By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Wallace Berman may be the most important unknown artist in California history. A leader of the postwar avant-garde, he was the founder and editor of “Semina,” a hand-printed, free-form journal that he produced irregularly between 1955 and 1964. He was also an avid photographer, collagist, and installation artist. His Los Angeles residences, first in Beverly Glen and later at the top of Topanga Canyon, were the center of beatnik life in Southern California. Since his death in a car accident on his 50th birthday, in 1976, his life, work, and contribution to cultural history has often been reduced to the annals of cult memory. A new Santa Monica Museum of Art-organized exhibition and catalogue, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” brings him and 53 of his fellow artists and poets into the broader history of American life during the second half of the 20th century. Berman was born on Staten Island in 1926, but moved to the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles in 1936. After his father’s death the following year, the family moved to Hollywood. Although his parents were observant, he was not raised strictly within the Jewish faith or tradition. A lifelong lover of poker, pool, and ping pong, he was expelled from Fairfax High in 1943 for gambling. He entered the Navy after an arrest for possession of marijuana, but stayed in for only six months. Back in Los Angeles, he spent increasing time in the city’s jazz clubs, where he met Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. During this time Berman supported himself by working for a furniture company while immersing himself in the arts community. He made a passing attempt at art school, but dropped out twice. While waiting in line to see a film by Jean Cocteau, one of his favorite artists, he met Shirley Morand; they married the following year, 1952. With a $5,000 loan from Berman’s mother, the young couple bought a house at 10426 Crater Lane, in Beverly Glen. After Berman purchased a Kelly hand press through the mail, “Semina” sprung to life. The first issue included writing and art by Cameron, Walter Hopps, David Meltzer, Jean Cocteau, and Bob Alexander. Berman produced 150 copies. He published eight more issues, produced in Los Angeles and San Francisco over the next nine years. The work of Herman Hesse, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs, among many others, was included. Only one issue was bound; most consisted of an envelope filled with loose pieces of paper printed with contributors’ art and poetry. Berman mailed out “Semina,” free of charge to his friends and associates. With the exception of a few copies available at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, ‘Semina” could not be bought. Michael Duncan, co-curator of the exhibition, in an interview with the Palisadian-Post, spoke of Berman’s commitment to “multiplicity in the arts and multifarious forms of expression.” In Berman’s world, “art is made for other members of the group, not made for just the art or poetry world.” Berman believed art to be a “mysterious force,” in Duncan’s words, and therefore was hesitant about discussing the meaning behind his work. His skepticism of the commercial and academic art world was no doubt confirmed when his first one-man show, on view at the Ferus Galley in 1957, was shut down by the Los Angeles Vice Squad. Charged with obscenity, Berman was fined $150. The Ferus show included a cross, a series of paintings of Hebrew letters, and several other installation pieces, including “Homage to Herman Hesse,” the only piece from the exhibition that survives. It was a line drawing of a couple making love by the artist Cameron’from the first “Semina,” pages of which Berman had scattered throughout the gallery’ that the police arrested him for, not a photograph of a couple in a coital position on the cross, which didn’t register with the police. The show’s shutdown was devastating to Berman, who, disgusted with the whole experience, moved with Shirley and their son Tosh to San Francisco later that year. They did not return to live in Los Angeles until June 1961. Rebecca Solnit, in her book “Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era,” writes of Berman: “The Ferus show is the only time he left out irony and distance. He truly exposed himself, though it was another kind of exposure that got him into trouble.” He never tried to explain his work. Kristine McKenna, Berman’s biographer and co-curator of the exhibition, recently said in an interview with the Post: “Berman was very secretive in ways. He never discussed his work, never gave an interview, never kept a journal, and never taught a class. There’s no record of how he felt about his work or life. “Secretiveness was a strategy,” McKenna continued. “Berman was very strict about work, how it was shown.” He never stopped making art; he took thousands of photographs and spent his last years producing his Verifax collages, grids of different images taken from popular culture magazines, each framed by a photo of a hand holding a transistor radio. As Duncan writes in the show’s catalogue: “The structural device is a resonant metaphor for Berman’s broader role as a transmitter of images and ideas that were metaphorically ‘in the air.'” He never incorporated his own photographs into his collages. Yet it was seeing these photographs a few years ago that piqued McKenna’s interest in Berman. “I started looking at the negatives and saw he had connections with all kinds of people’ Jack Smith, Allen Ginsberg. I was surprised that he was a really good photographer. I wanted to show the photos.” At this time, she heard that Michael Duncan was organizing a show about “Semina,” that would, in his words, “do a social history of that time and an examination of the participants.” They decided to join together to curate the Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition, which includes more than 300 works, approximately 75 of them by Berman. The show illustrates, as McKenna puts it, that “Berman was an important catalyst. He was the vibrating energy field at the center of it all.” It also sheds some light on some of the underground figures who are less well known along with better-known figures like Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Dennis Hopper, Michael McClure and Henry Miller. Curator Duncan notes that it took real “field work to find objects by some of these people.” One was John Reed, “a casualty of the group, who ended up homeless and with mental problems.” Duncan found two handmade books by Reed in the late curator Walter Hopps’ basement. Some things, even if found, could not be borrowed, such as a 1949 black painting with crucifix by Allen Ginsburg that was too fragile to lend. The artists in the exhibition were photographed by Berman, and those portraits, most of which were printed especially for this show, give the viewer a snapshot of how much Berman respected and nurtured his friends and colleagues. Duncan equates him with Andy Warhol, who shot two films at Berman’s Crater Lane house, and his infamous coterie of artists. Duncan said: “Warhol was more of a vampire; Wallace was more of a solicitor. He was a more lyrical, more sensitive artist. The comparison is interesting, for both had a close-knit group and used pop culture in new ways.” Berman’s untimely death further cemented his position as “a symbol for a whole era,” suggested Duncan. McKenna believes that many young Los Angeles artists think of Berman as an indisputable influence. With the exhibition complete and all of her interviews finished, she must now sit down and write her biography. She has collected so many differing points of view, so many different versions of Wallace Berman that she recently admitted: “I haven’t figured out how to resolve it.” While McKenna works to figure out the Berman she wants to represent in her book, the exhibition will embark on a national tour after closing at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. For now, it will be up to us to decide who he might have been. “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through November 26. Contact: 586-6488 or www.smmoa.org. The exhibition will then travel to Logan, Utah; Wichita, Kansas; Berkeley, California; and New York City. The catalog is published by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and D.A.P.
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