An Aesthetic of Nostalgia by Sophia Zweifel

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An Aesthetic of Nostalgia:

Wallace Berman and his Proximity to the Object

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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 widein the expanse of open terrain, the city became a breeding ground for the consumer-basedsociety that was the foundation of the new America.1 With no art school, no art critics, nomunicipal 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 societalconventions. 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 suffered from the social repressions of the McCarthy era and the threats and hostility thatcame with acting outside of the norm,4 the lack of audience and critical interest that they werefaced 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-existingartistic 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 theireclectic choice of music, to their nonconformity with the structure of the American nuclearfamily, this alternative group was pushed into the margins of an increasingly standardizedsociety. Instead of rejecting this exclusionary state, Bermans community actively cultivated it,sheltering itself by developing strong interpersonal bonds and a fortied collective sense ofcultural 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 productionand reception of Bermans work, rather than studying the actual artworks themselves. Richard

1 Rebecca Solnit, Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-1961, inBeat 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.


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Candida Smith argues that Berman focused attention away from the artwork as an object toits 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 receivedthem, 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 agreethat the interrelationships of Bermans close-knit circle are key to understanding the receptionof Bermans oeuvre, it is necessary to consider that the ties between members were, in fact,strengthened through the physical objects themselves. Signicantly, it was the very appearanceof age and history upon these objects that instigated sensorial and participatory interactionsbetween 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 fortied itself with an identity rooted in a history ofunderground 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 natureof his artwork. In looking at Bermans work, it becomes apparent that the materiality of the artobjects 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 physicalhistory, 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 intensied 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 worksunique and singular, and therefore more wholly proximate and palpable to their beholders. It was in Bermans apartment that his early artworks were rst informally exhibitedor, rather, encountered, alongside a panoply of other found objects. Bermans residence becamethe communal space where relationships within the Beat circle were cultivated. His homecame to be felt by his friends as a welcoming and inviting space of natural interactions ratherthan a place of formal, hosted entertainment. Charles Brittin, a Los Angeles photographerand member of Bermans circle, whose photographic work is now considered a signicant

visual record of the underground art scene in the city at the time, once recalled of Bermanshospitality: He wouldnt put on a show or entertain you. People came happily and sat downand left a few hours later. What happened is that youd listen to some music and youd smokesome pot and talk and look at things. What I enjoyed most was not the conversation butthe 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 ofCalifornia Press, 1995), 215.


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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010

6 Michael Duncan, Wallace Berman and His Circle: Introduction, inSemina Culture: Wallace Bermanand 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 descriptionsuggests that the clutter of what has come to be seen as the typical Beat apartment actuallyparticipated in the construction of the social relationships of the Beat circle. Te group wasdrawn to the physical objects that surrounded them in Bermans domestic space, and found

pleasure in interacting with them. In leang through pages of books, sifting through photo-graphs, and stumbling upon old news stories, visitors to the apartment discovered the play ofchance 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 hisfriends 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 anobject can lack a connection to a viewers specic past, it can still manage to inspire a sense ofhistory through its physical appearance. It follows, then, that nostalgia can be felt for a pastone does not know, a longing for history itself. Such a general sense of history is implicit inthe very materiality of these objects: from the worn spines of books to the fragments of papersoftened by handling. Within these patinas of time lies a sedimentary record of the objectsprevious 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 alsoto the accreted histories of these objects handling.

Although undeniably cluttered and likely accidental in its arrangement, Bermanscollection appears to have embodied a system of ordering not unlike that which existed inCabinets 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 physicalremains of the holy gures 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 werenot only worshipped by owners and pilgrims for their divine transcendence, but also for theircorporealitytheir 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 exchangedand acquired property.9 As mentioned earlier, Berman and his friends were likewise attractedto an assortment of objects upon which a physical history was inscribed through successiveownership, readings, and handling.

