel of the '60’s New York No!Art art scene, died this month, leaving behind a lasting legacy of innovative work in film and the visual arts as well as other aesthetic forms.

Tambellini, whose death at the age of 90 was announced on Nov 12 was “a major catalyst for a lot of the expanded media and performance activity that was happening in New York City in the 1960s,” according to Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“He was a rebel. He was a nonconformist,” said Anne Salamone, Tambellini's lifelong companion. “That was a position that he took in life.”

According to an obit in the Boston Globe, Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracuse, N.Y., on April 20, 1930 to John Tambellini, a hotel waiter, and Gina Puccinelli, a homemaker. When his parent separated, he went with her to Italy during World War II to live with her relatives and enrolled in art school in Lucca, Tuscany. There, wartime bombings that destroyed his neighborhood became embedded in his consciousness ("I saw the earth hurled by force/ in chunks lifting to the sky/ friends & neighbors died/ others survived deformed.")

After the war he returned to Syracuse, earned a scholarship to Syracuse University, studied at Notre Dame and taught high school until landing in the Lower East side in the late 50s in a volatile avante garde and countercultural arts world -- including the influential visual artist Boris Lurie, a leader of the No-Art movement and Buchenwald survivor, and poet Stanley Fisher, who as editor of "Beat Coast East: An Anthology of Rebellion" (Excelsior Press, NY 1960), adeptly negotiated an uneasy merger between NO!art's violent social criticism and the playfulness of young Beat writers.

The No!Art group produced a large body of confrontational works of art which drew on commercial images, pin-up nudes and photographs of war atrocities. Originally identified as the March Gallery Group, they espoused street art, graffiti and what they described as “violent expressionism.” These disturbing and powerful works were created in response to the contrast between the superficial consumer culture of the postwar era and the horror of the recent past, including the Holocaust and the atomic crises of the cold war.

In 1969, he created one of the first and best known short experimental film about television called Black TV. This film won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany. Grove Press, the distributor described Black TV in this manner: “The film is an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through a television tube. Tambellini presents it subliminally in rapid-fire abstractions in which such horrors as Robert Kennedy’s assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality in Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out of focus expressions of faces and events.”

Later, Tambellini moved to the Boston area and was a Fellow at MIT in the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and collaborated on several creative international telecommunications projects under the name of Communicationsphere.

More recently, "LISTEN," (winner, 2005 New England Film and Video Festival) demonstrated the continuing power of his voice. Based on Tambellini’s poetry, the experimental work was a continuation of his confrontational work, critiquing the contemporary political world situation through the spoken word, visu
al poetry, written text and mass media imagery appropriation. A segment included sound and video clips of the artwork of Iraqi children. James Wines, Founder of “Sculpture in the Environment” (SITE), New York City, called the digital video “a collage of powerful insights related to the war in Iraq and the issue of humanity’s destructive behavior in general.”

“The making of this film gave me the opportunity to combine my social and political poetry with my work with media," Tambellini told me in 2005. "Having been a victim of a war, what I look at was from the perspective of the innocent population called collateral damage.”

He was also a beloved elder to more than one generation of avante garde and countercultural artists in the New York and Boston area, through the continuing power and innovation of his aesthetic voice.

“We are the primitives of a new era,” a 37-year old Tambellini told The New York Times in 1967.

For nearly a half century after uttering that assertion, Aldo Tambellini could still lay claim to that title. “We are the primitives of a new era,” a 37-year old Tambellini told The New York Times in 1967.