Press Release

Wallace Berman and Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, Al Ruppersberg and Andy Warhol

Despite his relatively underground, cult persona, Wallace Berman is considered to have been a pivotal figure in both the art and literary world of the California Beat Generation during 50s and 60. His work, produced from the periphery, contained the seedlings of what later became the movements of California Assemblage, Pop Are, and Fluxus and had a quiet but potent influence on those who surrounded him.

This show is meeting of works by Wallace Berman (b.1926-1976) and Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, Al Ruppersberg, and Andy Warhol. Some of these artists had contact with Wallace Berman and his work and some did not; however, a common preoccupation proliferated through their work. Whether questioning the basis of ‘authenticity’, sublimating the ‘banal’, or regurgitating pop culture, these artists put to test the affect of images and objects gleaned from daily life.

From the late 40s to the mid-70s, Berman experimented with typography, poetry, film, photography, sculpture, collage, Verifax imagery, boxed assemblages, assemblages tableaux, and outdoor installation. Ultimately, his work with the Verifax machine (a precursor to the photocopier) in which repeated use of jarring imagery superimposed with language - specifically the Hebrew letter “Aleph” - signified the cacophony of information that exploded in the sixties, invoking both the spiritual temperament and political hypocrisy of those years.

Semina, Berman’s handmade publication that he distributed to select friends and sympathetic thinkers in the art, poetry and jazz circles, became the conduit for collaborative actives and philosophical musings from 1955-1964. Berman’s only solo exhibition in a commercial gallery at Gerus Gallery in 1957- (run by Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps) resulted in his arrest for exhibiting what was perceived by the police as ‘pornogrpahic’ imagery.

Andy Warhol, having also showed at Ferus gallery two years later, shared the interest in replicating the mundane through repetition and experimenting with a version of the Verifax - the Thermofax - but taking it to different ends. Both Al Ruppersberg and Allan McCollum have acknowledged Berman’s impact on their work during their time in Los Angeles; Ruppersberg opened Al’s Café as an art project in 1969, and McCollum’s earliest surrogate works were made with a version of the Verifax machine. Jeff Koons’ work is seen here as amplifying to a certain extreme, Berman’s and Warhol’s foray into popular culture. Screenings of Wallace Berman’s only film, Untitled (Aleph), 1956-66 will also be on view at the gallery.