An Aesthetic of Nostalgia:

Wallace Berman and his Proximity to the Object

Sophia Zweifel
UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 1 | 2010
Living within the ever-changing, sprawling city of Los Angeles in the 1950s, Wallace Berman
was among the numerous assemblage artists that began to form circles and communities
within a city previously devoid of any artistic activity. As a place of industry, stretched wide
in the expanse of open terrain, the city became a breeding ground for the consumer-based
society that was the foundation of the new America.
1
With no art school, no art critics, no
municipal art gallery, and little interest in the art movement occurring on the opposite coast,
2

Los Angeles provided little to no audience for artistic movements that questioned societal
conventions. Emerging artists on the scene responded to the absence of a municipal art iden-
tity by forming their own, smaller artistic communities.
3
Although many of these communi-
ties sufered from the social repressions of the McCarthy era and the threats and hostility that
came with acting outside of the norm,
4
the lack of audience and critical interest that they were
faced with also provided Los Angeles artists with a freedom to experiment that may not have
been as liberal in more established art centers like New York. Te absence of a pre-existing
artistic framework provided an element of freedom for Berman and his bohemian circle that
was denied to them by the rigid social norms of the time, marginalizing them and other like-
minded individuals because of their chosen lifestyles. From their beatnik style of dress, to their
eclectic choice of music, to their nonconformity with the structure of the American nuclear
family, this alternative group was pushed into the margins of an increasingly standardized
society. Instead of rejecting this exclusionary state, Bermans community actively cultivated it,
sheltering itself by developing strong interpersonal bonds and a fortifed collective sense of
cultural and artistic identity.
Not unsurprisingly then, many scholars of Beat culture have focused much of their ef-
forts on precisely these types of bohemian circles and lifestyles that surrounded the production
and reception of Bermans work, rather than studying the actual artworks themselves. Richard
1 Rebecca Solnit, Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-1961, in Beat Culture and the New
America, 1950-1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 74, 85.
2 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Walter Hopps, in A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008), 12-16.
3 Solnit, 74.
4 Ibid., 76.
2
Sophia Zweifel
Candida Smith argues that Berman focused attention away from the artwork as an object to
its function between people.
5
By suggesting that the inherent materiality of Bermans artwork
was subordinate to the rapports between individuals within the artistic circle that received
them, Candida Smith has neglected to thoroughly study the way in which these artworks
themselves, as objects, contributed to the building of those relationships. Although I agree
that the interrelationships of Bermans close-knit circle are key to understanding the reception
of Bermans oeuvre, it is necessary to consider that the ties between members were, in fact,
strengthened through the physical objects themselves. Signifcantly, it was the very appearance
of age and history upon these objects that instigated sensorial and participatory interactions
between their beholders.
As de-facto leader of a relatively private, bohemian circle, Berman exhibited an inter-
est in perpetuating a sense of history that was in many ways extinct in the fast-paced cul-
ture of consumption and strict social and familial mores of mid-twentieth-century America.
Marginalized by their transgression of such norms and their refusal to engage in the acquisi-
tiveness of mass culture, Bermans circle fortifed itself with an identity rooted in a history of
underground culture that was in many ways a constructed one. Tis constructed history mani-
fested itself in the spaces inhabited by Berman and his circle, as well as in the physical nature
of his artwork. In looking at Bermans work, it becomes apparent that the materiality of the art
objects functioned to foster personal relationships and to construct a sense of group identity.
By appealing to the full range of human senses through a layered patina of time and physical
history, Bermans art objects made such a history feel tangible to those who encountered them,
thereby creating a strong and intimate reception for his artwork. Tis intimacy of encounter
was further intensifed by Bermans relatively private practices of showing and sharing his
work, as well as through his use of artistic techniques and processes that rendered his works
unique and singular, and therefore more wholly proximate and palpable to their beholders.
