Viewing page 79 of 83

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

THE ARTISTS

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was born in Staten Island, NY, and came to Los Angeles with his parents when he was four years old. Expelled from Fairfax High for gambling, he haunted the jazz clubs on Central Avenue, briefly attending Chouinard and Jepson Art Schools before leaving academia without a degree. He proceed to make art on his own terms, illustrating album covers, writing a song with blues great Jimmy Witherspoon, and becoming a shrewd and ferocious gambler with a deep love of poetry in both art and life. A non-conformist by nature, he eschewed a 'formal' art career, refinishing old furniture for a living, and, in 1955, founding the small, but influential mail art publication Semina -- a brilliant, loose-leaf compilation of the most advanced artists and poets of his time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jess (Collins), Joan Brown, Robert Duncan, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, and Berman himself. In 1957 he exhibited his work at Walter Hopps' and Ed Kienholz's burgeoning Ferus Gallery, a show that was promptly shut down by the LAPD and led to his arrest and conviction on obscenity charges. Between 1955 to 1966, he also made his first and only film, titled Aleph (for the Hebrew letter) after the artist's untimely death at age 50.

Today, Berman is best known for his verifax collages, softly sepia-colored works created with a forerunner of the photocopy machine. Influenced by surrealism, assemblage, and contemporary artists like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, Berman produced multi-layered works that combined the picture of a hand-held transistor radio with images culled from newspapers and popular magazines. Fascinated by women, he often used the female figure, infusing it both with a raw sexuality and metaphysical overtones. Hebrew letters appear frequently in his work, alluding to his interest in Jewish mysticism and the Cabbala, an arcane religious text that requires the imaginative decoding of hidden symbols and signs. Art is Love is God was Berman's motto, and he explored it relentlessly in art works steeped in metaphor, spirituality, and sex.

"All his images," the poet Jack Hirschman wrote about Berman, "have about them a texture of tough bodily concentrated realism mixed with demonic funk-sense of the forlorn and violent eros of wanderers in the lush Los Angeles night of the '60s." Famously reclusive and given to a purist pursuit of art for art's sake, Berman labored in obscurity for most of his life, sharing his art only with close friends and associates. Following disastrous show at the Ferus Gallery, he didn't exhibit his work again until 1966, after he had returned to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. His Semina magazine was a strictly underground phenomenon that rarely reached more than 300 people, a private sharing of poetic musings and epiphanies rather than a commercial statement. Only nine editions appeared until 1964, the last one ending with a version of the notorious news photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet, despite his intense privacy and decidedly non-commercial stance, Berman was highly influential -- a cult hero and "guru" of sorts, who greatly influenced the generation that followed.

Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) was born in Denver, CO, but moved with his parents to Southern California as a youngster. He began his studies at Riverside Junior College in 1949 and joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a fighter pilot four years later. After his discharge in 1957, he studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a masters degree in art in 1960 and founding the department of photography there three years later. From early on in his career, Heinecken deployed unconventional processes and an irreverent attitude toward the photographic image that flew in the face of everything the medium was supposed to be. He rarely used a camera, relying instead on appropriated imagery culled from newspapers and illustrated magazines. Like Berman, he refused to treat art works as autonomous creations, focusing instead on "found images" that he manipulated to often witty and sarcastic effects, using techniques like lithography, etching, camera-less exposure, and photo emulsion on canvas.

In stark contrast to West Coast masters like Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, Heinecken once noted that there is "a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph. Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own." His perhaps most influential portfolio Are You Rea of 1964-68 was made by passing light onto photographic paper through the pages of an illustrated magazine instead of a negative. The resulting pictures showed both sides of the printed page