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Speaking in Tongues:
The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken

An Exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts
September 25 - December 31, 2011

"The job of the poet [...] involves placing objects from the visible world, rendered invisible by the eraser of habit, in an untoward position that strikes the soul and imbues them with tragedy. One therefore needs to compromise reality, to catch it out, to flood it unexpectedly with light and to make it reveal what it is hiding." -- Jean Cocteau

PROJECT SUMMARY

Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken brings two seminal, yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. Organized by the curatorial team of Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, with supporting research by Colin Westerbeck and Carolyn Peter, the exhibition examines how these two artists bridged modernist and emerging post-modernist trends by ushering in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Focusing on language and the creation of new visual codes, Berman's and Heinecken's works are explored within the unique cultural context of the 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with essays by all curatorial team members. Both the exhibition and the catalog are generously underwritten by a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of their region-wide Pacific Standard Time initiative.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

In the art of the 1960s and early 1970s, the 'death of the avant-garde' emerged as a recurrent and haunting theme, replaced by a new emphasis on experimentation and renewal that reflected the aesthetic pluralism of post-modernity. "The situation of contemporary culture, wrote the Italian critic Angela Guglielmi in 1964, "is similar to a city from which the enemy, after laying mines, has fled. What will the victor, who is of the gates of the city, do? Will he send assault troops to conquer a city that is already conquered? ... [Or] will he have specialized sections of the rearguard sent in which will advance into the abandoned city not with machine guns but Geiger Counters?"

Speaking in Tongues: Wallace and Berman and Robert Heinecken focuses on two exemplary Los Angeles artists, who radically challenged existing traditions. Rear-guard revolutionaries, rather than avant-garde warriors, theirs was a quiet and sophisticated probing of aesthetic conventions that played on the pleasures of upending rules for the sake of artistic invention. Favoring a visceral and poetic approach to their subjects, they were "artists' artists," who displayed a highly independent engagement with the world. Intellectually curious, playful, and enigmatic, with a penchant for innovation and small, covert moves, they aimed at a stunning reversal of traditional vocabularies, helping to establish photography at the heart of post-modernist practice. Neither spoke frequently about his work,