It was in Bermans apartment that his early artworks were frst informally exhibited
or, rather, encountered, alongside a panoply of other found objects. Bermans residence became
the communal space where relationships within the Beat circle were cultivated. His home
came to be felt by his friends as a welcoming and inviting space of natural interactions rather
than a place of formal, hosted entertainment. Charles Brittin, a Los Angeles photographer
and member of Bermans circle, whose photographic work is now considered a signifcant
visual record of the underground art scene in the city at the time, once recalled of Bermans
hospitality: He wouldnt put on a show or entertain you. People came happily and sat down
and left a few hours later. What happened is that youd listen to some music and youd smoke
some pot and talk and look at things. What I enjoyed most was not the conversation but
the things we looked at. Tere were books, pictures, art books, clippings from newspapers
5 Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art Poetry and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 215.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
6 Michael Duncan, Wallace Berman and His Circle: Introduction, in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman
and His Circle, ed. Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 11.
7 Patrick Mauris, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Tames and Hudson, 2002), 7.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 7, 236.
people would change records, walk over and say, Look at this, wow!
6
Brittins description
suggests that the clutter of what has come to be seen as the typical Beat apartment actually
participated in the construction of the social relationships of the Beat circle. Te group was
drawn to the physical objects that surrounded them in Bermans domestic space, and found
pleasure in interacting with them. In leafng through pages of books, sifting through photo-
graphs, and stumbling upon old news stories, visitors to the apartment discovered the play of
chance meaning, and the weight of history that lay within lost and found objects.
Te singular appeal these photographs, books, and trinkets held for Berman and his
friends is perhaps akin to the nostalgic desire brought about by the items of ones own past,
only now transferred to objects unrelated to ones particular history. In other words, while an
object can lack a connection to a viewers specifc past, it can still manage to inspire a sense of
history through its physical appearance. It follows, then, that nostalgia can be felt for a past
one does not know, a longing for history itself. Such a general sense of history is implicit in
the very materiality of these objects: from the worn spines of books to the fragments of paper
softened by handling. Within these patinas of time lies a sedimentary record of the objects
previous interactions with its beholders. By engaging with the clutter of Bermans apartment,
guests were granted access not only to the contents of photographs, books, and texts, but also
to the accreted histories of these objects handling.
Although undeniably cluttered and likely accidental in its arrangement, Bermans
collection appears to have embodied a system of ordering not unlike that which existed in
Cabinets of Curiosities, repositories for precious objects that originate in a medieval fascina-
tion with the relics that had either come into contact with saints, or constituted the physical
remains of the holy fgures themselves. Te desire to hunt, acquire, and possess objects imbued
with religious history and myth was prompted by the belief that these relics held certain pow-
ers and a physical connection to the divine through their material history.
7
Tat is, relics were
not only worshipped by owners and pilgrims for their divine transcendence, but also for their
corporealitytheir physical journey through time and their material interactions with the
world and the sacred.
8
Tis attention to the physical state of objects reappears in later collect-
ing practices, as collections expanded to include secular objects that were valued for their ex-
oticism as rarities, as well as for their particular temporal and spatial trajectories as exchanged
and acquired property.
9
As mentioned earlier, Berman and his friends were likewise attracted
to an assortment of objects upon which a physical history was inscribed through successive
ownership, readings, and handling.
Another element linking the owners of cabinets to Berman lies in the formers un-
4
Sophia Zweifel
orthodox methods of arranging the items of their collections. Many collectors would have
perceived their cabinets as microcosms of the universe, making it their duty to seek out and
discover all of its parts and piece them together within the order of the cabinet.
10
It is this
method of ordering that would have appealed to Berman, for it provided an alternative to
the established ordering system in place since the Enlightenment.
11
Although Cabinets of
Curiosities were not chaotic bodies and they revolved around ordering and classifcation, the
diference between the cabinets and later rational systems of classifcation such as the ency-
clopedia was the way in which cabinet collectors were always looking for oddities, items that
did not ft within existing norms. Terefore, in their search for deviations and mysterious
objects, collectors of curiosities were constantly in the process of disrupting, and reconstruct-
ing, the established order. Rather than impose rational structures upon the world, Cabinets
of Curiosities functioned to shape a notion of universal order out of their found, physical
contents.
Following a similar logic and fed by his interest in the haphazard arrangements of
junk shops, Berman transformed his apartment into a collection of clutter out of which mean-
ing could be extrapolated. Te artist aspired to create a locus of chance encounters
12
like that
of the Cabinets of Curiosities: an arena in which stumbled upon, decontextualized objects
contested an established order or norm through their dissonance with each other or their sur-
roundings.
