The Beat Goes On
Wallace Berman Lives on in an NYU Exhibition
With Terrence Koh regularly coming for $100,000, the thumbed-over collages and Hebrew woodcuts of Beat poet and Conceptual artist Wallace Berman might seem precious. But in 1957, the Los Angeles Police Department raided Berman’s first solo exhibition for the alleged pornography in the first issue of his magazine, Semina. Berman vowed revenge, moved to San Francisco and never again exhibited in a private gallery.
Unlike the doomed Lenny Bruce, Berman’s work only intensified. Returning with his wife to Topanga Canyon , northwest of Los Angeles, Berman attracted a collection of Beat artists and celebrities. His work grew until his untimely death in an auto accident, in 1976
Before 1992, when the Amsterdam institute of Contemporary Art put out its book, Wallace Berman, Support the Revolution, little was known about him: hius hand-made work had disintegrated, or was disregarded.
“I look at him as one of those freaky, marginal west-coast artists,” said Carlo McCormick, Senior Editor of Paper Magazine and frequent Artforum contributor. “Everything that happened in LA took a long time to get to the East Coast,” explained McCormick. The work of eclectic mixed media artists like Berman, he explained, was “buried by Minimalism.” However, with a shift toward ephemerality and collage in the contemporary art garde, and the validaton of Los Angeles as an art world hub, Berman is once again risen. In recognition of the change, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle”, which first opened in Los Angeles, curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, opened at NYU’s Grey Gallery last Thursday.
The exhibition presents a network of sculptures, drawings, paintings and collages, grouped by artist and linked by the (often magnificent) photographs taken by Berman himself. Though the sequencing presents a perhaps over-simplified conception of the artists’ interaction and inter-dependence, it delicately undertakes the task of unearthing overlooked artists including Loree Foxx and Joan Brown.
Berman and his friends put together the magazine, and each subscriber was personally chosen. In a 1992 interview, Beat poet Michael McClure explained, “Seminas are a form of love structure that Wallace made, drawing friends together.”
Recent years have seen an explosion in independent publishing, in the form of low-distribution art and lifestyle magazines. The canon was explored in the recently closed “Megazines” exhibit at the Visionaire Gallery, where viewers could view and purchase rare copies of some of the world’s most influential independent magazines.
Co-curator of “Megazines” Scott Meriam was unaware of Berman’s work entirely. His exhibition (co-curated with Kyra Griffin and Dominic Sidhu), tracked independent publishing to the surrealist art journals that opened in the 1920s.
The exhibition traced the development of magazines through downtown New York, noting the complex network of influences and paying dues to Andy Warhol’s Interview and Ralph Ginsberg’s Avant-Garde. Meriam noted specifically the way in which contemporary magazines like Fantastic Man or Purple subtly quote a 1930s men’s magazine Bachelor or old editions of Interview.
The exhibition featured those magazines that left “an indelible impression on publishing,” in the words of Meriam, rather than “the ones that sort of fester in their own world, because it doesn’t matter if you’re just sitting in nowhere.”
“It’s hard to say who Berman is informing, because everyone is looking at everyone,” said McCormick. Just as young publishers are looking at old editions, Los Angeles is being re-examined because of a generation of strong visual artists looking at their history. The influence of Berman is clear also in sculptors like recently-popular George Herms (also featured here).
And the politics of Semina were both unmistakeable and influential: “It’s un-American,” said McClure, it’s against “the Korean War, the grey flannel suits.” Berman’s Semina, McClure concluded, “wasn’t a secular publication. It was a magazine of the spirit.”