Semina 1955-1964

Semina 1955-1964
Author: Wallace Berman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781938265181

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was the quintessential artist of the Californian counterculture, connecting the disparate artistic, literary, music and film scenes of Los Angeles and San Francisco with his pioneering mail-art magazine Semina. Published between 1955 and 1964 in editions ranging from 150 to 350 copies, and hand-printed on a tabletop at Berman's house, Semina was sent through the mail to his friends, to the contributors and to those he admired. Among its many contributors were Charles Brittin, Jean Cocteau, Walter Hopps, Cameron, Michael McClure, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan and Berman himself. With its loose-leaf poetry, collages and photography, the magazine has become a defining document of its period (particularly since the 2006 traveling exhibition Semina Culture) and now sells for thousands of dollars. This volume allows itsentire contents to be seen for the first time, reproducing every component of every issue of the magazine in full color. Published in collaboration with the Berman family and Berman's gallerist Michael Kohn, it also includes commentary and essays by friends, admirers and family in a laid-in pamphlet.

Semina Culture

Semina Culture
Author: Michael Duncan
Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers (DAP)
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Edited by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. Essays by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna and Stephen Fredman.

Contextual Practice

Contextual Practice
Author: Stephen Fredman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804763585

Fredman makes the original argument that some of the most innovative works of poetry and art in the postwar period (1945–1970) engaged in a "contextual practice," a term that refers both to a way of making art characterized by assemblage and to a new relationship between art and life, an "erotic poetics."

Tosh

Tosh
Author: Tosh Berman
Publisher: City Lights Books
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0872867641

The triumphs and tragedies of growing up as the son of a famous Beat artist. TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music, and literature, with local and international luminaries regularly passing through. Tosh's unconventional childhood and peculiar journey to adulthood features an array of famous characters, from George Herms and Marcel Duchamp, to Michael McClure and William S. Burroughs, to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Toni Basil. TOSH takes an unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of his unusual upbringing by an artistic genius with all-too-human frailties, against a backdrop that includes The T.A.M.I. Show, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Easy Rider, and more. With a preface by actress/writer Amber Tamblyn (daughter of Wallace's friend, actor Russ Tamblyn), TOSH is a self-portrait taken at the crossroads of popular culture and the avant-garde. The index of names included represents a who's who of midcentury American—and international—culture. Praise for Tosh: "Tosh Berman's sweet and affecting memoir provides an intimate glimpse of his father, Wallace, and the exciting, seat-of-the-pants LA art scene of the 1960s, and it also speaks to the hearts of current and former lonely teenagers everywhere."--Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris "This is the story of a kid growing up inside of art world history, retelling his upbringing warts and all. A well-written, fast-moving book that is candid, funny, often disturbing, and never dull."--Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk "TOSH is a delightfully entertaining memoir filled with sly wit and a profound personal perspective."--John Zorn, composer "One could not wish for a better guide into the subterranean and bohemian worlds of the California art/Beat scene than Tosh Berman, only scion of the great Wallace. Tosh has a sly wit and an informed eye, he is both erudite and neurotic, and often hilarious."--John Taylor, Duran Duran "There's the life—and then there's the life. With TOSH you can have both. My life, and that of many who sailed with me, was formed by the 40's & 50's. TOSH takes you there."--Andrew Loog Oldham, producer/manager, The Rolling Stones "As the son of artist Wallace Berman, Tosh Berman had a front row seat for the beat parade of the '50s, and the hippie extravaganza of the '60s. It was an exotic, star-studded childhood, but having groovy parents doesn't insulate one from the challenge of forging one's own identity in the world. Berman's successful effort to do that provides the heart and soul of this movingly candid chronicle of growing up bohemian."--Kristine McKenna, co-author of Room to Dream by David Lynch "This is a beautifully written memoir, and I highly recommend it to those who are interested in the Sixties, Topanga Canyon, the Southern California art scene, and for those who wonder what it might mean to grow up as the son of one of our most acclaimed artists."--Lisa See, author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Artists' Magazines

Artists' Magazines
Author: Gwen Allen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262015196

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system.

Artists' Magazines

Artists' Magazines
Author: Gwen Allen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 026252841X

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

SEMINA

SEMINA
Author: WALLACE. BERMAN
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN:

The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing

The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing
Author: Sarah Lowndes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2016-04-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317555651

This book considers the history of Do It Yourself art, music and publishing, demonstrating how DIY strategies have transitioned from being marginal, to emergent, to embedded. Through secondary research, observation and 30 original interviews, each chapter analyses one of 15 creative cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dusseldorf, New York, London, Manchester, Cologne, Washington DC, Detroit, Berlin, Glasgow, Olympia (Washington), Portland (Oregon), Moscow and Istanbul) and assesses the contemporary situation in each in the post-subcultural era of digital and internet technologies. The book challenges existing subcultural histories by examining less well-known scenes as well as exploring DIY "best practices" to trace a template of best approaches for sustainable, independent, locally owned creative enterprises.

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats
Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2017-08-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110826770X

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats is the first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of eleven major Beat authors. The opening chapter discusses Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan as predecessors and important influences on the spiritual orientation of the Beats. David Stephen Calonne draws comparisons throughout the book between various approaches individual Beat writers took regarding sacred experience - for example, Burroughs had significant objections to Buddhist philosophy, while Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac both devoted considerable time to studying Buddhist history and texts. This book also focuses on authors who have traditionally been neglected in Beat Studies - Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen. In addition, several understudied work such as Gregory Corso's 'The Geometric Poem' - inspired by Corso's deep engagement with ancient Egyptian thought - are given close attention. Calonne introduces important themes from the history of heterodoxy - from Gnosticism, Manicheanism and Ismailism to Theosophy and Tarot - and demonstrates how inextricably these ideas shaped the Beat literary imagination.

The Beats in Mexico

The Beats in Mexico
Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 197882873X

Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.