DESTROY THE MUSEUMS. OUR STRUGGLE CANNOT BE HUNG ON WALLS. A NEW SPIRIT IS
RISING. LIKE THE STREETS OF WATTS WE BURN WITH REVOLUTION… October 10, 1966.
A handful of young guys and girls, having stalked up from New York’s Lower East Side scattering leaflets calling for the closure of the Museum of Modern Art, are stopped Just outside the Museum entrance by a whole phalanx of cops and crashbarriers. The story had leaked, and the cops, on the ball as ever, had sensed a new and very real type of threat months before anyone else: the cops at least have got it clear Just whose side Art Is on… The Director of the Museum (largest collection of Dada in the world) out on the steps, wringing his hands, almost in tears, only too anxious to please: “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done anything…” The group, unheard of before this, called BLACK MASK… Next, early one morning, black balaclava hoods pulled down to their eyes, cracked rictus skulls skewered on stakes, BLACK MASK, swollen to 15, marched from Canal Street down Lower Broadway to Wall Street. Throwaways reading Traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers… Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange at death… WALL STREET IS WAR STREET… The cops and the overdressed corporation errandboys plain dumbfounded; the only people to get really uptight were, predictably enough, alas, a group of straight proles who showed up… A relative flop, all in all. Too much sub-Committee of 100 stuff – Grosvenor Square = Genocide Square, etc. In fact all BLACK MASK’s early experiments with Provo-type tactics were far more trenchant and original when applied to the culture scene. It was official ‘experimental’ art rather than official leftwing politics that they’d broken out of. And they loathed its guts…
From Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker
–MLA
Filed under: Everything's Political, Black Mask, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker
