Kohn Gallery recently staged “American Aleph,” a retrospective of the influential West Coast artist Wallace Berman (1926–1976). Mostly self-taught, Berman fueled his output with improvisation and irreverent DIY methods.
Read MoreBy JEFF JACKSON
WALLACE BERMAN: AMERICAN ALEPH
Edited by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon
(Kohn Gallery)
Though he’s hardly a household name, Wallace Berman’s work casts a long shadow. He helped create the vibrant West Coast art scene of the 1960s, and was one of the luminaries featured on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He’s been called a Beat artist and proto-Pop artist, but curator Johan Kugelberg more accurately describes him as “proto-punk, proto-DIY, and proto-appropriation art, and also post-Dada and post-Symbolist, and this and that, and whatever you want him to be.”
Berman’s multifaceted work refuses to fall into neat categories, which is why it’s remained a vital source of inspiration in the decades since his untimely death in 1976. He’s a major figure in American art whose true significance has yet to be fully realized.
The Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles recently mounted a Berman retrospective and their beautifully designed catalog serves as an excellent introduction to his work. It captures the full breadth of his output, including sculptures, collages, photographs, drawings, posters, film stills, mail art, and even images of pieces that are no longer extant.
There’s also a nod to his assemblage and literary magazine Semina, which lasted from 1955-64 and featured work from writers including Jean Cocteau, Herman Hesse, Robert Duncan, and John Wieners. For a deeper dive into this influential project, check out the recently reissued Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle.
American Aleph discusses Berman’s far-flung influences and the paths his work followed after an early gallery show was busted on obscenity charges. The catalog is most notable for the generous selection of Verifax collages he focused on during his final decade. These works feature a hand holding a transistor radio whose visual content continually changes: religious icons, politicians, pop stars, nudes, flowers, buildings, animals, and much more. They’re accompanied by Hebrew letters, deployed in ways that suggest mystical Kabbalistic associations.
This onslaught of images feels remarkably contemporary, leaving viewers to discern their own patterns and meanings. They’re mysteries whose depths remain unplumbed, transmissions vibrating on their own disruptive frequency.
Ori Gersht uses a digital camera, off-the-shelf software and a high-end printer to make photographs that make you wonder what you are looking at. It’s a slippery enterprise. When it works, the uncertainty is sublime.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospective with an image ofBombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at once, “Bruce Connor: It’s All True” is a marvelous look at a figure whose gleefully anarchic work called for the end of culture as we know it.
Read MoreIn 1963, Bruce Conner decided to find himself. He was back in San Francisco, after a year in Mexico documenting his search for mind-altering mushrooms (Timothy Leary has a flickering cameo in the resulting short film).
Read MoreIn a time when the world is constantly depicted to us through images, what is real: the tangible world or the reflected world? Can we even make a distinction between the two? How does it affect our approach to what we encounter? Ori Gersht’s work addresses these issues through two photographic series, On Reflection and Floating World at the Kohn Gallery.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s CHILD has been difficult from the start—hard to look at, hard to appreciate, and harder still to preserve. The controversial sculpture, completed in 1960, was Conner’s response to the gas chamber execution of Caryl Chessman, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping and raping a woman in Los Angeles.
Read MoreArt reviews from art critics Edward Goldman and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp.
Photographers as Magicians and Tricksters on Art Talk.
Read More“I think most of the time I’m awful at depicting people because I want the summation of their personalities without necessarily including a human form,” says Hahn.
Read MoreIn the late 19th century, Southern California attracted misfits, idealists, and entrepreneurs with few ties to anyone or anything. Swamis, spiritualists, and other self-proclaimed religious authorities quickly made their way out West to forge new faiths. Independent book publishers, motivational speakers, and metaphysical-minded artists and writers then became part of the Los Angeles landscape. City of the Seekers examines how creative freedom enables LA-based artists to make spiritual work as part of their practices.
Read MoreArtist. Visionary. Hipster. Mystic. Voracious consumer and conduit of modern culture. Wallace Berman immersed himself in all these guises, with a selftaught fervor and disarming sincerity. To those who know his artwork, he remains a uniquely prescient and compelling figure, even 50 years after his death in 1976, from a tragic accident caused by a drunk driver on the eve of his 50th birthday.
Read MoreThe title of the exhibition Bruce Conner: It’s All True, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, comes from a letter the artist wrote, late in life, in which he listed 61 labels the media had attached to him and his work. These included “artist” and “anti-artist”, “feminist” and “misogynist”, “spiritual” and “profane”, “accessible” and “obscure”, “realist” and “surrealist”.
Read MoreWhen Bruce Conner died in 2008, it wasn’t the first time. In 1960, the artist staged his own death in his first solo show, titled “The Work of the Late Bruce Conner.” By 1970, he had also convinced “Who’s Who in American Art” directory that he was deceased.
Read MoreBruce Conner was one of the great outliers of American art, a polymathic nonconformist whose secret mantra might have been “Only resist.” In multiple media, over more than five decades, this restless denizen of the San Francisco cultural scene resisted categorization, art world expectations and almost any kind of authority.
Read MoreDeparting from the stock footage that characterizes Bruce Conner’s earlier films, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) is his first color film and consists of footage he shot while living in Mexico in 1961–62, as well as some earlier shots of him and his wife, Jean, in San Francisco.
Read MoreAs a child, the late artist Bruce Conner overheard his father exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor in their front yard. Their conversation was so stilted and trite that the young Conner thought they must have been speaking in code. At that moment, as his story goes, he reckoned that adults must be using language to hide something from children. “I learned to distrust words,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I placed my bet on vision.”
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933–2008) was one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era. Emerging from the California art scene, in which he worked for half a century, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse.
Read MoreAmerican art had been drawing from Sunday newspaper funnies in various ways long before Roy Lichtenstein’s painted comic books panels Popped onto the gallery scene. In 1950s New York, Robert Rauschenberg affixed Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and Terry and the Pirates onto his paintings and assemblages, recontextualizing them with coded signals about his closeted desires.
Read MoreSunday 19 June 10:00 - 10:45 Lumiere Theatre
People perceive the visible as real, and don’t distinguish between what is real versus what is perceived to be. We’re all subject to the influence of ‘hyperrealities’ being constructed around us.
Read MoreJoin us this time for a special episode dedicated to the influential Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976). Our guests are Hollywood gallerist Michael Kohn, who walks us through the retrospective exhibition “Wallace Berman—American Aleph,” on view at Kohn Gallery through June 25, 2016, and the artist’s son, the author and publisher Tosh Berman, talking about his father’s craft and character, and his importance in the mid-century West Coast cultural scene.
Read More
