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Ben Morea at the International Anti-Authoritarian Meetings of 2023 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Photograph Source: Antochkat \u2013 CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/p>\n In Memory of Ben Morea<\/p>\n On the afternoon of October 10, 1966, six members of Black Mask, a radical anti-arts arts group, marched in front of New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) handing out leaflets while two members unraveled a large canvas sign announcing, \u201cMUSEUM CLOSED.\u201d<\/p>\n A handout published in\u00a0Black Mask\u00a01 (November 1966)\u00a0read, in part, \u201cA new spirit is rising.\u00a0\u00a0Like the streets of Watts [i.e., August 1965 riot] we burn with revolution. We assault your Gods \u2013 We sing of your death. DESTROY THE MUSEUMS \u2013 our struggle cannot be hung on walls.\u201d It\u00a0continued, \u201cGoddamn your culture, your science, your art. \u2026 What purpose do they serve? Your mass-murder cannot be concealed. The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretence [sic] and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n In an accompanying press release, the group clarified its concerns:<\/p>\n \u201cThis symbolic action is taken at a time when America is on a path of total destruction, and signals the opening of another front in the world-wide struggle against suppression. We seek a total revolution, cultural, as well as social and political \u2013 LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.\u201d<\/p>\n The demonstrators were offended by MoMA\u2019s exhibition, \u201cDada, Surrealism and\u00a0Their Heritage,\u201d which they felt violated the Dadaist and Surrealists very creative visions.<\/p>\n Museum executives, having been notified by Black Mask about the planned action, informed the police who put up two sawhorses to block the entrance, closing the facility.\u00a0\u00a0According to one account, \u201ca nervous and shifty-eyed mob of plain-clothed and uniformed policemen and newsmen [and] one FBI man with a small Japanese camera\u201d observed the demonstration.\u00a0As the scholar Conor Hannan\u00a0notes,<\/a>\u00a0\u201cBlack Mask\u2019s mock-closure of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) represents the first true meeting of art and social protest within the setting of 1960s New York.\u201d<\/p>\n During the \u201860s, numerous arts groups emerged that expressed strong political beliefs, including\u00a0the Art Workers Coalition, the\u00a0Guerrilla Art Action Group\u00a0(GAAG),\u00a0Women Artists in Revolution (WAR),\u00a0Black Emergency Cultural Coalition\u00a0Inc. (BECC)\u00a0and, most importantly, the\u00a0Black Arts Movement.<\/p>\n Black Mask was different from the other political arts groups in two important ways. First, it drew its radical sensibilities from the post-WW-I Dada and Surrealist movements, a sensibility shared by groups like the\u00a0Chicago Surrealists, the Amsterdam Provos, the San Francisco Diggers and the UK\u2019s King Mob.\u00a0\u00a0Second, it drew its\u00a0theoretical or analytic perspective \u2013 i.e., its critique of the capitalist culture industry \u2014 from the radical Marxists tradition that included the Frankfurt School (e.g., Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich), the anarchist\/ecologist\u00a0Murray Bookchin\u00a0(i.e., the concept of \u201cpost-scarcity\u201d) and the French Situationist International, particularly\u00a0Guy Debord\u00a0(i.e., the concept of \u201cthe spectacle\u201d).<\/p>\n At the center of Black Mask was Ben Morea (1941-2026), an abstract painter and vibraphonistwho moved to the East Village in the early \u201860s.\u00a0\u00a0As he later\u00a0reflected<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cI had been involved in jazz during my drug addiction days. I was a musician and every time I got out of jail I went back around the jazz world and got re-addicted . . . When I finally kicked for the last time . . . they put me in the prison hospital . . . in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan . . . There was an occupational therapist who befriended me . . . She was an art therapist, so I started painting.\u201d<\/p>\n During this period, he hooked up with the Living Theater and, as he recalled, he \u201cwas highly influenced by their ideas despite never being theatrically orientated myself.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Morea further explained, \u201cthey were the first people to put a name to the way I was feeling and leaning philosophically.