A fixture of the Lower East Side’s ’60s art scene, he had an abiding interest in black. “‘Black,’” he wrote, “is not the opposite of white; it is a state of being.”
Aldo Tambellini, a sculptor turned avant-garde filmmaker, pioneer video artist and veteran practitioner of multimedia installations, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 90.
Anna Salamone, his partner and only immediate survivor, said he had died of complications following surgery at Spaulding Hospital.
Mr. Tambellini was notable for his community-based sense of cultural production, particularly during his years as an artist-activist on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was even more famous for his career-long interest in the color (or noncolor) black.
“It is striking that one of the true pioneers of video has seemed to base his entire production on a rejection of the centrality of light,” a critic observed in the magazine Artforum on the occasion of Mr. Tambellini’s 2012 retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. But for Mr. Tambellini, black was something more illuminating than the absence of light.
by J. Hoberman
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(2020-11-13)
www.nytimes.com

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