calendario eventi  :: 

X

17/10/2006

3 exhibition

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA, Berkeley

Semina Culture

Wallace Berman & His Circle

Oct 18 2006 - Dec 10 2006

The exhibition Semina Culture revolves around Wallace Berman—artist, poet, and, above all else, catalyst for a group of mid-twentieth-century artists, performers, and poets commonly referred to as Beat. Between 1955 and 1964, among his other activities, Berman published nine issues of the unbound magazine Semina, which he printed on a hand press and distributed to friends through the mail. As exhibition co-curator Michael Duncan wrote, “Semina was sent out like a surprise communication from an erratic correspondent . . . and soon became an underground legend." The magazine serves as the organizing principle for the exhibition, which features works by its contributors—including artists Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner, poets Michael McClure and David Meltzer, performers and countercultural figures Dennis Hopper and Russ Tamblyn, among many others—as well as portraits and ephemera documenting an extraordinary yet under-recognized moment in postwar American artistic and literary culture.

Semina was a loose-leaf journal published sporadically in editions of a few hundred; each issue consisted of a folder or envelope containing a random ordering of drawings, collages, photographs, and poetry by Berman and his circle along with poets and artists he admired from the past. More than the sum of its parts, Semina is an artwork, “a new kind of assemblage of images and text," according to Duncan. Duncan draws connections between Semina and the Boite en Valise (1941-66), a witty gathering of miniaturized artworks by artist and gamesman Marcel Duchamp; the “little magazines" of the 1920s, such as Transition, Dial, and Broom; and especially the 1940s journal View (copies of which Berman owned), which presented poetry and features on artists like Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, who also designed the magazine's covers. (An example of Duchamp's Boite as well as works by Cornell and Man Ray are currently on view in the BAM exhibition Measure of Time.)

The heart of Berman's activities was a small house on Crater Lane in Los Angeles (photographer Charles Brittin called it an “artistic dissemination center"), where young artists gathered informally and were exposed to Berman's eclectic passions, which included French poets Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Eluard, radical playwright Antonin Artaud, and German mystical writer Hermann Hesse, as well as the Kabbalah and new jazz and classical recordings. Brittin described the atmosphere at the house: “People came happily and sat down and left four hours later. What happened is that you'd listen to some music and smoke some pot and talk and look at things."

Although the core of Berman's circle lived in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area—Jay DeFeo, John Altoon, Arthur Richer, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Ben Talbert, Jean Conner, Jess, Cameron, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Michael McClure, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer, Robert Alexander, John Reed, Larry Jordan, Patricia Jordan, Bob Kaufman, Dennis Hopper, and Llyn Foulkes were key figures—it also included avant-gardists centered at Black Mountain College (Robert Duncan, Jess, and John Wieners) as well as New York poets (Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima) and Warhol Factory filmmakers (Jack Smith and Taylor Mead). Semina Culture includes paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, assemblages, artifacts, and poetry by all of these artists and others, over fifty in all, illustrating their artistic and intellectual interactions. Many of them are also represented in a large selection of Berman's photographic portraits, several of which have never been seen before this exhibition.

The exhibition also includes a selection of Berman's Verifax collages, the artistic works for which he is best known. These works feature a grid of repeated images (made using an early form of photocopying) of a hand-held transistor radio. Within the rectangular space of the radio appear images drawn from newspapers along with the Hebrew letter aleph, the Egyptian ankh, and other hermetic symbols (Berman was a devotee of esoteric mysticism, games, and systems). There are frequent references to jazz, French poetry, and sports figures.

Berman withdrew from public exhibition of his work after his 1957 show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles was closed by the police and he was charged with public obscenity. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1976, the day before his fiftieth birthday. Berman's slogan “Art is Love is God" sums up his belief that life, religion, and aesthetics are inseparable, a point of view made richly manifest in Semina.

Constance Lewallen. Senior Curator for Exhibitions

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle has been organized for the Santa Monica Museum of Art by co-curators Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna.

Support for the exhibition and catalog Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle has been provided by: Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, Charles Brittin, LLWW Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pasadena Art Alliance. The presentation of the exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum is supported by the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley.

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Grapefruit

Conceptual Art in the BAM Collections

Oct 18 2006 - Mar 28 2007

"My paintings, which are all instruction paintings (and meant for others to do), come after collage and assemblage (1915) and happening (1950) came into the art world. Considering the nature of my painting, any of the above three words or a new word can be used instead of the word painting. But I like the old word painting because it immediately connects with “wall painting" painting, and it is nice and funny."—Yoko Ono

It was in 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London that Yoko Ono first met her future husband John Lennon, and later that year, she presented him with a copy of her book of instruction pieces, Grapefruit. Years afterward, Lennon cited the powerful effect the book had on him, inspiring him to write his lyrical masterpiece and hymn to peace “Imagine."

The Berkeley Art Museum is delighted to present an exhibition of Yoko Ono's instruction paintings selected from that groundbreaking publication. Gracefully expressive, enchanting, and original, the paintings are presented as wall texts that fill the gallery in the same way that paintings on canvas do. However, the conceptual nature of the art offers the beholder a means of taking the paintings home in the form of a do-it-yourself idea.

In the spirit of imagination, and as a kind of homage, we have included among the instruction paintings on view all those in which the word “imagine" appears, including spring 1963's Cloud Piece (“Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in"), which also appears on Lennon's Imagine album sleeve.

In addition to the instruction paintings, a few ephemeral works from the museum's collection, such as an edition of Grapefruit and a brochure from the exhibition Yoko at Indica, will be shown, as will a copy of Lennon's Imagine LP. Sparingly interspersed among the instruction paintings, like puffy clouds in a clear sky, will be a few watercolors—images of sky—by Ono's fellow Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks.

Born in Japan in 1933, Ono, a pioneer of Conceptual art, has lived her life combining her talents as artist and poet, musician, and tireless advocate for peace and love. Grapefruit was originally published in Japan in 1964 in an edition of 500 copies. It has since been reprinted in many languages and editions. Yoko Ono has generously donated IMAGINE PEACE buttons to be distributed free to viewers throughout the course of the exhibition. Special thanks for her support of the exhibition, and for permission to reproduce the texts in this fashion.

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Allen Ruppersberg

The singing posters

Oct 18 2006 - Dec 10 2006

Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg began his career in the radical environment of 1960s Los Angeles, exploring cultural narratives and mythologies using very ordinary materials such as postcards, newspaper articles, books, and magazines from his personal collections, often to humorous effect. In his installation The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg's Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Part I) (2003), on view in Gallery 1, Ruppersberg plasters a room with hundreds of Day-Glo posters of Ginsberg's famous poem, which was banned as obscene when first published by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in 1956. Ruppersberg has written out Ginsberg's poem both normally and phonetically, so that “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" becomes “Y SAW thuh BEST MYNDS uhv my je-nuh-RAY-shin di-STOYED BY Mad-nis." The Singing Posters is both an homage to the celebrated Beat poet and a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make “Howl" accessible to future generations.

Also part of the installation are notebooks with copies of newspaper articles, magazine ads, concert programs, and ephemera from the period to deepen the visitor's understanding of the spirit, politics, and culture of the late 1950s and sixties. Ruppersberg's projects are typically informative and educational (even as they are parodic), based on his belief that art and life should be interchangeable.

More works by Ginsberg and other artists, poets, and writers from the Beat period are on view in Galleries 2 and 3 in the exhibition Semina Culture.

Dara Solomon. Curatorial Assistant

BAM/PFA
2626 Bancroft Way - Berkeley

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