Up Against the Real

"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 *
"[Addresses] the highly understudied area of guerilla, legally risky, and often iconoclastic art practices in the US during the latter half of the twentieth century. [Its] release could hardly be more timely. . . . Up Against the Real, focused on one group and its milieu, takes us through a chronological biography of the group from roughly 1962–1969, its debates and transformations, with contextual sidesteps to discuss other related work, such as that of Group Center or Valerie Solanos (something expanding from UATWMF’s work, exploring the work of underground comic-book artist Spain waits to be written). Meanwhile, the narrative orients readers with nods forward to resonances into the present as well as back to their surrealist and dadaist forebearers. . . . highly attentive not just to gaps and complexities in the historical narrative, but to the risks and complexities for the institutional spaces of art history and museums in recording and discussing this work, and, even more importantly, what all this might mean for future generations of militant and guerilla artists." * Art History *
"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 *
"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 *
"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 *
“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