From the outset, Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action mobilizes categories tied to 20th-century avant-gardism, populating the siege against the division between art and life with a wide array of radical characters and groups from heterogeneous backgrounds. As Millner-Larsen suggests, what most of them have in common is a “minor” status in the histories of the avant-garde after 1945 (14–15), but whose practices and redefinitions of the social role of art point to crucial contacts and thresholds between aesthetics and politics often not found in the discussions surrounding the “major” avant-gardes of the period, such as the Situationist International (SI). The book weaves together an interesting set of strands related to the politics of Black Mask’s self-historicizing as a group that transitions from artistic to political activity and develops lines of common inquiry for 1960s vanguards, in which the exact relationship between art and politics must not only be thoroughly and incisively explored in intellectual terms but also materialized. The context itself—international student and worker movements, the emergence of a New Left, the formation of youth countercultures—was crossed by questions about the political nature of social activities beyond conventional understandings of it as governance. Inheritors of specific political traditions, the new leftists of that decade organized around reinterpretations of old issues, such as the relationship between theory and praxis, and the implied “political priority of the latter” (Wainwright, “Praxis,” Rethinking Marxism, 2022, 41). However, another important issue was the actuality of the concept of the proletariat, upon which many new leftist debates hinged, resulting in new subjects for Marxist philosophy of history (the student, the lumpenproletariat, the Third World . . . ) and tense defenses of older types of class analysis under new lights (such as the SI’s “On the Poverty of Student Life”). As Millner-Larsen reveals, Black Mask and its revolutionary avant-garde milieu participated in these reframings and reformulations from the position of art that evolved into activism.

Through an excellent and exhaustive use of primary sources, Millner-Larsen locates the collective in a network of radical and radicalized agents belonging to the fields of culture, the arts, politics, and student and worker movements in New York City, the United States more broadly, and even internationally. In this sense, she greatly advances the research agendas of scholars like Gavin Grindon, Conor Hannan, Breanne Fahs, Abigail Susik, and me. As part of the ultraleft of the New Left, Black Mask and its various group transformations (particularly Up Against the Wall Motherfucker [UAWMF]) exemplify the framework of the theory and praxis debate or the discussions around new (Marxist) subjects of history that characterized the political context. However, they were realized by collectives at the margins of the art world—and through the languages of art and literature, not just political philosophy. For instance, the transition from representation to anti-representation (from art to “the real”), which structures the book, is an aesthetic recreation of the question of theory and praxis. However, the avant-garde conflation of art and politics, in which artistic actions potentially double as direct actions upon society, often depends on the presupposition of the separation between art and other social practices as defined by territories of the art world. This creates an analytic tension throughout the book that begins in the very introduction, where the author claims that Black Mask’s concerns with the aforementioned topics, characterized by ultraleft vanguard aesthetics, turns it into a “somewhat anomalous” set of practices “within New Left narratives” (12–13). Nonetheless, both the primacy of practical activity as revolutionary where theory is not (Wainwright, 2022, 42) and the formulation of a countercultural subject of history (the “new proletariat” of a lumpenized class) (52–53) align the group’s discourse with that of new leftists at large. They even fit in Herbert Marcuse’s conceptualization, contemporaneous to Black Mask and derided by its members, in which the New Left materializes in diffuse organizations and small, autonomous groups dedicated to local activities, which also take seriously the actuality of the working class (Marcuse, “On the New Left,” Routledge, 2005, 125–26).

The tension is continually reaffirmed by Millner-Larsen’s wide, panoramic approach to the history of these groups. In a way, the book is best read less as a history of Black Mask and UAWMF and more as a history of ultraleft US avant-gardes of the 1960s. While centered on these two collectives, the monograph offers a deep and rich exploration of myriad “minor” vanguards, from Group Center, which directly informed their practices, to other contacts like Murray Bookchin’s network, the US section of the SI, film-making group The Newsreel, Henry Flynt, Robert Williams, the Living Theatre, Umbra, and of course, Valerie Solanas, to whom the last chapter of the book is dedicated. While a provocative analysis of 1960s radical feminism and the uses of violence across the New Left and its ultraleft currents, the chapter does feel distant from the main subject matter, which across the book ends up feeling stretched somewhat thin. While in the background the question remains about aesthetics and politics, representation and anti-representation, the book explores so many avenues that it actually offers an equally wide set of responses, many of which clearly relate to Black Mask and UAWMF but some of which move beyond them.

Considered from this perspective, the maintenance of the distinction between aesthetic and political activity—which many of the 1960s avant-gardes articulated and dissolved around, with one of the best-known instances being the 1962 expulsion of “the artists” by the SI from its organization—creates a productive set of problems throughout the text. They begin with the issue of Black Mask and UAWMF’s relations to the New Left and continue with the ample network of historical agents that maintain the same, similar, or even distinct positions regarding the same questions. Millner-Larsen makes the case for these groups’ particular use of anticolonial theory, emphasizing the role of the writings of Frantz Fanon, some of which were translated into English for the first time during that decade. The argument is convincing when it comes to the use of anticolonialism by the 1960s ultraleft at large, but the evidence of Black Mask and UAWMF’s integration of early decolonial theory would have benefited from further explanation. Indeed, not only was Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks first translated and published in the US in 1967, at least a year after Black Mask was formed as a collective; perhaps just as importantly, most references to Fanon also depend on one of the key figures in this history, founder Ben Morea, and not on the collective as such. According to the book, by becoming UAWMF, the group had transitioned fully to an anti-representational and thus fully political activity, which meant that its use of Native American imagery and the language of anticolonial struggles seem to fruitfully coincide, albeit in problematic ways. While the author very carefully points out these problems, she does not always explain them. The issue here is that Black Mask and UAWMF conceive of anticolonialism in aesthetic terms, with political implications deriving from it; like other avant-gardes before them, primitivism and a certain fetishism of the “barbaric other” fulfill a very specific function for a context in which the anticolonial struggle is not national in nature. Among these groups, the most meaningful filter for Fanon’s texts was perhaps the Black vanguard (such as the Black Panther Party or Amiri Baraka) that inspired even the name UAWMF, and whose indirectness perhaps resulted in UAWMF developing their perspective from a primitivist position instead of a better-informed one. The book’s chapter on Solanas suffers from the same issue, albeit in an inverted manner: while it proposes that the radical feminist milieu to which she belonged developed an anticolonial critique, the text would have benefited from more precise elaboration of the connections between Solanas herself and Fanon’s works.