Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask.

With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers a novel view of anti-art in the 1960s. This is the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and their acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the time. Now cited as originators of many protest aesthetics common today, Black Mask employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. The group shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blank shots during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon during an anti-war protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the Secretary of State, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968 when the group changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after a poem by Amiri Baraka) and took up the identity of a street gang with analysis. American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as the middle-class nightmare … an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.

Up Against the Real examines Black Mask’s entanglement with postwar art practices, unearthing their story to examine how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what they deemed real political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that arose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.