13
It is interesting to reconsider Charles Brittins description of Bermans apartment
in these same terms, as a space functioning as an arena or theatre in which meaning is created
through spontaneity, discovery, and chance. Permitting its occupants to create meaning from
its contents with unprecedented freedom, the living room became a space where the outside
worlds confdence in rational order and standardization was constantly transgressed.
While the haphazard nature of his collections helped to establish a new system of
ordering for his circle, Bermans interest in the obscurity and mysticism of objects went be-
yond the staging of chance encounters to an acquisitive impulse inherent to collectors. Patrick
Mauris compares the fgure of the collector to Walter Benjamins bibliophile, claiming that
both characters make use of the full gamut of infantile modes of acquisition, from holding it
in his hands to the fnal culmination of giving it a name.
14
Te idea of the collectors desire
to classify and name what he discovers as a means of appropriation resonates with Bermans
adoption of the Aleph symbol in his artwork. As the frst letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph
signifes both primal chaos as the potentiality of meaning, and Adams ordering of the uni-
verse through the bestowal of names.
15
Tus, Berman was perhaps aligning his own practices
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 219, 236. In that sense, Berman identifed with the ideologies of the Surrealists and Duchamp,
opposed as they were to the set rationality of the modern world.
12 Ibid., 236.
13 Ibid., 218, 250-251.
14 Ibid., 134.
15 Candida Smith, 496.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
16 Ibid., 135.
17 Leah Ollman, Counterculture: Flowers of Friendship, Art in America 94 (2006): 71.
18 Merril Greene, Wallace Berman: Portrait of the Artist and an Underground Man, Artforum 16 (1978):
56-57. Berman was charged with obscenity after the Los Angeles Police Department Vice Squad searched the
Ferus show in response to an anonymous complaint. Te ofcials had difculty locating the ofending subject
matter in the show, not recognizing the overarching themes of violence, sexuality, and religion inherent to the
show. Looking right past the extremely prevalent sexual imagery hanging from the centre-piece assemblage, Cross,
the squad identifed a drawing done by the artist Cameron as the incriminating factor of the show. Te drawing
was included in the frst issue of Bermans magazine Semina, and featured a feral image that intertwined sex with
violence, base instinct and pleasureall attributes that were severely repressed in post-war American society.
19 Candida Smith, 221.
to Adams activities of ordering and naming, further associating himself with the possessors of
Cabinets of Curiositiesdirectors of their own model universes. Bermans roles as owner and
orderer of his own chaotic collection may be read as symbolic of his insertion and adoption of
the Aleph symbol in his artwork. Berman repeatedly painted this symbol over photographs,
on the pages of his magazine publication Semina, and even on the front of his motorcycle hel-
met. Whatever his exact motivation may have been, Bermans interests in artistic creation and
collecting must have contributed towards his desire to align himself with the Aleph symbol.
While the naming and classifcation of objects are some of the types of appropriation
inherent to collecting, another lies in the desire to touch and hold the collected object, which
has much to do with the latters accreted history and material connection to the past. In fact,
Mauris describes the collected object as a relic, palimpsest of other eras and philosophies,
piece of a puzzle or transitional plaything in a never-ending play of echoes and analogies,
in essence a manifestation of an age old system of thought.
16
With this defnition in mind,
it follows that the longing to touch an object is a desire to access its history through its ma-
terial existence, as if its past has accreted upon the objects actual surface and thereby been
made accessible. Te accumulation of books, papers, records, and miscellaneous objects flling
Bermans living room would have instilled in his guests this hunger for a sensory engagement
with these materials.
Nostalgic undertones present within the clutter of Bermans living room were in turn
refected in his art, which evoked both mysticism and ephemerality. Te Hebrew lettering that
dominated Bermans art, from photography to collage to sculpture, identifed with the occult
in a manner that was more related to the aura of tradition and mystery than with the actual
Kabbalah doctrines. Leah Ollman asserts that he used the letters liberally in his work for
their form, ancient patina, and associative power.
