Berman’s Family Album

“My father would be unhappy if his work were seen by some stranger in a news medium,” Tosh Berman says of his father, the late artist Wallace Berman. “He had a total mistrust of journalism.”Wallace Berman (1926–76) never agreed to a published interview. His son, himself a poet and translator, recalled an instance in which Berman completed an interview with journalist Al Aronowitz for a series on the “Beats.” Unhappy with the experience, Berman kidnapped Aronowitz and destroyed the tapes, which also included an interview with Jack Kerouac, among others. True to his nature, however, Berman would go on to become close friends with Aronowitz.Berman never spoke about his work, which is one reason it’s come to be shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. Although he is regularly included in anthologies on California artists and was canonized (albeit rather lackadaisically) in Krauss-Foster-Buchloh-Bois’s “Art Since 1900,” to this date only three major books have been published on him. The first, “Support the Revolution,” is out of print; the second, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle” (DAP/Santa Monica Museum of Art), accompanies an exhibition that traveled to NYU’s Grey Art Gallery last year. The third, “Wallace Berman: Photographs” (DAP/RoseGallery), was released in May, and launched this week at Brooklyn’s Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers.For a variety of reasons, Berman scholarship has until recently stalled. He spent most of his life in California (and hated to travel), so geographically he was out of step with the traditional art historical narrative. His works — tactile, fragile, and often small in scale, (which made them impossible to preserve) — couldn’t have been further from the prevailing abstract expressionism of the era.Berman exhibited publicly only once, in 1957, at the Ferus Gallery, which was run by his peers Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps. The exhibition was busted by the Los Angeles vice squad for a sexually explicit drawing by the artist Cameron. When the verdict was announced, Berman is reputed to have said, “There is no justice; there is just revenge.” It was a turning point for the artist, who fled temporarily for San Francisco. With rare exception, Berman only exhibited in his home, for a day at a time, from then on.Kristine McKenna, who co-curated the “Semina Culture” exhibition with Michael Duncan, has compiled this most recent book of photographs and authored its introduction. She recovered the negatives from a box in the house of Berman’s widow, Shirley.Berman began taking pictures in the early 1950s, but he never showed them, except during two one-day exhibitions in his house. The photographs, primarily portraits of his friends and family, and renderings of his homes, document the circumstances in which he lived. Berman scholarship makes much of his ability to bring people together, and indeed this book includes portraits of Teri Garr, George Herms, Gerard Malanga, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Henry Miller, and Jack Smith. The photographs disclose a self-consciously bohemian family, more or less on the fringe. Despite his resentment for the negative connotations of the word Beatnik, Berman could be called something of a prototype. Born in 1926 in Staten Island, he and most of his crew transplanted to the West. Few of his friends survived him (he died at 50, hit by a drunk driver); fewer managed to avoid prolonged drug habits. A disproportionate number were child stars, and everyone was looking for a guru — a role that Berman seemed to have quietly taken up.Unquestionably, Berman had the ability to put his sitters at ease, as he was known to do in social circumstances. The subtly posed faces in “Wallace Berman: Photographs” are full of vulnerability, fragility, and youth. For Berman, the formal was personal.Michael McClure has coined the term “love structure” to define Berman’s most famous works, “Semina.” Between 1955 and 1964, Berman produced nine volumes of the makeshift publication, which included clipped mailings and the collages, drawings, and poetry of his friends and mentors. His mailed works were “an assemblage of meaningful materials,” Mr. McClure said in a 1992 interview. Even the distribution was meaningful. Never more than 350 copies of an issue were produced, and each was personally mailed. Said McClure: “One is chosen. One cannot purchase or request “Semina,” it simply comes to you.” As Pop elevated the mundane object, Berman’s project was the mundane act — perhaps, even, the mundane life.

Berman’s Family Album

Berman’s Family Album

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