Beat poet’s version of Pop Art

"Wallace Berman 1927­1976"

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/art/81611/wallace-berman-19271976-at-nicole-klagsbrun-art-review

Wallace Berman created a Beat poet's version of Pop Art.

Nicole Klagsbrun, through Sat 9.

by Anne Doran
Dec 31, 2009­Jan 13, 2010

Artist, poet (under the pseudonym Pantale Xantos) and avatar of cool,
Wallace Berman was friend and mentor to a group of artists and
writers associated with California's Beat culture of the 1950s and
'60s. His fame within these circles was in contrast to his near-total
public obscurity: His only solo exhibition at a gallery during his
lifetime­at L.A.'s legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957­was shut down by
the LAPD's vice squad the day it opened. Recent posthumous
exhibitions have emphasized Berman's activities as a collector and
disseminator of ideas, conducted largely through Semina, the
hand-printed, unbound art and literary journal he distributed to
friends. This show focuses on Berman's art, which was at once
hardboiled and ecstatic.

Works range from the youthful jazz-themed surrealist drawing that
graces the cover of a bebop LP to rocks painted with nonsensical
strings of Hebrew letters, to Berman's signature Verifax
photocollages. Included are rebuslike works that often featured the
multiplied image of a hand holding a transistor radio, with found
pictures­mandalas, snakes, mushrooms, crosses, fighter jets, film
stars and porn­inserted in place of the radio's speaker. Aleph
(1956­66), his first and only movie, reprises the motifs of sex,
death and transformation found in the rest of the show.

If Berman's "seeing" radios have a spooky similarity to smart phones,
they couldn't be farther apart­their transmissions proposed, instead
of a million subcultures of one, a single counterculture dedicated to
love, faith and art. "I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet
awaits it/preferably religious sweet planets no money..." wrote Allen
Ginsberg in 1958. By the 1960s, Warhol's more pragmatic arrangement
with consumer culture had prevailed. Perhaps though, there are
synesthetic life-forms on faraway worlds swaying to the syncopated
rhythms of Berman's transcendentalist Pop.

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