17
Bermans 1957 show at the Ferus gallery,
which eventually ended in Bermans arrest upon charges of obscenity,
18
included twelve paint-
ings of Hebrew lettering on stained and torn parchment, glazed with shoe polish to evoke a
veil of time. Upon their exhibition, the objects prompted viewers to ask for a translation of the
painted inscriptions. Berman explained that the Hebrew letters had no specifc, translatable
sense, and that he simply liked the decorative form of the lettering and the moods that the
shapes evoked.
19
Te letters, then, were arranged not according to their spiritual meaning, but
6
Sophia Zweifel
20 Stephen Fredman, Surrealism Meets Kabbalah: Wallace Berman and the Semina Poets, in Semina
Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, ed. Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art
Publishers, 2005), 47. Berman makes artistic allusions to the tradition not for its specifc religious principles, but
rather to evoke his own history and memory as a Jewish American in Los Angeles. At this point in history, the
Hebrew lettering brought with it a sense of extinction, of ghostly remnants of a language rendered nearly obsolete
within the new ruins of Jewish culture. According to Stephen Fredman, one of the reasons behind Bermans
depiction of Hebrew letters on photographs, in assemblages, on parchment, and upon stones, is their allusion to
sufering and disappearance (ibid., 47-48).
21 Kristine McKenna, Wallace Berman and Photography, in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His
Circle, ed. Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 307.
22 Candida Smith, 217.
placed according to how they interacted visually with each other and with the artworks aged
quality as a whole. It was these visual interactions, moreover, that engendered new meaning.
Furthermore, it has been suggested that Bermans use of Hebrew lettering was connected to
his childhood spent living in a Jewish neighbourhood,
20
where the characters were scrawled
upon signs and within shop windows. In this light, his works appear to have been less in line
with an implied spirituality, and more so with the allures of nostalgia and a revisiting of tradi-
tion, memory, and loss.
Tese themes of longing and nostalgia were reinforced by the way Berman manipu-
lated his work to synthesize a captivating patina much like the accreted wear of the clutter in
his apartment. Berman spent a number of years employed as a distresser in a furniture factory,
making him well-practiced in mimicking the veneer of age and creating the illusion of decay.
21

Te assemblages in his 1957 Ferus show incorporated scratched wood, peeling varnishes and
paints, stained and yellowed paper torn at the edges, and residues of glue and debris. Tese
types of manipulations yielded not only the impression of age upon the works, but created an
artifcially accumulated history for them. Looking as though they had been passed from hand
to hand, exposed to the ravages of time and the worlds elements, Bermans objects appear to
have undergone a historic and mystical journey.
Te Veritas Panel was one of the four major assemblages in the Ferus exhibition. With
its artifcially aged wood and aura of concealed secrets, the work is reminiscent of a Cabinet of
Curiosities of antique origins whose enigmatic doors and compartments have gone unopened
for a lengthy period of time. Like the cabinets, this artworks rectangular wooden surface is
replete with doors, drawers, and other niche-like spaces that incite further exploration of the
piece. A small rock bearing ambiguous Hebrew lettering is held by leather bands forming a
cross, and contained by a protruding wooden frame. Beneath it, an image of dancers is con-
cealed by a large door. Pasted to the front of the door is an obscure, fragmented drawing of
Hebrew lettering, while on its reverse side appears the number twelve, considered an ordering
number, as it represents both the number of apostles, and the number of Kabbalah paintings
included in the show.
22
A second, much smaller door is placed at the top of the panel: on its
front is a small, hardly legible letter, while behind it Berman had placed a small mirror. Despite
the works opacity, viewers interacted with the piece, opening and closing its doors, and run-
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
ning their hands over the knobs and dowels that had once been part of Bermans everyday
work-life. Although the multiple compartments implied order and functionality, the barely
legible letters, and disjunctive imagery evoked mystery, the occult. Indeed, upon viewing their
own refections in the concealed mirror, the panels viewers saw themselves situated among the
works components and mysteries. In this way, the panel united past with present, as its viewers
interacted in a bodily fashion with the works contrived history within the present time of the
exhibition.
Tis aesthetic of distressing also carried through into Bermans photography. Although
not skilled in the darkroom, or even overly adept at the mechanics of the camera, Berman
nevertheless employed specifc photographic processes intended to alter the physical appear-
ance of the printed photographs. In so doing, he demonstrated an interesting conception of
photography that difered from the notion of the reproducible, time-enduring photograph.
