Up Against the Real maps an expansive history of Black Mask, a group of anarchist anti-artists who emerged from the worlds of late modernist painting and experimental cinema to advocate direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. Through extensive archival research, Millner-Larsen traces Black Mask’s encounters with abstract expressionism, expanded cinema, guerilla theater, collective filmmaking, and avant-garde poetics. Following the group’s parallel engagements with the major political tendencies of the time – the Black freedom struggle, the student movement, the global movement for decolonization, anarchist theory, and the beginnings of radical feminism – Millner-Larsen asks how and why Black Mask rejected art in favor of “real” political action. While Up Against the Real uncovers an alternative history of 1960s cultural politics, it also mines the story of Black Mask to launch a broader critical inquiry into the relationship between experimental artmaking and antiauthoritarian politics in the age of the New Left.

Nadja Millner-Larsen writes about modern and contemporary art, feminist and queer media history, and the aesthetic registers of antiauthoritarian politics. Her writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Art Monthly, Triple Canopy and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She is also co-editor of The Queer Commons, a special issue of GLQ. Nadja has taught at NYU’s program in Experimental Humanities, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and, from 2014-2018, was a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s, University of London. She was a Helena Rubenstein fellow in critical studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and NYU’s Center for the Humanities. She received her PhD from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.