Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle (D.A.P./Santa Monica Museum of Art) Essays by Michael Duncan, Kristine McKenna and Stephen Fredman
Valery Oisteanu
Wallace Berman is a legend of a West Coast counterculture that bloomed during the Beat Generation, although the full extent of his contribution to art and literature has yet to be fully reckoned. He was a magnet and a catalyst for many other artists of his generation. Living on top of Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles, he attracted colleagues and friends such as Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Henry Miller and Andy Warhol, among others. That community is the subject of a traveling exhibition organized for the Santa Monica Museum of Art by co-curators Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna.
Semina, Berman’s handcrafted journal (1955 to 1964) is featured in the show, along with his original works and the contributions of over 50 other artists and poets. For more than seven years, the curators conducted research into the period and the people in Berman’s orbit, and the result is this selection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, writings and artifacts, as well as photographic portraits from Berman’s personal archives printed from negatives for the first time. The show will travel to Utah, Kansas, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Pacific Film Archive in California, and ultimately to the Grey Art Gallery in New York. Wallace Berman is obviously an under-appreciated figure. He communicated a dark spirituality of American culture through his collages and assemblages. Semina is an iconic document of its time, providing a space for some of the most innovative talents of the 50s and the 60s.
The early Beat Movement was ephemeral, theatrical and fervent, infused with lyricism and nostalgia, venturing into abstract expressionism, minimalism and neo-surrealism. Although based in California, Berman had significant connections to the East Coast artists and poets such as Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Jack Smith, Taylor Meade and others from Andy Warhol’s factory. His oracular artwork featured Jewish hermetic symbols, images referring to jazz music and Kabbalah. A conviction on charges of public obscenity for his 1957 exhibition at Ferris Gallery alienated Berman from exhibiting his work in galleries again. As he put it, he preferred to "swing in the shadows." Finally, in the 1960s, he came into the light and stepped up his creation of what have become his best-known works, his enigmatic collages of newspaper and magazine images made with an early photocopying machine. By now, other artists were attracted to his circle, among them: Jay DeFeo, Jack Hirschman, John Reed, and magical collagist Jess. Although, at that time, they made their works for each other without a thought to commercial audience, today their art seems prophetic.
Berman never directly stated his intention behind Semina, and only nine issues were produced, providing a context for new writers such as Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi and David Meltzer. Despite its extremely limited distribution, the journal became an underground legend. According to his wife, Shirley Berman, Wallace began Semina because "he loved poetry so much. We spent a lot of time reading poetry," she recalls, insisting that it was a more important source of inspiration than any other form he adored, including music and film. His work process was to read all the new, young poets: Phillip Lamantia, John Wieners, Bob Kaufman, Robert Alexander, Ray Bremser and Kirby Doyle. As his wife attests, Berman was really more involved with surrealist poetry than he was with artists. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Cocteau and Artaud were favorites. The texts that Artaud wrote in Mexico, where he trekked for the purpose of ingesting peyote with the Tarahumara Indians (1936), contains one of the first modern depictions of psychedelic experiences. In 1958, McClure took the opportunity to turn his own body into a psychedelic experiment when Berman left five peyote buttons at his apartment. The morning after, McClure wrote "Peyote Poem," which Berman printed as the sole content of Semina 3, with a cover photo of two peyote buttons.
In another poem from the journal, Kirby Doyle imitates Artaud’s initiation. He writes:
I Mexico After Artaud
Stricken by my unconscious impotence
Dizzy from intelligent spells of madness
Revealing the same thoughts
I fall into Nature already prepared
………………………………
And I know there is a rage concealed
Behind my mouth, beneath my lips, on my eyes.
The artist of survival asks how to shape survival and in what art to survive?
It is easy to conclude that Berman, who grew up in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, where Hebrew lettering was prominent in the windows of Jewish shops and in the Yiddish newspaper, picked up collage-visuals from this gestalt. His depiction of Hebrew letters slightly burned on photographs, assemblages, on parchment and even upon stones is fraught with suffering and betokening the disappearance of the Jewish culture in Europe as well as the promise of a new redemption. There is a unique fusion of vulnerability and toughness in Wallace Berman. By combining opposing qualities, he achieved a fusion of his life and art, so tightly that they became inseparable. His greatest influence derives not from the specific artifacts that he created, but from who he was, what he thought and how he inspired creativity in others by his example. He evolved into a kind of shamanic figure. He united art and occult and helped to affect the transition from Beat Culture to that of the Hippies. The book-catalog, written and compiled by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, is an invaluable resource for students of that particular time and the seminal culture of the 50s and 60s.