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0During this period,\u00a0Morea was introduced to artist\u00a0Aldo Tambellini (1930-2020) and the radical arts community.<\/p>\n Tambellini,\u00a0a painter, sculptor and poet who pioneered electronic intermedia, championed a belief that art had to break free from the\u00a0confines of white-walled galleries.\u00a0\u00a0In \u201959,\u00a0he moved to East 10th\u00a0Street and began publishing a radical anti-art-institution mimeographed newsletter,\u00a0The Screw, bearing the bold slogan, \u201cArtists in an Anonymous Generation Arise.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The Screw\u00a0\u201cwas created to raise the social consciousness of artists,\u201d\u00a0Tambellini reflected. \u201cIn the newsletter, I voiced my objection to the manipulation I saw in the art establishment which used the artists as a commodity and financial investments rather than cultural entities.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0It included tracks like\u00a0\u201cFuck the Tastemaker: Wall Street is making our art, the galleries are making our art \u2026 the critics are making our art. WHERE THE HELL IS THE ARTIST?\u201d It challenged the commoditization of art.<\/p>\n Tambellini\u00a0put his words into action by\u00a0handing out copies of\u00a0The Screw\u00a0at \u201cThe Club<\/a>\u201d (a loft at\u00a039 East 8th\u00a0Street), a regular meeting space for\u00a0New York School artists like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.\u00a0\u00a0On July 12, 1962, in an action anticipating Black Mask, he hosted \u201cEvent of the Screw\u201d in front of MoMA.\u00a0\u00a0He later reflected:<\/p>\n \u201cThere, in front of many artists who attended the \u201cEvent,\u201d the media, and law enforcement, I dressed in a black suit and tie with a gold screw tie-clip, [and] read the \u201cManifesto of the Screw.\u201d The Belltones, a Puerto Rican Trio from my neighborhood, also dressed in suits and ties, accompanied me by singing a cappella the \u201cSong of The Screw\u201d which I composed satirizing the conforming artistic \u201crules of the game.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n At the gathering, he awarded \u201cGolden Screw Awards\u201d \u2013 i.e., hardware screws dipped in gold paint \u2014 to museum officials as they entered the building.<\/p>\n In 1962, Tambellini, with Morea, Ron Hahne, Elsa Tambellini and Don Snyder, founded\u00a0Group Center that sought to\u00a0find new ways to display non-mainstream art.\u00a0\u00a0The group\u00a0organized a local, two-week arts festival in association with the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association at St. Mark\u2019s Church-in-the-Bowery and, in June 1963, an outdoor sculpture show.<\/p>\n Works by Group Center artists were shown at two galleries:\u00a0Quantum I,\u00a0in December \u201864 at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery (1078\u00a0Madison Avenue),\u00a0and Quantum II,\u00a0in January \u201865 at the\u00a0AM Sachs Gallery (29 West 57th\u00a0Street).\u00a0Morea turned to black paintings at the time of the Quantum shows.\u00a0The New\u00a0York Herald Tribune\u00a0reported,\u00a0\u201cBenn\u00a0Morea wants to show light emanating from darkness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Looking deeper, it\u00a0adds<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cHis \u2018V-Box, I-Boc\u2019 has two adjoining wall-hanging boxes painted black. Projecting cutout forms in the shape of circles, Vs, and bars jiggle electrically, revealing identical white forms behind. The mechanical device remains subordinate to the pictorial composition. He also shows two black floor boxes, about 30 inches square and one foot high. The top of each box is a black and white oil on paper, placed between two sheets of Lucite illuminated by a lightbulb inside.\u201d<\/p>\n Morea\u2019s paintings were strongly influenced by the work of both Tambellini and Jackson Pollock.<\/p>\n The scholar Nadja\u00a0Millner\u2013Larsen\u00a0argues<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0Tambellini, Morea and others developed\u00a0Black Zero, a live, mixed-media audiovisual collage that included contribution from jazz musicians (e.g., Bill Dixon), dancers (e.g., Judith Dunn) and writers (e.g., Ismael Reed), among others. It was to bea \u201ccommunity of the arts \u2026 [for] those vitally interested in the creative expression of man.