Another element linking the owners of cabinets to Berman lies in the formers un-


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orthodox methods of arranging the items of their collections. Many collectors would haveperceived their cabinets as microcosms of the universe, making it their duty to seek out anddiscover all of its parts and piece them together within the order of the cabinet.10 It is thismethod 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 ofCuriosities were not chaotic bodies and they revolved around ordering and classication, thedifference between the cabinets and later rational systems of classication such as the ency-clopedia was the way in which cabinet collectors were always looking for oddities, items thatdid not t within existing norms. Terefore, in their search for deviations and mysteriousobjects, collectors of curiosities were constantly in the process of disrupting, and reconstruct-ing, the established order. Rather than impose rational structures upon the world, Cabinetsof Curiosities functioned to shape a notion of universal order out of their found, physicalcontents.

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 encounters12 like thatof the Cabinets of Curiosities: an arena in which stumbled upon, decontextualized objectscontested 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 apartmentin these same terms, as a space functioning as an arena or theatre in which meaning is createdthrough spontaneity, discovery, and chance. Permitting its occupants to create meaning fromits contents with unprecedented freedom, the living room became a space where the outside

worlds condence 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. PatrickMauris compares the gure of the collector to Walter Benjamins bibliophile, claiming thatboth characters make use of the full gamut of infantile modes of acquisition, from holding itin his hands to the nal culmination of giving it a name.14 Te idea of the collectors desireto classify and name what he discovers as a means of appropriation resonates with Bermansadoption of the Aleph symbol in his artwork. As the rst letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Alephsignies 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 identied 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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16 Ibid., 135.17 Leah Ollman, Counterculture: Flowers of Friendship, Art in America94 (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 theFerus show in response to an anonymous complaint. Te officials had difficulty locating the offending subjectmatter in the show, not recognizing the overarching themes of violence, sexuality, and religion inherent to theshow. Looking right past the extremely prevalent sexual imagery hanging from the centre-piece assemblage,Cross ,the squad identied a drawing done by the artist Cameron as the incriminating factor of the show. Te drawing was included in the rst issue of Bermans magazineSemina , 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 ofCabinets of Curiositiesdirectors of their own model universes. Bermans roles as owner andorderer of his own chaotic collection may be read as symbolic of his insertion and adoption ofthe Aleph symbol in his artwork. Berman repeatedly painted this symbol over photographs,

on the pages of his magazine publicationSemina , and even on the front of his motorcycle hel-met. Whatever his exact motivation may have been, Bermans interests in artistic creation andcollecting must have contributed towards his desire to align himself with the Aleph symbol.

While the naming and classication of objects are some of the types of appropriationinherent to collecting, another lies in the desire to touch and hold the collected object, whichhas 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 denition 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 beenmade accessible. Te accumulation of books, papers, records, and miscellaneous objects llingBermans 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 turnreected in his art, which evoked both mysticism and ephemerality. Te Hebrew lettering thatdominated Bermans art, from photography to collage to sculpture, identied with the occultin a manner that was more related to the aura of tradition and mystery than with the actualKabbalah doctrines. Leah Ollman asserts that he used the letters liberally in his work fortheir 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 thepainted inscriptions. Berman explained that the Hebrew letters had no specic, translatablesense, and that he simply liked the decorative form of the lettering and the moods that theshapes evoked.19 Te letters, then, were arranged not according to their spiritual meaning, but