Known to destroy the negatives after printing his photos,
23
Berman was in fact granting the
images back their transience and restoring their ephemerality, perhaps in an attempt to make
them more immediately tangible to their recipients. In keeping with his alternative under-
standing of the photograph as a unique, singular object, Berman distressed the photographs to
achieve an efect of age similar to that of his paper and wood pieces. Te process is described
by Kristine McKenna: Berman often printed his photographs through a patterned transpar-
ency that stamped the image with a soft net of cross-hatching, and he also favored a darkroom
technique called reticulation, which involves a slight alteration in the process of washing the
negative. Because the silver on the negative is still very soft at this point in the developing pro-
cess, this alteration leaves a pixilated dot pattern on the surface of the picture. Brittin recalls
introducing the efect to Berman, who immediately responded to the mysterious, veiled qual-
ity it brings to the picture.
24
In addition to these dark room manipulations, Berman would
further the illusion of age and history by tearing the photographs edges,
25
converting it into a
memento or found object of some kind rather than a mechanical likeness of an object or per-
son. What is then created by these photographs is a dual embedding of memory: the record of
that which is represented by the photograph, as well as the history of the photograph itself as
an object. Terefore, Bermans photographs could be qualifed as hyper-nostalgic, as they cling
to both the photographed, captured and frozen in time as they become image, as well as the
photographs own corporeality, emphasized by its own material traces collected over its time
as a physical object.
Roland Barthes explores the implications of photographys ability to arrest people
and things in time. Tis process of recording both preserves its subjects by documenting them,
yet simultaneously kills them through their objectifcation upon being photographed. Barthes
23 McKenna, 305
24 Ibid., 308.
25 Ibid.
8
Sophia Zweifel
writes: When we defne the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that
[the photographed subjects] do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened
down, like butterfies.
26
Te idea of butterfies pinned down for observation speaks to the no-
tion of the photograph as archiving those caught within time, preserving them despite their
eventual obsolescence or mortality, whichever the case.
27
According to Barthes, the sound of
the cameras shutter (the cameras witnessing of that which it photographs) reasserts the exis-
tence of the photographed subject through the cameras necessary proximity to it.
28
A photo-
graph, then, is evidence for the tangibility of what it depicts. By making the photograph itself
more proximate and tangible to its viewer through his extra-photographic processes, Berman
amplifes the viewers sense of connection to the actual object through its represented form.
Just as Bermans photographs become unique and ephemeral objects upon the de-
struction of their negatives, another layer of intimacy was added to the photos when Berman
pasted them onto cardboard and sent them to his friends and collaborators through the mail
(fg. 1). As mailers, the photos then underwent a spatial journey via the U.S. postal system,
accumulating a history that left its residue in the form of stamps, bumps and bent edges, and
adding to the artifcial patina of Bermans development process. By sending the mailer to a
specifc recipient, he ensured that the latter interacted with it on a more intimate level, as the
work became associated in the recipients mind with his own relationship to Berman. Once in
the possession of the recipient, the art object was his or hers to hold onto, to place atop a stack
of paper, or to store in a box, only to fnd it again days or years later and experience it all over
again. Each successive interaction with the object by its owner held within it the memory of
previous experiences, from its initial arrival in the recipients mailbox, to all that occurred since
that time.
Berman used mailers such as these to approach contributors with brief requests for
submissions to his nearly annual art magazine, Semina. Produced on a minor scale and mailed
out only to Bermans friends and artistic colleagues, the magazine was intimate in scale and
in nature. Rather than bind each issue together into a coherent whole, for seven of his issues,
Berman sent the magazines pages as loose leaves in an envelope, leaving it up to the viewer
26 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1981), 57.
27 Kenneth Calhoon, Personal Efects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography, MLN 113 (1998):
613, 617, 624. From this vivid analogy, Barthes discussion takes a nostalgic turn as he addresses his experience
of leafng through images of his recently deceased mother. Barthes attempts to locate what, if anything, in the
images gives him the strongest and most accurate sense of his mothers character. Kenneth Calhoun explores
how, interestingly, it was not the cameras ability to record his mothers likeness that gave Barthes the greatest
remembrance of his mothers self, but instead this remembrance was achieved by the photographs that contained
the specifc objects he had come to associate with her in his sensational memory. It would seem that objects, in
their interactions with ones senses, have an enormous capability to store memory. Photographic representations of
the fabric of his mothers dress stirred in him the memory of how that fabric once felt against his face. Te image
of her powder box also caused him to recollect the sound it made as she closed its lida sound, as Calhoon points
out, that echoes the click of the cameras shutter as it locks its subject into a frozen object.
