Abstract
Wallace Berman’s 8mm film Aleph (1956–1966) provides a flickering glimpse into a pivotal intersection of sound and visuality in the art of the 1960s. A central artistic figure of the Beat era in California, operating in Los Angeles and San Francisco from the 1940s to the 1970s, Berman experimented widely as a poet, assemblage artist, filmmaker, and creator of the underground mail-art magazine Semina. From the age of bebop jazz in the 1940s and 1950s to the rock and soul of the 1960s, Wallace Berman’s Aleph encompasses an age of sound that serves as an integral component—structurally, thematically, and experientially—to its visual expression.
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Notes
Alberto Cavalcanti, “The Sound Film,” in The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture As An Art, From 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 170.
Stan Brakhage, “Letter to Ronna Page (On Music),” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 135.
Russ Tamblyn’s description in Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1990), 6,
and Walter Hopps, “L.A. c. 1949: Dark Night-Jazz: Prologue,” in Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, ed. Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa et al. (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1992), 11.
Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 283.
Wallace Berman met Andy Warhol in 1963, when Warhol came to LA for a solo show at the Ferus Gallery, and Warhol even filmed a segment of one of his earliest films, Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of (1963), at the Bermans’ home in Beverly Glen, with Wallace and his son Tosh as characters in the film. Wallace, therefore, was familiar with Warhol’s work and likely knew of it when he began working with the Verifax. Sandra Leonard Starr, Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art (Santa Monica, CA: James Corcoran Gallery, 1988), 110.
Christopher Knight, “Instant Artifacts: The Art of Wallace Berman,” in Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, ed. Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa et al. (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1992), 46.
Also quoted in Louis Kaplan, “Aleph Beat: Wallace Berman Between Photography and Film,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 207–208, who states that the radio Verifaxes become “visual transmissions through a sonic medium” when taken into the lens of the Kabala.
Mona Lisa Saloy, “Black Beats and Black Issues,” in Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965 , ed. Lisa Phillips et al. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 155.
Scott DeVeaux, quoted in Ken D. Allan, “City of Degenerate Angels: Wallace Berman, Jazz, and Semina in Postwar Los Angeles,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 81.
Quote from Kaplan, 203. Reference to The T.A.M.I. Show determined by Tosh Berman in Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle (New York: D.A.P., 2005), 349, and by David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, 278.
David Meltzer, “The Door of Heaven, the Path of Letters,” in Wallace Berman: Retrospective, October 24–November 26, 1978, ed. Hal Glicksman et al. (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, Otis Art Institute Gallery, 1978), 92.
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, quoted in Stephen Fredman, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 118, and Stephen Fredman, “Surrealism meets Kabbalah: Wallace Berman and the Semina Poets” in Duncan and McKenna, 47.
The original source of this statement is found in Merril Greene, “Wallace Berman: Portrait of the Artist as an Underground Man” in Artforum Vol. 16 (February 1978): 53. The phrase “universal man” comes from an oral history statement by Shirley Berman in Starr, 116.
A. E. Waite, ed., The Book of Formation or Sepher Yetzirah (Berwick: Ibis Press, 2004), 24.
Allen Ginsberg, “Prologue,” in Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965, Lisa Phillips et al., (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 17.
“Emotional combinations, not only with the visible elements of the shots, but chiefly with chains of psychological associations [are created with] Association montage.” Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Sergei Eisenstein and Jay Leyda (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books/The World Publishing Company, 1969), 57. “In cinema, the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein realized that when you put two separate/opposite images together (montage), a new political/poetic meaning comes out of those combined images.”
Tosh Berman, “Wallace and His Film,” in Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, ed. Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa et al. (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1992), 74.
Claudia Bohn-Spector, “Rearguard Revolutionaries: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken,” in Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961–1976, ed. Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon (Pasadena: The Armory Center for the Arts, 2011), 17.
Antonin Artaud, “Sorcery and the Cinema,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 49.
Peter Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 140.
Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 76. Experiments in the intertwining of sound and visual rhythm are particularly meaningful in the years following Aleph, as Structuralist film in America began to take root. American Structuralist film utilized a similar blurring of visual rhythm and auditory rhythm, through a particular form of very rapid montage-like effect called the “flicker.” The filmmaker Paul Sharits articulates his early “flicker” films as “filled with attempts to allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing.” The theoretical basis, for Sharits, is in part a scientific one: “Both light and sound occur in waves … that is, both are primarily vibratory experiences whose ‘continuous’ qualities are illusional.” His primary concern, in essence, is to illustrate the parallel nature of sound and image in order to create a cinema embodying both simultaneously. “What possibilities are there,” Sharits posits, “for developing both sound and image from the same structural principle and simply presenting them side-by-side as two equal yet autonomous articulations of one conception?”
Paul Sharits, “Hearing:Seeing,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 256,
and Paul Sharits, “Words Per Page,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 262.
Jack Sargeant, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2008), 13. Emphasis mine.
Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 7, 22–23, quoted in Vogel, 106–107.
Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 190.
Ibid., 190. This statement contrasts with Theodor Adorno’s infamous line from his 1949 “Cultural Criticism and Society”: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” In the cultural context of World War II, to produce “poetry” was, to Adorno, akin to supporting the cultural structures that produced the Holocaust. Adorno himself later amended this statement in his work Negative Dialectics. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, ed. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 17–34.
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© 2014 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison
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Fralick, C.B. (2014). “Musical & Magical Counterpoint”: Language, Sound, and Image in Wallace Berman’s Aleph, 1956–1966. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_7
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