"WALLACE BERMAN: Off The Grid" Exhibition at TOTAH, 183 Stanton Street, NYC, Until October 31

 

"Wallace Berman: Off The Grid" exhibition at TOTAH 183 Stanton Street, NYC. The show is up until October 31.

Wallace Berman: Off The Grid at TOTAH

 

"Wallace Berman: Off The Grid" exhibition at TOTAH 183 Stanton Street, NYC. The show is up until October 31.

WALLACE BERMAN: Off The Grid Exhibition at TOTAH, NYC

 TOTAH presents Off the Grid, featuring 45 works by California art legend Wallace Berman (1926-1976), on view from September 8th through October 30th, 2021. Rarely shown on the East Coast, this exhibition is Berman’s long overdue return to New York since his last major solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978.

Wallace Berman is a notorious guru of the 1960s art pantheon. He emerged out of Los Angeles’ historic Ferus Gallery, driven by Walter Hopps, Robert Alexander and Ed Kienholz. Often cited as a West Coast Beat Generation artist who appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and rubbed elbows with the likes of Allen Ginsburg, Dennis Hopper and the Rolling Stones, his contributions transcended the multiple comparisons of his aesthetic and the associations that he kept.

Berman was a self-taught artist who incorporated the essence of the syncopated rhythms of jazz music and its culture, the mystique of re- appropriated objects, and his sharp wit expressed through mystical symbols and the popular imagery of his time. Surrealism, Dadaism and the Kabbalah all influenced his aesthetic. After discovering the possibilities of the Kodak Verifax photo copying system, Berman landed on his now famous motif in 1964. The image of a hand holding a transistor radio found in an advertisement for Sony, which appeared in Life Magazine became his delivery system. By removing the speaker grill and inserting random appropriated images the hand shuffles up messages that appear to spring out of the ether. His early use of the gridding technique creates a visual cacophony that barrages the senses. In Off the Grid, we see many early examples of Berman searching for this now infamous motif. For example, in Untitled (Business Man at a Desk), we see Berman beginning to play with the idea of substituting content to shift the contextual interpretation of a common advertisement image.

Berman worked from 1958 until his death on an 8mm silent film (later entitled by his son Tosh as, Aleph) that incorporated unconventional film techniques carried over from collage and painting. The film includes hand-coloring, Letraset symbols, and collage portraits of pop-culture icons spun into a rapid- moving version of his gridded works.

Off the Grid welcomes Wallace Berman back to New York after a long absence. Berman’s presence in New York dates as far back as 1968 when legendary curator Kynaston McShine featured him in a one-man show at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side. This is a rare opportunity to see selections from the artist’s oeuvre including the film, Aleph, which will be screened at the gallery during the exhibition.

This exhibition is realized in collaboration with Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, Sam Mellon, and the Wallace Berman Estate. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

Wallace Berman (born 1926, Staten Island, NY) refined his artistic vision in California from the 1950s-70s, living in San Francisco then Los Angeles, cultivating a like-minded community and eschewing academic constraints. His critical involvement with the Beat generation and contribution to the art and culture of that region was both influential and also largely forgotten by the mainstream art-consuming public. His mail art folio Semina was self-published from 1955-64, and has become an iconic chronicle of emerging thinkers and writers from this era. A complete catalogue of Semina editions are now included in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In 2016, Kohn Gallery, in Los Angeles, staged “Wallace Berman: American Aleph,” the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist in nearly 40 years. Solo exhibitions have also taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1978), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles (2007). Today, his works are held in collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among many others. Berman died in a car accident on his 50th birthday on February 18, 1976 in Topanga Canyon, CA.

For further information please contact info@davidtotah.com

TOTAH 183 Stanton Street, New York, NY 10002

DAVID BOWIE IS.... In Tokyo

DAVID BOWIE IS ... An Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan

As most of my friends and enemies know, I love David Bowie.   I have been thinking of David Bowie for every day since 1972 when I purchased "Honky Dory."   My whole life is mapped out by Bowie's releases of album and singles.   To say he's important to me is like asking if humans need to drink water.    I actually don't understand people who don't like Bowie's music.  I have met them, but for me, they're truly alien from another hostile planet.  So, one would think I would be bananas over the David Bowie Is" exhibition.   The truth is I like it, as a spectacle, but I think they could have done much more of a better show.