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20 Stephen Fredman, Surrealism Meets Kabbalah: Wallace Berman and the Semina Poets, inSeminaCulture: Wallace Berman and His Circle , ed. Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed ArtPublishers, 2005), 47. Berman makes artistic allusions to the tradition not for its specic religious principles, butrather to evoke his own history and memory as a Jewish American in Los Angeles. At this point in history, theHebrew 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 Bermansdepiction of Hebrew letters on photographs, in assemblages, on parchment, and upon stones, is their allusion tosuffering and disappearance (ibid., 47-48).21 Kristine McKenna, Wallace Berman and Photography, inSemina Culture: Wallace Berman and HisCircle , 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 agedquality 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 tohis 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 inhis 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 andpaints, stained and yellowed paper torn at the edges, and residues of glue and debris. Tesetypes of manipulations yielded not only the impression of age upon the works, but created anarticially accumulated history for them. Looking as though they had been passed from handto hand, exposed to the ravages of time and the worlds elements, Bermans objects appear tohave undergone a historic and mystical journey. Te Veritas Panel was one of the four major assemblages in the Ferus exhibition. Withits articially aged wood and aura of concealed secrets, the work is reminiscent of a Cabinet ofCuriosities of antique origins whose enigmatic doors and compartments have gone unopenedfor a lengthy period of time. Like the cabinets, this artworks rectangular wooden surface isreplete with doors, drawers, and other niche-like spaces that incite further exploration of thepiece. A small rock bearing ambiguous Hebrew lettering is held by leather bands forming across, 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 ofHebrew lettering, while on its reverse side appears the number twelve, considered an orderingnumber, as it represents both the number of apostles, and the number of Kabbalah paintingsincluded in the show.22 A second, much smaller door is placed at the top of the panel: on itsfront is a small, hardly legible letter, while behind it Berman had placed a small mirror. Despitethe works opacity, viewers interacted with the piece, opening and closing its doors, and run-


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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 barelylegible letters, and disjunctive imagery evoked mystery, the occult. Indeed, upon viewing theirown reections 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 viewersinteracted in a bodily fashion with the works contrived history within the present time of theexhibition.

Tis aesthetic of distressing also carried through into Bermans photography. Althoughnot skilled in the darkroom, or even overly adept at the mechanics of the camera, Bermannevertheless employed specic photographic processes intended to alter the physical appear-ance of the printed photographs. In so doing, he demonstrated an interesting conception ofphotography that differed from the notion of the reproducible, time-enduring photograph.Known to destroy the negatives after printing his photos,23 Berman was in fact granting theimages back their transience and restoring their ephemerality, perhaps in an attempt to makethem 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 toachieve an effect of age similar to that of his paper and wood pieces. Te process is describedby 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 darkroomtechnique called reticulation, which involves a slight alteration in the process of washing thenegative. 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 recallsintroducing the effect 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 wouldfurther the illusion of age and history by tearing the photographs edges,25 converting it into amemento or found object of some kind rather than a mechanicallikeness of an object or per-son. What is then created by these photographs is a dual embedding of memory: the record ofthat which is represented by the photograph, as well as the history of the photograph itself asan object. Terefore, Bermans photographs could be qualied ashyper-nostalgic , as they clingto both the photographed, captured and frozen in time as they become image, as well as thephotographs own corporeality, emphasized by its own material traces collected over its timeas a physical object. Roland Barthes explores the implications of photographys ability to arrest peopleand things in time. Tis process of recording both preserves its subjects by documenting them,

yet simultaneously kills them through their objectication upon being photographed. Barthes

23 McKenna, 30524 Ibid., 308.25 Ibid.


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writes: When we dene 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 fasteneddown, like butteries.26 Te idea of butteries 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 ofthe 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 itselfmore proximate and tangible to its viewer through his extra-photographic processes, Bermanamplies 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 Bermanpasted them onto cardboard and sent them to his friends and collaborators through the mail(g. 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, andadding to the articial patina of Bermans development process. By sending the mailer to aspecic 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 inthe possession of the recipient, the art object was his or hers to hold onto, to place atop a stackof paper, or to store in a box, only to nd it again days or years later and experience it all overagain. Each successive interaction with the object by its owner held within it the memory ofprevious experiences, from its initial arrival in the recipients mailbox, to all that occurred sincethat time.

