Went to K McK’s curated show of art by a group of artists associated with Wallace Berman’s Semina project. It was a limited edition publication in the early to mid 60s in LA that was pocket-sized and filled with poems, drawings, typings and collages. The show documents the project and a short-lived community that made experimental films and other work and lived on next to nothing — as K says, they didn’t care about money. Berman’s photos of his friends are interspersed with their work. Some of the Semina contributors went on to other things, some even becoming successful in some areas — as actors, filmmakers, choreographers or in the movie business. I say “even” because to judge by the photos they were not a hugely ambitious lot. Others hit bottom via drugs, inertia or poverty. They had a wide and secret influence, but many of the artists themselves sank into oblivion. There are parallels with the East Village scene in the mid to late seventies, but with the Semina crowd there was less press attention and scant documentation. The glare of publicity passed this crowd by. The show is combo of paintings, drawings, photos of the artists and some video projections of films. Some of the work is powerful, remarkable, and some isn’t. More important than the art though, the show documents a scene, a social utopia, and maybe a dystopia too — it’s more a social document than a collection of major works. A walk-in book. This is not a show designed for collectors. The photos that are interspersed with the work are of bohemians — bearded men and beautiful women living on the fringes of LA, cheaply, when such a thing was possible. They all seem to be living in a refugee camp — by choice. Post-war American alienation — the ubiquitous TV images of happy homemakers didn’t jive with this bunch. They wanted no part of it. They wanted real love, sex, passion, fear and danger. The media world seemed phony, as one famous fictional juvenile said. (That book was banned at the time.) Occasionally they would make things, but it seems most often their lives were their primary creative work.
[Link to New York Times review.]
