Aldo Tambellini’s The Day Before the Moon Landing (1969)
The Day Before the Moon Landing (1969) is the first in a series of videos made by Aldo Tambellini to capture broadcast television as it was experienced live. It was available to view through February 23rd, accompanied by a new text by Rebecca Cleman.
Aldo Tambellini, The Day Before the Moon Landing
1969, 47:08 min, black & white
Program one of TV About TV.
The viewing period for this work has ended.
The 1960s marked the ascendancy of the television set as a pervasive living room fixture, and the decade’s end marked a catalytic time for a vanguard of artists experimenting with television technology. Just months ahead of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and a few blocks away from where Walter Cronkite would conduct his live broadcast of that historic event, the first art exhibition in the US devoted to television was held at the Howard Wise Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan. Among the eleven projects exhibited in TV as a Creative Medium was Aldo Tambellini’s Black Spiral (1969), an augmented TV that bent its broadcast signal into a spiral abstraction, blazing like a celestial pattern.
Tambellini was a major figure in the New York intermedia arts scene, emblematic of the type of multidisciplinary, unclassifiable artist that inspired Wise to close his commercial gallery and found Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in 1971. One of the first artists to work with video and television, Tambellini was a visionary in a movement that sought to make socially beneficial and accessible art that emphasized communication and participation. Beginning around 1967, he embarked on a series of projects that rigorously experimented with the form and function of TV, exploiting the unique features of the technology including its capacity to broadcast, display, and feedback information.
Television was central for Tambellini not only because it was a major cultural signifier, but because of the new communication tools it offered. Black Gate Cologne (1968), a collaboration with Otto Piene, was the first participatory television art event, an intermedia performance that engaged a live audience, gathered in the studio of a German public broadcasting station, in a mesmerizing orchestration of light, image, and sound effects. The performance included a spectacle of American television, projected from film: Muhammad Ali sparring (he was barred from the ring that year for conscientiously objecting the Vietnam War); Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination; street scenes accompanied by a recording of Calvin Hernton’s poem “Jitterbugging in the Streets,” a forceful indictment of systemic racism.
The dynamic energy and volatile political and cultural climate of the ’60s resonated across Tambellini’s projects. Within a short span he also produced Black (1969), a multi-media studio event for WGBH in Boston that amplified Black identity, and Black TV (1964-68), an expanded-cinema film exploring the phenomenological experience of television. Quoted in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Tambellini remarked: “Black TV is about the future, the contemporary American, the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and the expansion of the senses. The act of communication and the experience is the essential.”
Electromedia portrait of Aldo Tambellini at The Black Gate Theater, New York, 1967. Photo: Richard Raderman. Courtesy of the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. Image description: Tambellini stands in the theater, surrounded by projected spirals; a close-up of his face is super-imposed.
The Day Before the Moon Landing (1969) is the first in a series of videos Tambellini made to capture broadcast television as it was experienced live. Unlike more involved works such as Black TV, the video simply records Tambellini channel surfing between the networks on July 19, 1969, the day before Apollo 11 landed. And yet, this relatively raw document is remarkable. Recorded very early on in the emergence of home video, when the mere act of being able to capture broadcast television was a marvel, the footage might not otherwise exist today, as major television networks were not yet in the habit of archiving their content. Tambellini corralled the transmission and transformed it into an improvised performance, ultimately structuring a visual poem about the quotidian context of an otherworldly event.
Fleeting glimpses of Apollo 11’s live video feed of the lunar surface (“the clearest pictures yet of its bleak and desolate body,” chimes a broadcaster) are nearly engulfed by competing scenes of marauding motorcycle gangs in The Wild One (1953), a monster destroying a city in an Atomic-era “creature feature,” advertisements for personal products, and an investigative report on sex in cinema. Slivers of ethereal space footage surrounded by the cultural tropes of commercial television and mainstream America offer a striking disparity. Watching this footage in the throes of a pandemic, we are again reminded of the contrast between the expansiveness of the universe and the vulnerability of our small world.
Aldo Tambellini manipulating images of Black Video 2 at The Black Gate Theatre, New York, 1967. Photo: Richard Raderman. Courtesy Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. Image description: A shirtless Tambellini demonstrates for an audience his Black Video 2 sculpture, manipulating a bank of four stacked monitors and other equipment.
Tambellini was born in Syracuse, New York in 1930 but spent his early life in Italy, where he narrowly survived a bombing during World War II. He returned to the United States and ultimately settled in New York City in 1959, where he became involved with several of the most important postwar art groups and alternative spaces, including the Black Gate Theater, which he co-founded with Otto Piene in the East Village. During this time, Tambellini pursued intermedia art, especially video, as an alternative to the art establishment, excited by new modes of production and display that resisted institutionalization. Boundlessly creative, Tambellini moved fluidly between poetry, sculpture, the moving image, and painting, and when he died in 2020 at the age of 90, he was at work on a new virtual reality project. An anarchist and pacifist, all of Tambellini’s activities were driven by a sincere concern for humanity, especially for those who suffer under systems of oppression. Blackness, in both its racial and aesthetic connotations, was a major theme throughout his career, drawing on the Black Power Movement, Space Age iconography, and his own metaphysical associations. In black he saw the “expansion of consciousness in all directions,” and in Black Power he saw the welcome destruction of “the old notion of western man, and by destroying that notion it also destroys the tradition of the art concept.”
Rebecca Cleman is the Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.