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Wallace Berman
Wallace Berman, 1926-1976
Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was a visionary Beat Generation artist whose body of work encompassed
assemblage, photography, film, collage, drawing, sculpture, poetry, and mail art. Born on Staten Island, Berman moved with his family to Los Angeles during the 1930’s. In the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights and the Fairfax district, the decorative shapes of Hebrew letters on storefront windows and in Yiddish-language
newspapers fascinated Berman. According to historian Richard Cándida Smith, “Berman’s interest in the Hebrew alphabet and its functions in Jewish mysticism was part of an effort to reclaim his ethnic identity.” (Smith, 222)
Berman’s combinations of Hebrew letters reflected a general interest among the Beats in Kabbalah and other occult practices. In his poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg coined the term “bop Kabbalah” as a way of reclaiming Jewish mysticism for a new generation of cool hipsters. According to poet and artist Jack Hirschman, “The poets and painters interested in Kabbalah at the time felt it as the poetic Left of Judaism that was moving more and more to the Right in embracing Zionism. Kabbalah also provided an opening into Black culture (the letter-permutations seen as a kind of verbal jazz improvisation.)”
www.leftcurve.org/LC25WebPages/
JackIntr.html
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Wallace Berman (American, 1926-1976)
Untitled, (1972)
Stone, wood, paint, Plexiglas, and screws
9 3/4 x 13 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. (24.8 x 34.3 x 16.5 cm.)
Purchase: Joshua Lowenfish Bequest
1987-109a-vvv
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York
Poet David Meltzer, a friend of Berman's, wrote that the Spanish Kabbalist Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia advocated the necessity of moving from one impression to another--the “jump-cut” approach to study. "What Abulafia taught is not unlike what the artist learns and knows in moments around and within acts of creation. Allowing the mind to 'skip' and 'jump' aids in untying knots, opens new planes of perception, a new page, new spheres of possibility…By introducing the Hebrew alphabet into his art, Wallace began to create a body of work blessed, at first, by an intuitive Kabbalah. The Kabbalist isolates himself from Kabbalah in order to enter it as if entering Eden, clear, unattached to systems. The Kabbalist exiles himself from Kabbalah in order to create it
again." (Wallace Berman Retrospective, Otis Art Institute: 1978, pp. 97-100)
Berman edited and published Semina (1955-1964), a scrapbook folio that the artist distributed in limited editions to friends and colleagues. Semina featured poetry, photographs, and drawings printed on cards, intended to be shuffled in different combinations like a tarot deck. His film Aleph (1955-1956) is a meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop, Berman uses Hebrew letters to
frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created with a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. Berman’s Verifax collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for the reception and dissemination of knowledge,
enlightenment, and divinity.
Wallace Berman (American, 1926-1976)
Detail from Silent, 1967-1969
Verifax on paper Sheet and image: 48 x 48 3/4 in. (121.9 x 123.8 cm.)
Purchase: Mr. and Mrs. George Jaffin Fund, Lucy and Henry Moses Fund, and the Fine Arts Acquisitions Committee Fund; Partial Gift of Timothea Stewart 2003-25
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York
Readings:
Glicksman, Hal. Wallace Berman Retrospective, Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art/Otis Art Institute, 1978.
Phillips, Lisa, ed. Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995.
Smith, Richard Cándida. Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
Tuchman, Morris, ed. Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981.
Wallace Berman: Verifax Collages. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1968.
Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution. Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1993.
Links:
www.beatmuseum.org/berman/wallaceberman.html
www.verdantpress.com/berman.html
www.blastitude.com/13/Eternity/wallace_berman.htm
Film distribution for Aleph:
www.lux.org.uk
www.canyoncinema.com
http://hdl.handle.net/1964/469
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