Tree

Tree. I would like this to be an homage to Wallace Berman, one of my great favorite artists. We never met, of course--he died in 1976, in a car crash in Topanga Canyon. He'd predicted it (told his mother, as a boy) that he'd die at 50. The crash was on his 50th birthday. It's a terrible story for such a beautiful man--or at least a man who could touch on such beautiful things. Berman understood the world, its underpinnings--or better, he knew that through his images he could allude to this. Also to what was beyond understanding--which was, of course, the core. Not just gambling and jazz and the roughness of city life (picture of Berman and his young family, on an broken street in Venice, CA--set against the long since vanished oil derricks. He's holding his son Tosh, his wife Shirley looks at him from alongside, not entirely easily. He's wearing a raincoat and flip-flops. It's 1956.)

The core--that's the word for Berman, the way he could form the Hebrew letters--I was always amazed--how these shapes were so clearly in his soul. Combined them and re-combined them (an ancient practice) never for meaning, but with an attention to how meaning itself might be formed (Abraham Abulafia and the tree of life-- Etz chaim hi...) Photo of him, kneeling, brush in hand, painting them on a rough white concrete wall, and the letters themselves were perfect--each one carried a universe of perfection.

Much has been made of him since (I remember the first real show, at the Whitney--where for some reason they gave the most space to his big Verifax images--which to me always seemed too repetitive, too much the same.) (Maybe New York just likes big?) But look at one of his of small beach stone gatherings, one of the stones with an aleph inscribed--painted with all the delicacy--the infinity--of time...

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When my painter friend Wendy Sussman died, in 2001, they held a memorial for her at the old UAM (Berkeley Art Museum)--the gray concrete across from campus on Bancroft Way. Wendy had been a professor in the Art Practice Department, so there were many friends and students present. They'd asked me to be part of it--to play the concertina, somewhere in the background, and I liked the idea. (I'd done this informally at a small family memorial prior.)  In the background--that was the key. Not up on stage, as a performer, but somewhere off to the side, in one of those cavernous concrete bays. Old songs, too--from Russia and Poland--Eastern Europe--a world that lived on in the line of a chassidic melody, from Medzhybyzh, or from Pinsk. It had happened more than once--where a line from a song became a moment of discovery.

But here, a chance to touch on--invoke--a world that Wendy and I may have both understood... She'd get wonderfully excited as a teacher, gesturing to the students,  "You must go and see this...!" And her paintings--she liked that chaos, that darkness, keeping her studio lights so low that one could barely see--perhaps only time itself showing through...



(For Wallace Berman and for Wendy Sussman)
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