28 Barthes, 78-80.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
Fig. 1. Wallace Berman, Collage Mailer to Cameron, 1962. Mixed media collage on paper. Photograph of Cameron
by Wallace Berman, 1955. Courtesy of Wallace Berman Estate.
10
Sophia Zweifel
Fig. 2. Wallace Berman, Untitled, 1961-62. Verifax collage, 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of Wallace Berman
Estate.
29 Michael Duncan, Semina as Art, in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, ed. Michael Duncan
and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 22.
30 Fredman, 41-48.
to sequence them.
29
What resulted was not only the interactive freedom of the magazines
reader, but a construction of meaning based on chance. Meaning itself became ephemeral
and purely dependent upon the inclination of the viewer, as, like the loose-leaf pages, it could
be constantly shufed and reconstructed. Semina served to replicate the same kind of chance
meaning engendered by the decontextualized, stumbled upon, items of interest discovered
within Bermans home.
30
In this way, Seminas readers became entwined with the art object
itself: their reading of the magazine became an inextricable part of its history and identity.
Te manual nature of Seminas assembly and production resulted in an ephemerality
that, like Bermans photographs without negatives, granted the journal immediacy and in-
imitability. Te Verifax works, which Berman began in 1963, provided a sharp contrast to his
hand-pressed journal, as they utilized the contemporary technology of the Verifax machine,
a precursor to the photocopier (fg. 2). Te shift to a medium of mechanical reproduction
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31 Candida Smith, 283.
32 Ibid.
would seem to distance the Verifax images from Bermans previous work, which emphasized
the inherence of materiality and tangibility in the object. Despite his adoption of a mechani-
cal process in his art practice, Berman made a point of maintaining a level of corporeality in
his Verifax collages. Upon closely examining Bermans Verifax productions, Candida Smith
observes of Bermans technique that the process was so primitive that no two prints were
alike. He built the collages layer by layer by rerunning the paper through the system to add
another image. While the paper was still wet, he often rubbed out sections or applied other
chemicals by hand to alter the image.
31
Bermans eforts appear to perpetuate his tradition of
rendering his works immediate to their viewers through their singularity. Nevertheless, these
collages took on a signifcantly diferent nature than his previous endeavors such as Semina
and his collaged mailers, as they fulflled more public and political objectives.
Bermans emergence from the underground coincided with a signifcant change in
his art and the type of viewing it encouraged. Borrowing visual strategies from contempo-
rary mass media such as flm and television, Berman created a degree of separation between
audience and artwork in order to stage a more passive, detached mode of viewership. His
works no longer had to be experienced by viewers as physical, proximate objects, but rather
they communicated their meaning as representations. By nature of the reproducibility of such
representational works, Bermans Verifax works would have expanded his artistic reach to a
much larger arena of public reception. It was while he was producing the Verifax collages
that Berman became publicly involved in the Civil Rights Movement and began to join the
ranks of anti-Vietnam protesters. Tese acts of public engagement had previously been more
the province of the avant-garde than of Bermans bohemian circle. With this gradual shift in
activity, Berman emerged from the sheltered underground to join the avant-garde in spirit and
intention:
His eforts at community building came to an end. Te counterculture had emerged
as a projection onto mass culture of the private ideas that had motivated Berman and
his peers. Inevitably, incorporation into the mass media meant deformation. Berman
had warned his colleagues that they were now part of the parcel of the dynamic
American society, no matter how much they wanted to stay apart. Te task at hand
then was to pose more sharply the ability of aesthetic production to sever the power
of social construction and allow people to construct their own identities through ac-
cess to a more powerful, but less noisy universal reality.