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Going further, they declared:<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe that the artistic community has reached a new stage of development. In a mobile society, it is no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation. We feel the hunger of a society lost in its own vacuum and rise with an open, active commitment to forward a new spirit for mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n They exhibited at East Village sites, public spaces and traditional galleries.\u00a0Group Center condemned the commercialization of art as well as museums and galleries as elite institutions that separated the artist from ordinary people.<\/p>\n \u201cHis painting was very unusual,\u201d noted<\/a>\u00a0Bookchin. \u201cIt consisted of\u00a0vast panels\u00a0of black. Swirling nebulae. Completely black.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0By 1966, Morea sought out new ways to realize his artistic vision, most notably through direct interventions and the publication of a radical mimeographed broadside,\u00a0Black Mask.\u00a0\u00a0As the poet\u00a0Dan Georgakas\u00a0announced<\/a>,<\/p>\n \u201cPoetry comes out of the Barrel of a Gun,<\/p>\n \u201cCreative man does not entertain or shock the bourgeoisie. He destroys them!\u201d<\/p>\n The group Black Mask believed in turning radical theory into activist practice.\u00a0\u00a0On February 10, 1967, 25 masked men marched down Wall Street with\u00a0a sign reading, \u201cWALL ST. IS WAR STREET.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0In a handout, they\u00a0declared<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers\u2014but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead \u201cWE DID NOT KNOW.\u201d Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom. BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS! If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street\u2019s formula for the great society!\u201d<\/p>\n Noting their artistic backgrounds, they insisted:\u00a0\u201cWe are not abandoning the cultural front but rather showing the interrelatedness of the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, the group\u00a0essentially abandon conventional artistic expression and, increasingly, engaged in direct action.\u00a0\u00a0In October \u201967, they joined over\u00a0100,000 protesters at the March on the Pentagon expressing opposition to the Vietnam War.\u00a0\u00a0Morea and several others broke into the Pentagon and were beaten by U.S.\u00a0soldiers. \u201cIt didn\u2019t bring the world any closer to [betterment],\u201d Morea shrugs. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know if they would start shooting! They could have. We really thought they might.\u201d<\/p>\n The next month, the Associated Press reported, \u201cA riotous mob screaming \u2018Peace\u2019 battled police for control of Sixth Avenue tonight, as a violent anti-war demonstration against Secretary of State Dean Rusk spread half a mile along the busy midtown thorough-fare.\u201d\u00a0Rusk was in New York to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association, but Black Mask members\u00a0threw<\/a>\u00a0eggs, rocks and bags of cows\u2019 blood\u00a0at him as he slipped into the hotel unscathed.<\/p>\n In January \u201868, the group staged a mock-assassination of the poet Kenneth Koch at a poetry reading on St. Marks Place. \u201cKoch was a symbol to us of this totally bourgeois, dandy world,\u201d\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0Morea. \u201cWe were determined to be outrageous in order to force people to decide where they stood on things.\u201d An accompanying flyer made these views more explicit, charging, \u201c[The] act was more poetic than anything Mr. Koch or his like could have read\u2026 We must use the poetic act to destroy poetry (as object\/spectacle).\u201d<\/p>\n In February, during the city\u2019s garbage strike, Black Mask collected uncollected trash from the Lower East Side and dumped it into the fountains of Lincoln Center. In an accompanying leaflet, they proclaimed: \u201cWE PROPOSE A CULTURAL EXCHANGE \u2026 garbage for garbage.\u201d They held the demonstration the night of the opening of \u201cbourgeois cultural event\u201d and the\u00a0episode<\/a>\u00a0was documented in\u00a0Garbage, a 16-mm black-&-white film produced by Newsreel, a filmmaking collective founded in New York in 1967.<\/p>\n In the wake of the Paris uprising of May \u201968, Black Mask morphed into Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (aka UAW\/MF), a name appropriated from Amiri Baraka\u2019s (aka LeRoy Jones) poem,\u00a0Black People, which in turn refers to a repeatedly shouted command by the Newark, NJ, police at Black residents.