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nor were they given to theoretical musings. "I like to go into something," Robert Heinecken once said, "shake it up, and disappear" - a creative modus operandi that equally applies to Wallace Berman.

Taking its title from the eponymous Talking Heads album of 1983, whose promotional concert at Hollywood's Pantages Theater was documented in Jonathan Demme's critically acclaimed movie Stop Making Sense, the exhibition represents an exploration of Berman's and Heinecken's practice of dismantling, juggling, and reassembling established visual codes to highly original ends. Using techniques like montage, appropriation, chance, repetition, sequencing, and improvisation, they created a complex visual poetry that, while sometimes perplexing and seemingly random, represented a fresh aesthetic approach that significantly impacted on later generations. Unlike L.A. contemporaries like John Baldessari or Ed Ruscha whose use of the photographic image ironically mimicked the one-dimensionality of popular culture, Berman and Heinecken reached for a richly layered, sensuous imagery that deeply mined the socio-political landscape of their day. In Berman's case, this strategy was also infused with an interest in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and the occult that recalls the ancient Christian practice of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues.

Berman's and Heinecken's works defy easy classification, aiming as they did at making the familiar strange. Visual guerillas both, they pursued their creative visions at the expense of critical and commercial success, remaining largely anonymous beyond their immediate circle of friends and associates. Aided by their unique geographical location in Southern California, which freed them of the restraints of cultural traditions, they rejected all signs of fetishism, individual authorship, and the cult of the beautiful object. Smart and outrageous, with deep roots in dada, surrealism, and the poetics of California assemblage, they focused instead on art works as cultural constructs in an uncompromising subversion of conventional protocols.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will argue that Berman and Heinecken were transitional figures that took as their point of departure the art of the historical avant-garde and updated its subjects, techniques, and irreverent stance for contemporary use. Divided into three interrelated sections - Code, Gesture, and Narrative - the show traces the evolution of a new visual language that placed photography and its representational contingencies at the heart of contemporary art. Code in this context signifies both the individual building blocks and underlying system of the new/updated speech, exploring techniques like montage, appropriation, pastiche, and overlay as key elements of Berman's and Heinecken's emerging art. Works in this section include some of Berman's earliest experiments in composite imagery, such as individual verifax collages of hands holding a transistor radio with inlaid photographs, and his explorations of the interstices between image and text. It also shows Heinecken's Are You Rea portfolio, his early projection pieces and collages of pin-ups, which articulated his desire to excavate cultural meaning through multi-layered imagery. The Gesture section activates Code, like putting individual cards into play, by emphasizing human agency and performance as integral elements of Berman's and Heinecken's practice. Works here range from examples of Berman's mail art and Semina publication to Heinecken's magazine interventions and photo sculptures, which encourage active viewer participation. With Narrative, the exhibition turns towards sequential images in which individual elements build upon each other to form complex visual texts. Berman's sequenced verifax collages, rock assemblages, and "erased faces" series might be found here, as well as Heinecken's visual Poems, Erogenous Zone System Exercises, Le Voyeur/Robbe-Grillet and Cliché Vary series, among others. This section will naturally touch upon both artists' interest in experimental film, showing Berman's Untitled movie (Aleph) and Heinecken's early experiments with medium on free floating video screens in the gallery.

In the installation, all three sections will freely interpenetrate and loop into each other to the extent permitted by the layout of the Armory space. Section headings and didactic panels are viewed solely as interpretive "anchors" in the gallery from which particular sets of images flow, meshing and informing each other as they come into physical contact.