"Musical & magical counterpoint"

language, sound, and image in Wallace Berman's Aleph, 1956–1966

Chelsea Behle Fralick

pp. 101-118

in: Timothy Scott Brown, Andrew Lison (eds), The global sixties in sound and vision, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

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.