<\/p>\n The Motherfuckers grew more aggressive in pushing their political demands.\u00a0\u00a0Two episodes at the Fillmore East concert hall are most illustrative.\u00a0\u00a0They forced the hall\u2019s promoter Bill Graham, to let them use the hall for \u201cCommunity Nights\u201d on Wednesdays.\u00a0\u00a0But the\u00a0free concerts<\/a>\u00a0were short-lived.\u00a0\u00a0On December 18, 1968, at an\u00a0MC5 show,\u00a0a\u00a0disagreement between the Motherfuckers and Graham led to a standoff, with Graham standing at the front of the theater holding the Motherfuckers off.\u00a0\u00a0A fist fight broke out and one of the Motherfuckers smashed Graham with a chain, breaking his nose.<\/p>\n The radical anti-arts movement reached its worst moment when, on June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, the author of\u00a0S.C.U.M. Manifesto\u2013an acronym for The Society for Cutting Up Men\u2013\u00a0and the play,\u00a0Up Your Ass, walked into Warhol\u2019s Union Square offices of The Factory with two guns and\u00a0shot<\/a> him three times; she also shot Mario Amaya, a visiting London gallery owner.\u00a0\u00a0After fleeing the building, she turned herself in to the police.\u00a0\u00a0The shooting\u00a0caused great controversy\u00a0and split the emerging second-wave feminist movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n Morea later discussed<\/a>\u00a0this incident, noting, \u201cValerie came up there [at Columbia University] and found me and asked \u2018What would happen if I shot somebody?\u2019 I said \u2018It depends on two things \u2013 who you shoot and whether they die or not.\u2019 A week later she shot Andy Warhol.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He then elaborated:<\/p>\n \u201cAfter she shot him I wrote a pamphlet supporting her. I may have been the only person who did that publicly. I went up to MOMA and handed it out there. Everybody I met was very negative about it, but, hey, I disliked Andy Warhol immensely and I loved Valerie. I felt she was right in her anger and that he was way more destructive than she was because he was helping to destroy the whole idea of creativity in art.\u201d<\/p>\n Millner\u2013Larsen reframes the incident, arguing that Solanas\u2019s act implemented the Motherfucker\u2019s\u00a0notion of \u201c\u2019ARMED LOVE.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0To the\u00a0Motherfucker\u2019s, the shooting was symptomatic, not of a mental break, but of a desperation borne from the restricted economy of a patriarchal art world that systematically denied access to the \u2018wretched of the earth.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n By the late \u201860s, the Motherfuckers morphed into the International Werewolf Conspiracy and then the Family.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWe weren\u2019t really hippies or politicos,\u201d Morea\u00a0reflected<\/a>. \u201cWe were separate from other groups even though we were part of the wider counterculture. Some people would have placed us as hippies. \u2026 We also took a lot of LSD. Even though we were also radicals no one would have mixed us up with the Young Communist League. (laughter)\u201d. Morea was under constant government surveillance and faced increasing legal troubles.\u00a0\u00a0During this period, he was drawn to Native American imagery, championed the notion the native \u201cwarrior\u201d and rejected the pacifism promoted by Abbie Hoffman and much of the New Left. Morea believed in, when appropriate, armed struggle. In \u201969, he split from New York to the Southwest.<\/p>\n In 1964 and 196, Morea\u2019s works appeared with those of Ad Reinhardt and Louise Nevelson, as well as of Louise Bourgeois and Meredith Monk in New York gallery shows.\u00a0\u00a0In a 2016 review of his works at the White Column gallery in Chelsey, the Times\u00a0quoted<\/a>\u00a0him, \u201cI always painted in a semi-trance.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Adding, \u201cI just feel like I was able to tap into something powerful, an understanding that we were a speck in the universe.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He went on to state: \u201cI consider Pop Art capitalist realism and I detest it the same way most aesthetically minded people detest socialist realism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Morea at the International Anti-Authoritarian Meetings of 2023 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Photograph Source: Antochkat \u2013 CC BY-SA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-452108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}