Semina 7. ALEPH / a gesture involving photographs drawings & text

Larkspur: [Wallace Berman], 1961. [18] unbound sheets, laid into a printed manila pocket mounted in a folded cardstock cover with photo mounted on front panel. Slight rubbing to the spine, else fine, complete, and very rare thus.

One of 200 copies printed. This is the sole issue of Semina for which Berman titled and claimed authorship. Berman frequently used the Aleph as a kind of personal logo, "the symbol in kabbalistic lore for the primordial chaos. By linking it to his own acute sense of mortality, Berman saw Aleph as meaning 'the all-encompassing man,' and this is how he thought of himself. His acceptance of metaphor as an absolutely real, (truncated) often desirable mode of thought and action complemented his insistent advocacy of an art of essential use, by which he meant not only the employment of all means and materials available regardless of origin and previous function, but also a deployment of his own energies toward the retaking of mystery. This Wallace did knowingly, in moments of his choosing and, in so doing, acted as magician." (Merril Greene, "Wallace Berman: Portrait of the Artist as an Underground Man," Artforum, February 1978) The most personal and elegiac issue of Berman's deeply personal journal, "each issue is a complete world of its own," as Berman's son Tosh wrote. Semina Culture, p. 63-65. (Inventory #: 2462)