Berman used mailers such as these to approach contributors with brief requests forsubmissions to his nearly annual art magazine,Semina . Produced on a minor scale and mailedout only to Bermans friends and artistic colleagues, the magazine was intimate in scale andin 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: Reections on Photography , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 57.27 Kenneth Calhoon, Personal Effects: 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 experienceof leang through images of his recently deceased mother. Barthes attempts to locate what, if anything, in theimages gives him the strongest and most accurate sense of his mothers character. Kenneth Calhoun exploreshow, interestingly, it was not the cameras ability to record his mothers likeness that gave Barthes the greatestremembrance of his mothers self, but instead this remembrance was achieved by the photographs that containedthe specic objects he had come to associate with her in his sensational memory. It would seem that objects, intheir interactions with ones senses, have an enormous capability to store memory. Photographic representations ofthe fabric of his mothers dress stirred in him the memory of how that fabric once felt against his face. Te imageof her powder box also caused him to recollect the sound it made as she closed its lida sound, as Calhoon pointsout, 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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Fig. 1. Wallace Berman,Collage Mailer to Cameron, 1962. Mixed media collage on paper. Photograph of Cameronby Wallace Berman, 1955. Courtesy of Wallace Berman Estate.


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Fig. 2. Wallace Berman,Untitled , 1961-62. Verifax collage, 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of Wallace BermanEstate.

29 Michael Duncan, Semina as Art, inSemina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle , ed. Michael Duncanand 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 magazinesreader, but a construction of meaning based on chance. Meaning itself became ephemeraland purely dependent upon the inclination of the viewer, as, like the loose-leaf pages, it couldbe constantly shuffled and reconstructed.Semina served to replicate the same kind of chancemeaning engendered by the decontextualized, stumbled upon, items of interest discovered

within Bermans home.30 In this way, Semina s readers became entwined with the art objectitself: their reading of the magazine became an inextricable part of its history and identity. Te manual nature of Semina s assembly and production resulted in an ephemeralitythat, 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 hishand-pressed journal, as they utilized the contemporary technology of the Verifax machine,a precursor to the photocopier (g. 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 emphasizedthe 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 inhis Verifax collages. Upon closely examining Bermans Verifax productions, Candida Smith

observes of Bermans technique that the process was so primitive that no two prints werealike. He built the collages layer by layer by rerunning the paper through the system to addanother image. While the paper was still wet, he often rubbed out sections or applied otherchemicals by hand to alter the image.31 Bermans efforts appear to perpetuate his tradition ofrendering his works immediate to their viewers through their singularity. Nevertheless, thesecollages took on a signicantly different nature than his previous endeavors such asSemina and his collaged mailers, as they fullled more public and political objectives. Bermans emergence from the underground coincided with a signicant change inhis art and the type of viewing it encouraged. Borrowing visual strategies from contempo-rary mass media such as lm and television, Berman created a degree of separation betweenaudience 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 ratherthey communicated their meaning as representations. By nature of the reproducibility of suchrepresentational works, Bermans Verifax works would have expanded his artistic reach to amuch larger arena of public reception. It was while he was producing the Verifax collagesthat Berman became publicly involved in the Civil Rights Movement and began to join theranks of anti-Vietnam protesters. Tese acts of public engagement had previously been morethe province of the avant-garde than of Bermans bohemian circle. With this gradual shift inactivity, Berman emerged from the sheltered underground to join the avant-garde in spirit andintention:

His efforts at community building came to an end. Te counterculture had emergedas a projection onto mass culture of the private ideas that had motivated Berman andhis peers. Inevitably, incorporation into the mass media meant deformation. Bermanhad 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 handthen was to pose more sharply the ability of aesthetic production to sever the powerof 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 andestablishing a freedom of identity. Berman brought this aesthetic to a new public platform


