Nomad Codes

a folder of loose paper that had to be arranged, Tarot-like, by the reader; Michael McClure, whose “Peyote Poem” debuted in Semina 3 , called it a “scrapbook of the spirit.”
    Panel was a much denser piece than Temple : a mysterious wooden cabinet that incorporated photos of his wife, hidden compartments, mirrors, letters, and a long narrow image of swimmers surfacing into the light. There was a hushed mystery to the piece, at once a wrestling and an opening. Cross featured a slender wooden cross; from its left arm dangled a small shadow box that included a mandala-like photo of a cock plunging into a cunt above the inscribed motto factum fidei (true facts). As Rebecca Solnit points out, in the hypermodernist American art world of the mid-1950s, such hieratic objects—which “pointed at something beyond themselves and drew their meaning from that beyond”—had the force of blasphemy.
    Local law enforcement also found them blasphemous. Summoned to the gallery because of Cross ’s photo, they ironically overlooked the graphic shot, but busted Berman for an sketch included in the Semina issue scattered on the floor: a lusty, almost Frazetta-esque fantasy of a demon taking a woman from behind. The item was drawn by Marjorie Cameron, Berman’s most direct connection to LA’s occult underground and a woman whose full story remains to be told. The red-headed artist, scenester, and occultist had been married to Jack Parsons, the Jet Propulsion Labs rocketman who led the Pasadena Agape Lodge of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis and took the Beast’s sex magick perhaps even more seriously than Crowley himself. Cameron served as Parsons’s muse during the latter part of his apocalyptic “Babalon Working.” Following Parsons’s mysterious death in 1952 (he exploded in his garage lab), Cameron became LA’s pre-eminent bohemian witch, making talismanic art pieces, upstaging Anaïs Nin as the Whore of Babylon in Kenneth Anger’s 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome , and even frightening Dennis Hopper. She also clued Berman’s scene into the power of magick (which, as Anger’s film suggests, is itself all about acute psychic montage). George Herms, whose assemblages would outpace Berman’s tiny output in both formal power and enigmatic fire, said that Cameron “molded and formed me.”
    Berman’s Ferus installation was a pretty hermetic deal; you get the sense that you kinda had to be there, maybe be part of the scene to really get it. But in the early 1960s Berman began to work on his most accessible and compelling works, a series of collages that seemed to tune directly into the collective mind. Using an obsolete Verifax photocopier, which used negatives and treated paper, Berman made a series of pieces that channeled the overwhelming spew of images, ads, and information that came to define the ’60s mediascape. Each image contains single or multiple repetitions of the same visual placeholder: a hand holding a small AM/FM transistor radio. Within the “frame” of the radio, Berman placed an enormous range of images, including magic mushrooms, cheetahs, astronauts, hermetic glyphs, naked ladies, pot leaves, Buddhas, airplanes, Indian chiefs, popes, starbursts, movie stars, dolls, and clocks. Originally Berman used a TV set for the frame, but the transistor radio fused speech and image into a deeper alchemy that Christopher Knight called a visual chant. The resulting collages suggested that the emerging global mind, for all its image storms, had the magical intimacy that McLuhan dubbed acoustic space.
    Berman’s Verifax collages had a modest influence on the art world, earning Berman a spot in the gallery of oddballs that Peter Blake created for the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . Berman’s repeating figure and appropriated images also clearly anticipate Pop Art’s later obsession with mechanical reproduction and commodity images. But as with other California artists, Berman’s relationship to the signs on the street carries a more esoteric intensity and fragile sense of yearning than the self-conscious impersonality of Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Rauschenberg. Part of this difference is environmental; New York was at the heart of the secular world of media, whereas California’s strong media culture, however dominated by the culture industry, has always radiated an air of fantasy and transcendence, however garish. But much more important is the lived context within