Paper Monument

“Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle”
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
January 16 – March 31, 2007

In a memorable passage from Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert describes a day in the life of Pellerin, a second-rate artist. Pellerin wishes to paint the portrait of a model among “a silver dish containing a bunch of flowers, an amber rosary, a dagger and a casket of old, yellowish ivory, overflowing with gold sequins.” In order to create this lavish scene,Flaubert writes, Pellerin “fetch[ed] a packing-case, which he placed on the platform to represent the step; then taking a stool to do duty as a balustrade, he laid on it, by way of accessories, his jacket, a shield, a tin of sardines, a packet of pens, and a knife; and after scattering a dozen ten-centime pieces in front of [the model], he made her take up her pose.” While spoofing those artists whose work, unlike his own, refuses representational honesty, Flaubert also offers here a presciently modern take on how art’s creative labor might proceed, through the scattering and reusing of “accessories”— the handy, previously manufactured detritus of everyday life. Pellerin, Flaubert suggests, is a mediocre artist not at all because he employs haphazardly arranged, modest odds and ends as elements of his practice, but rather because, once selected, these elements are smoothed over in the service of a fetishized, idealized art, disregarding life’s loose, rough randomness.

In the handsome catalogue for “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” a traveling exhibition co-curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna for the Santa Monica Museum of Art and recently on show at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, one comes across an image of aesthetic practice to which, to speculate wildly, Flaubert might have turned a kinder eye. In a black-and-white photograph taken by Berman himself (Self-Portrait, 707 Scott Street, San Francisco, 1960), an oval mirror reflects the fuzzy likeness of this influential West Coast artist. Photographs of his friends are tacked up below the mirror, some resting on a crowded shelf, which also accommodates, among other things, a volume of Ezra Pound’s poetry, a can of spray paint, and, inexplicably, what looks like the pristine bone of a large animal. Berman’s bearded face and raised arms levitate over this scene, as if giving benediction to whichever meaning may arise from the slew of seemingly disparate artifacts grouped beneath his reflection.

Although this photograph is not itself exhibited in “Semina Culture,” its depiction of a shaggy yet somehow coherent scene of assemblage perfectly captures the tenor of this revealing show, which explores the sympathetic affinities among the painters, writers, performers, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors who formed an underground artistic community around Berman and his work. Born in 1926, in Staten Island, and raised in Los Angeles, Berman was a collagist, photographer, and poet who had only one commercial gallery show during his lifetime (he was killed by a drunk driver on the eve of his fiftieth birthday). He had been a key countercultural figure in the West Coast art scene in the 1950s and 60s largely due to his role as the publisher of the avant-garde journal Semina, which he produced between 1955 and 1964. Each issue of the journal consisted of a sheaf of hand-printed, reshuffle-able, arbitrarily arranged visuals and texts primarily distributed through the mail.

Rather than a slick fetish whose production history has been occluded, Semina was itself conceived in the spirit of collaborative assemblage—a mutable work of art whose open-endedness implied an ongoing remaking of meaning in its fabrication as well as its reception. And while the potential participatory anarchy of Semina’s nine issues is naturally tempered in “Semina Culture” by their static display in vitrines, the richness of the journal shines through nonetheless, in the idiosyncratic juxtapositions each issue makes between media, stylistic approaches, and themes. Semina 5, for instance, includes a black-and-white photograph by Berman of the poet Philip Lamantia shooting up, a Beardsleyesque ink drawing of a monster by artist and poet John Reed, and an enigmatic archeological image of a Mayan stone phallus by photographer Charles Brittin, along with several poems. Semina 8 contains a found image of a mummy in a dress, a fragment of an Artaud poem, and a photographic collage by Berman, which joins an image of a horse-drawn chariot with the face of Ray Charles. The minimal Semina 3, conversely, consists of only two works: Berman’s close-up photograph of the front and back view of a gnarled peyote button, and Michael McClure’s long “Peyote Poem,” written under the influence of the drug. The subject of the two works is an apt metaphor for Semina’s effect on its audience: a small but potent dose, this journal, despite its limited run, served as an aesthetic and spiritual game-opener for those who had a taste of it, forming the extended cultural sphere that is comprehensively explored in the rest of the show.