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by using the mechanically created poster-like pieces to disseminate his imagery in a relativelyreproducible form. Temes of reproduction and public exposure that are apparent in Bermans decisionto 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, aconstantly shifting image seems to haphazardly oat in upon the airwaves. Te collages varyaccording 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 elementssuch as textured backgrounds or Kabbalah lettering. Although the collages differ from oneanother in their overall appearance, common to all of the Verifax works was the way in whichthey 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 innite disorder, emphasizing a contrast betweenstructure and chaos. Te irrational collection of specimens found upon the radio airwaves resists easy com-prehension and categorization, and was perhaps left in disarray specically for the viewer topiece together. Te imagery displayed within the casements ranged from motifs of the occultthat 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 publicobjective by chaotically presenting to their viewers the repeated images of popular culturethat continuously invaded the homes of the masses. By juxtaposing the latter with obsceneand obscure imagery, the collages undercut the often passive way in which mass culture isexperienced. Te disorder of the images granted the audience agency to construct their ownmeaning out of what was presented to them, a privilege that was perhaps regularly denied tothem when encountering the same imagery in a mass cultural context. Similar to the unboundpages 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, unreec-tive consumption of mass cultural products. Te collages therefore allowed their audience afreedom of interpretation by challenging the enforced rational structures imposed upon thepublic on a daily basis by contemporary mass media. Bermans Verifax works therefore managed to address a broader public through theartists 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 andinterpret the artworks content. In that sense, the Verifax collages provide a signicant 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 alarger public, and therefore kept them separate and protected from the rigid society he and hisbohemian friends chose to disassociate with. In attempting to keep a circle intimate enoughto remain detached from their overwhelming, immediate present, Berman further bolstered


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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 theart 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 ownfriends 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 suchcircles had less to do with their socio-political agendas and cultural interventions than theirnotions 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 thepast? 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 seencapable 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 threatenedto engulf him. As transformation from historic present into historic past was occurring moreand more rapidly,34 those who chose an alternative pace began to run a greater risk of beingforgotten by the mainstream. Tis phenomenon, dened by Frederic Jameson as historicalamnesia, is described as the way in which our entire contemporary social system has littleby little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, [and] has begun to live in a perpetualpresent and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier socialinformation have had, in one way or another, to preserve.35 Bermans nostalgic aesthetic canthus be seen as actively resisting the perpetual cultural transformation Jameson speaks of: bydrawing attention to the constructed histories of his art objects, Berman attempts to conservethe traditions of the past. Te Semina circle became a refuge for individuals from a society that

33 Semina s conception in particular had much to do with Bermans own personal interest in historic artcollectives, specically those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Te journals inclusions of texts frompoets 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 (g. 3), it becomes evident that hisact of self-fashioning owes something to the collective artistic circles that preceded him. Berman photographedhimself reclining upon his desk, his hand-press in the foreground, while behind him hangs a framed print ofHenri Fantin-Latours Around the Table , completed in 1872. Te painting, originally intended as a tribute to therecently deceased Baudelaire, features a literary circle including poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, among others. In thephotograph, taken in 1955, the year of Bermans rstSemina publication, the artist draws a parallel between theavant-garde circle of poets and writers of the mid-nineteenth century and his own contemporariesindividualsbrought together into a collective throughSemina , alluded to through the presence in the pictures foreground ofthe 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 ofmass 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 aperiod of forty years. In a given persons life, the previous decade was becoming more and more alien to his or herimmediate present.35 Ibid., 20.


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Fig. 3. Wallace Berman, Self-Portrait, Crater Lane, 1955. Photograph. Courtesy of Wallace Berman Estate.


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not only persecuted them for their unconventional lifestyles, but also seemed to alienate themfor their failure to keep pace with the changing times. For some, the constant state of changeinherent 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 objectsthey surrounded themselves with. In this way, Bermans circle behaved similarly to the col-lector who feels an attachment to his accumulated objects for their xed, 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 ofux.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, harboringthe existence of all who encountered them. Bermans artwork attracted an interest in its beholders, not unlike the fascinationgenerated 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 callscultural museumication, 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 contemporaryculture, victims of the capriciousness of contemporary tastes. Yet, by engaging with the objectsanewreading the books and newspaper clippings, playing the older records, or putting to usean old printing pressBermans visitors allowed for such objects to continue to participate incontemporary 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-guardingagainst the changeableness of society. Te social, personal, and physical interactions betweenthese pieces and their beholders, helped to construct his groups identity, one strongly rootedin 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 transformedinto history. Bermans works, even as they were being created, were slowly becoming the fasci-nating clutter that lled the apartments of the members of his circle.

36 Mauris, 7.37 Lbbe, 161.

Documents

An Aesthetic of Nostalgia by Sophia Zweifel