Black Energy, White Noise: ArtsCanada’s 1967 Roundtable and the Blackness of Electromedia

Arts/Canada’s 1967 “Black” roundtable was riven, Fred Moten has argued, by a fundamental incommensurability. For the musician-poet Cecil Taylor, the only African American participant, blackness denoted “black energy”, a “way of life” manifested in black art, language, and dance. For the arch-modernist Ad Reinhardt, however, such meanings were suppressed in favor of blackness’s fundamentally aesthetic character.

Yet these irreconcilable positions were mediated by a third, which turned on the question of technology. In the roundtable and a subsequent issue of Arts/Canada, electromedia artist Aldo Tambellini argued that we live in an “Atomic Space Age”, “a world of matter, of non-physical forces, of energy”. Indeed, reflecting the media-centric practices of Toronto at the time, these forces were an explicit premise of the roundtable, which linked Toronto and New York thanks to the collaboration of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Bell Telephones. The role of the artist, according to Tambellini, was to facilitate humanity’s acclimatization to this new electronic environment. Blackness, Tambellini argued, was the fundamental human condition in which such electronic transformation could occur. Here, the sociality of Taylor’s “black energy” was not excluded (like Reinhardt), but rather refigured as a power-source to fuel a new universal condition of electronic becoming.

In discussing the ideas of Reinhardt, Taylor and Tambellini, this paper will argue that the 1967 Arts/Canada roundtable marked a crucial switching-point in 1960s art and politics, between the language of modernist aesthetics, the practices and politics of African American experimental practices, and the technological imaginings of an emergent Information Age.