I now imagine myself as the curator.  First of all, Bowie didn't curate this show.  I suspect he looked at it with a very critical eye and his opinion mattered much in the choices and the way the show is exhibited.   According to the Victoria & Albert Museum (who put the show together), he had no say in the exhibition.   I find this hard to believe.  What the show consists of are his stage costumes for both concert tours and videos, as well as his drawings, paintings, and notes.   In many ways, the exhibition reminds me of two other museum shows - and both were in Las Vegas.  Liberace's museum (no longer exists) and Debbie Reynolds exhibition of her Hollywood costume collection (that too, does not exist).   Of the three, the Liberace collection is more impressive because it expresses his aesthetic and attitude toward showbiz world.   Like Bowie's costumes, Liberace's clothing for the stage is superbly made and designed.   And the Liberace message comes through its narrative that runs through his collection with respect how it was displayed in that Vegas strip-mall.   The problem with Bowie's exhibition is not the content, but how the work is presented as well as lacking a narrative sense or place in history.

The chronicle order of showing the costumes is messed-up, and I would think it would confuse the new Bowie lurker.   I don't know the difference between the London and Tokyo show, but here in Japan, the exhibit starts off with John Cage and Gilbert & George.   My first reaction is why Cage and Gilbert & George?   I can understand Bowie's appreciation of these two artists, but to put them at the beginning of the show lacks a narrative, and this exhibition needs a definite beginning, middle, and end.   The opening of the exhibit does deal with literature and place and time in London during Bowie's teenage years, but then loses that sense of placement as one wonders on to the other rooms.

As a Bowie fanatic I see the exhibition going in another direction.  If I were the curator, I would make this show larger by bringing the outside world into the Bowie cosmos.   The beauty of Bowie is that he had always commented on the world around him.  That context is important throughout his career.   The exhibition needs not only his costumes, and personal papers - but also a film retrospective, panel discussions, and the whole subject of glam rock via T. Rex, Jobrieth, N.Y. Dolls and so forth.    A nice touch of adding Anthony Newley into the exhibit, but it would have been fantastic to show performances by Newley as well as Scott Walker,  Jacques Brel and others who influenced Bowie.

This, of course, is my fantasy of the Bowie exhibition, and I understand what the show is, and what it is not - but I feel that this is a lost opportunity to show the importance of this great artist.  The auction of Bowie's art collection that was recently sold has a stronger presence than what is shown here in the exhibition.   Still, I'm a starving man in the wilderness, and seeing the Bowie exhibition was a great pleasure.

Semina 1955-1964 Art Is Love Is Good exhibition at Boo-Hooray

Semina 1955-1964 Art Is Love Is God

Boo-Hooray265 Canal Street, 6th floorNew York, NY 10013

Sunday, December 8 - Thursday, January 9

RSVP for the opening party Sunday December 8, 3PM-6PM

John Zorn will be performing live.Do not miss!

Pre-order the limited edition catalogue at the special price of $65 at the Boo-Hooray Web Shop

On December 8 2013, through January 9 2014, Boo-Hooray is exhibiting all components of all nine issues of Wallace Berman’s art/assemblage/beat zine Semina, alongside related ephemera, posters and mail-art. Semina bridges appropriation, fine printing, punk-style DIY and collage/montage, this already in the late 1950s!

Michael McClure called it “a scrapbook of the spirit”. Outside of commerce, Semina was sent through the mail to Wallace Berman’s friends like David Meltzer, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, and Cameron. The components of Semina were not only submitted, but appropriated from these friends, alongside personal heroes like W. B. Yeats, Hermann Hesse, and Antonin Artaud.

Hand-printed on a table-top at his house, this free-form zine with its loose-leaf poetry and amazing collages, montages and photography, is also most baffling in its vanguard status: nobody had done anything like this before Berman, not even in the days of dada.

Published between 1955 and 1964 in editions ranging from 150 to 350 copies, this rare publication (original issues regularly sell in the five figures) needs to be seen and cherished by anyone interested in American post-war art.

Michael Duncan points out that “Semina’s overarching theme involved a search for how to transcend the ‘monster’ of postwar meaninglessness.”

The spirit of Semina’s assemblage will feel familiar to anybody who has ever stayed up late at night at a copy shop making a punk zine or flyer. The hypnotic and delicious feel of perusing the poetry and imagery is the closest I’ve gotten to capturing those fleeting moments when one remembers components of a distant dream.

On December 8th, Boo-Hooray is publishing Semina 1955-1964 Art Is Love Is God, a 174 page softbound full-color catalogue reproducing each component of each issue of Semina. The catalogue comes with a booklet of annotations and texts by Johan Kugelberg, Adam Davis, Tosh Berman, Shirley Berman, Philip Aarons and Andrew Roth alongside silkscreened artwork, photo prints, flyers and cards, all printed loose-leaf and contained in a pocket on the back board of the catalogue in the spirit of Wallace Berman’s original publication.

This publication is limited to 300 copies and is only available from Boo-Hooray.