Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 13: Up Against the Real with Nadja Millner-Larsen
For this episode we talk with Nadja Millner-Larsen about her book Up Against the Real Black Mask from Art to Action.
“With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar 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 it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “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.”
Bio: Nadja Millner-Larsen is visiting assistant professor in the Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York University.
Opening / outro music: Refused, “Poetry Written in Gasoline” (from The New Noise Theology)
