Radio Aether
Like the musicians and Beat poets he befriended, Berman preferred to operate on the margins of society, honing in on life’s darker side. In late 1963, around the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Marcel Duchamp’s influential retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art, he created his first collages with a Verifax machine, a forerunner of the photocopier. Built on materials appropriated from the popular press, the new work owed much to Duchamp’s revolutionary idea of the Readymade and eventually engendered Berman’s signature image: a handheld transistor radio, inlaid with found imagery and arrayed in grids ranging from four to fifty-six hands at a time. The radio, immortalized in Jean Cocteau’s classic art film Orphée and John Cage’s seminal chance compositions of the mid-1950s, became Berman’s defining motif; a potent expression of his abiding interest in secret transmissions and in the semiotic fallout of popular culture.
Inside his radio frames, an encyclopedic universe of images - machines, bodies, animals, buildings, plants, nuns, athletes, astronauts, guns, esoteric symbols, intergalactic nebulae, rock stars, and celebrities, among many other things - proliferates in webs of cryptic significance. “No hope in making, assembling, binding together ornate bibles of history,” Berman’s friend, the poet David Meltzer wrote about the artist’s vast and surreal dictionary. “The clues are found everywhere: inside the sleeping poet; on the streets; beneath the sea; in levels, stratum, the years of a desert; and aurora all around the dead we bury within ourselves.” The grid was likely inspired by Berman’s love of comic strips; and by Andy Warhol’s infamous Campbell’s Soup Cans, which he had first exhibited in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery. To try and solve Berman’s visual puzzles would be missing the point. His Verifax grids, like mankind’s deepest mysteries, are best approached obliquely, presciently streaming as they do the visual flotsam of a particular time and place.
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