32
Te Verifax collages are prime examples of this radical turn in Bermans aesthetic production:
his works were now created with the intention of overthrowing societal constructions and
establishing a freedom of identity. Berman brought this aesthetic to a new public platform
12
Sophia Zweifel
by using the mechanically created poster-like pieces to disseminate his imagery in a relatively
reproducible form.
Temes of reproduction and public exposure that are apparent in Bermans decision
to use the Verifax method of production are also present in the content of the images. Each
collage in the series follows a grid-like structure formed by the reoccurring and often su-
perimposed image of Bermans hand bearing a transistor radio. Within the radios casing, a
constantly shifting image seems to haphazardly foat in upon the airwaves. Te collages vary
according to the size and nature of the grid. Additionally, some are painted bright, while oth-
ers are washed out in black and white, or sepia tones. Some even contain additional elements
such as textured backgrounds or Kabbalah lettering. Although the collages difer from one
another in their overall appearance, common to all of the Verifax works was the way in which
they generated meaning for their viewers through the random multiplicity of images shown
within the casement of the radio. Tis ever-constant framework is constantly held in tension
with its varying contents of irrationality and infnite disorder, emphasizing a contrast between
structure and chaos.
Te irrational collection of specimens found upon the radio airwaves resists easy com-
prehension and categorization, and was perhaps left in disarray specifcally for the viewer to
piece together. Te imagery displayed within the casements ranged from motifs of the occult
that are so prominent in Bermans early uvre, to widely circulated images from mass culture,
drawn from magazines, newspapers, and television. Te collages thus asserted their public
objective by chaotically presenting to their viewers the repeated images of popular culture
that continuously invaded the homes of the masses. By juxtaposing the latter with obscene
and obscure imagery, the collages undercut the often passive way in which mass culture is
experienced. Te disorder of the images granted the audience agency to construct their own
meaning out of what was presented to them, a privilege that was perhaps regularly denied to
them when encountering the same imagery in a mass cultural context. Similar to the unbound
pages of the Semina issues, the unordered nature of these pictures left it to the viewers to ar-
range them in their mind, a creative exercise which contradicted the notion of easy, unrefec-
tive consumption of mass cultural products. Te collages therefore allowed their audience a
freedom of interpretation by challenging the enforced rational structures imposed upon the
public on a daily basis by contemporary mass media.
Bermans Verifax works therefore managed to address a broader public through the
artists utilization of a modern technology, yet nevertheless maintained a level of intimacy
with that public by inviting their participation, and allowing them the freedom to order and
interpret the artworks content. In that sense, the Verifax collages provide a signifcant con-
trast to Bermans previous, more private work, as it was the intimacy and physical participa-
tion that his previous works demanded of their viewers that impeded their consumption by a
larger public, and therefore kept them separate and protected from the rigid society he and his
bohemian friends chose to disassociate with. In attempting to keep a circle intimate enough
to remain detached from their overwhelming, immediate present, Berman further bolstered
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
his community by referring back to another time and associating his own circle with noncon-
formist groups of the past.
33
Yet the circle Berman constructed was not an avant-garde group like many of the
art collectives of the previous century, whose goals were on the order of societal and political
transformation. Semina, for example, was not intended for a public wider than Bermans own
friends and acquaintances, and consequently it did not attempt to change that public. Te ab-
sence of an underlying political motive in this journal suggests that Bermans interest in such
circles had less to do with their socio-political agendas and cultural interventions than their
notions of shared alienation and of solidarity amongst unconventional individuals.
So why is it that Berman and his colleagues seemed to feel the need to reawaken the
past? I would argue that Bermans revisiting of history and the material culture of earlier cen-
turies is directly linked to the nostalgic longing for the memory and history that we have seen
capable of being embedded in certain objects. For Berman, clinging to these pasts and histo-
ries may have been a means to resist the rapidly paced culture that surrounded and threatened
to engulf him. As transformation from historic present into historic past was occurring more
and more rapidly,
34
those who chose an alternative pace began to run a greater risk of being
forgotten by the mainstream. Tis phenomenon, defned by Frederic Jameson as historical
amnesia, is described as the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little
by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, [and] has begun to live in a perpetual
present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social
information have had, in one way or another, to preserve.