Despite some unevenness that should be expected in any exhibition that includes work from fifty-three artists, “Semina Culture” is nonetheless packed with many odd and lovely gems. Among them is the delightful Untitled (Jody and boyfriend, Wallace and girlfriend, and Loree Foxx, 1950), a Miró-like chalk and pastel drawing in shades of brown of a lonesome cubist gal gazing jealously at her paired-off friends, by the actress Lorree Foxx; the artist/ occultist Cameron’s proto-heavy metal drawings of Gothic sprites and mystics; and John Altoon’s doodly, lewd Untitled (woman, garden hose & boy, 1966), which practically buzzes with energy and seems to foretell the aesthetics of later West Coast luminaries such as Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley. The work of filmmaker and choreographer Toni Basil (of “Oh Mickey” fame) is represented in a few experimental movies, among them the short 16 mm A Dance Film Inspired by Jim Morrison (1968), in which dancers in white face groove out in photomontage on a black backdrop to the music of Jimi Hendrix, evoking equal parts Hair and Martha Graham. Also on display are Berman’s own collages, which assemble popular found images to productive, critical effect. In Untitled (Lenny Bruce, 1963), the top of the comedian’s head is torn off and juxtaposed with an image of a policeman, fist crashing down. The suture between the two images dissolves in a bouquet of leaves and tattered butterfly wings, a refashioned crown of thorns for a countercultural saint whose true greatness is recognized only by a select few.

This sense of a discrete scene, consistently defining itself against the grain, is nowhere more apparent than in the many photographic portraits that are included in the show. “Semina Culture” features photographs by Berman himself, Charles Brittin, and, to a more limited extent, Dennis Hopper, Ralph Gibson, and Patricia Jordan. Most of these document what appear at first as everyday, informal moments—the poet David Meltzer, his wife, Tina, and their infant son huddled in a doorway, the gorgeous Shirley Berman, Wallace’s wife, in an army coat, Diane DiPrima getting her hair combed, Berman on his motorcycle. A second glance, how- ever, reveals these photos’ keen historical intentionality, and they begin to read less as casual depictions and more as moments of arrested, self-aware performance. Steadily gazing into the camera, in canyons and on street corners, among bits and pieces of their own creation, clad in striped shirts, leather jackets, scuffed Converse sneakers, or, occasionally, nothing at all, the impossibly glamorous subjects of these photographs were obviously engaging in the mythologizing of their own ragtag community.

Bohemia’s self-definition as what Bourdieu has dubbed “a genuine society within a society” has much to do with the rejection of the tenets of midcentury bourgeois capitalism. Tellingly, many of the Semina photos weren’t even printed, much less exhibited, before the installation of this show. In these artists’ hands, photography became an act rather than an end, upholding not the production of concrete, marketable effects but the notion of communal engagement, alive in its moment—a bravura performance of group identity that seems to have been directed inward. The resulting images have a pleasing, dreamlike quality, presciently hinting at the ephemeral nature of the scene they sought to document.

More Dada than Pop, much of the work presented in this show doesn’t mimic the glossy surfaces of the commercial world, offering instead a reconstruction of its elements. This is a point metaphorically driven home in a letter Berman wrote in 1962 to David Meltzer, in which he shared his response to his wife’s request to buy her some shampoo: “She say Breck i say Dreck.” This nursery-rhymish phrase turns corporate, shiny-hair adspeak into junky, Jewish-y shit that is constitutionally undesirable and, therefore, is always already situated beyond the reach of the marketplace. Berman’s midcentury method stands in direct opposition to that of Flaubert’s Pellerin: he is turning the silver dish back into a tin of sardines, the balustrade into a stool, the Breck into Dreck. In other words, he is differentiating between a life lived and a life branded and directed towards the calcified niches of the market.

From a contemporary perspective, such a stance might appear positively prehistoric, “history” and the progressive colonization of everyday life by late capitalism having become all but synonymous. Of course, since claiming the sphere of Breck as its own long ago, the marketplace has been turning to Dreck in a big way. The translation of the so-called countercultural into consumable fetishes has lately been proceeding in leaps and bounds— from Marc Jacobs’ louche ad campaigns to Jackass’s gross-out verité, from Terry Richardson’s junkie cool to the Olsen twins’ dumpster-diving chic—and artists in pursuit of the unmarketable are engaged in an increasingly thankless task.

Now that mainstream magazine covers regularly depict artfully bedraggled artistes, placing their scruffily covetable lives among instructive advertisements, what can remain of the spirit of Semina? Rather than view the show as yet another opportunity to lament the loss of a counterculture, we can extract from it a lesson about the continued importance of seeking alternatives—the vital moment when lament becomes critique. While Semina’s practices might now seem quaint, they still manage to remind us of the radical distinction between a life and a lifestyle. With Pellerin’s descendants now aggressively marketing their knickknacks as authentic symbols of the artistic life, Semina’s example begins to seem like a very timely—and very lively—reproach.