35
Bermans nostalgic aesthetic can
thus be seen as actively resisting the perpetual cultural transformation Jameson speaks of: by
drawing attention to the constructed histories of his art objects, Berman attempts to conserve
the traditions of the past. Te Semina circle became a refuge for individuals from a society that
33 Seminas conception in particular had much to do with Bermans own personal interest in historic art
collectives, specifcally those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Te journals inclusions of texts from
poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Blake, and Artaud, aligned Bermans own artistic circle to those of the past.
Upon examining one of Bermans self-portraits at his home in Crater Lane (fg. 3), it becomes evident that his
act of self-fashioning owes something to the collective artistic circles that preceded him. Berman photographed
himself reclining upon his desk, his hand-press in the foreground, while behind him hangs a framed print of
Henri Fantin-Latours Around the Table, completed in 1872. Te painting, originally intended as a tribute to the
recently deceased Baudelaire, features a literary circle including poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, among others. In the
photograph, taken in 1955, the year of Bermans frst Semina publication, the artist draws a parallel between the
avant-garde circle of poets and writers of the mid-nineteenth century and his own contemporariesindividuals
brought together into a collective through Semina, alluded to through the presence in the pictures foreground of
the hand-press, used to create the magazine.
34 Hermann Lbbe, Te Contraction of the Present, in High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and
Modernity, ed. Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008), 160. According to Lbbe, consumerism, proliferation of newer technologies, and the rise of the media of
mass culture all contributed to an acceleration in pace that was beginning to alter ones sense of the passing of time.
A period of ten years, in terms of its developments and changes, was soon acquiring the equivalent sensation of a
period of forty years. In a given persons life, the previous decade was becoming more and more alien to his or her
immediate present.
35 Ibid., 20.
14
Sophia Zweifel
Fig. 3. Wallace Berman, Self-Portrait, Crater Lane, 1955. Photograph. Courtesy of Wallace Berman Estate.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
not only persecuted them for their unconventional lifestyles, but also seemed to alienate them
for their failure to keep pace with the changing times. For some, the constant state of change
inherent to post-war culture and the resultant rupture with the past meant the inability to re-
main in the cultural present and the risk that they themselves might pass into an obsolescence
much like that of the objects they treasured.
Rather than trying to hold on to the continuously changing ground of the present,
Bermans circle withdrew unto itself and clung to the history embodied in the art and objects
they surrounded themselves with. In this way, Bermans circle behaved similarly to the col-
lector who feels an attachment to his accumulated objects for their fxed, unchanging quality.
Indeed, Mauris tells us that the majority of these enlightened collectors preferred the im-
mutable and unmoving nature of objects to the illusions of a world in the constant state of
fux.
36
Te interactive nature of Bermans art inspired in his viewers a sense of permanence,
as their experiences with the objects became impressed within the individual histories of the
works themselves. Bermans works therefore acted as vessels of history and memory, harboring
the existence of all who encountered them.
Bermans artwork attracted an interest in its beholders, not unlike the fascination
generated by the unexpected array of time-worn objects dispersed in his familys living space.
Both his art and his living space can be seen as protection against what Hermann Lbbe calls
cultural museumifcation, that is, the accelerating rate at which cultural objects and innova-
tions become obsolete.
37
In one sense, attaching so much nostalgic value to the objects found
within ones own home, suggests that they have already been abandoned by contemporary
culture, victims of the capriciousness of contemporary tastes. Yet, by engaging with the objects
anewreading the books and newspaper clippings, playing the older records, or putting to use
an old printing pressBermans visitors allowed for such objects to continue to participate in
contemporary life.
Bermans aesthetic of nostalgia, history, and mysticism, which permeated his photog-
raphy, sculptures, and assemblage work, maintained the sense of history that Jameson claims
was at risk of being lost. Bermans works not only simulated a patina of age, but were con-
sciously placed within a history that Berman was constantly in the process of safe-guarding
against the changeableness of society. Te social, personal, and physical interactions between
these pieces and their beholders, helped to construct his groups identity, one strongly rooted
in the shared sense of their own collective present. Along with that sense of a shared moment,
however, came the subtle consciousness that this present was constantly being transformed
into history. Bermans works, even as they were being created, were slowly becoming the fasci-
nating clutter that flled the apartments of the members of his circle.
36 Mauris, 7.
37 Lbbe, 161.