Silence Series #7 1965 - 1968

Wallace Berman made this Silence Series #7 sometime in his life using what looks like Verifax collage. This is a real gridded picture plane, a little like a black and white TV screen, and each panel is a hand holding up some mysterious image or scene. It's a tactile, physical thing, you can almost feel the cut and paste of it. It is so beautiful in its process, the way the images aren't perfect, they're blurry, and there's a sense of chance in how they line up in the hand. Look at the fourth panel in the third row: a figure running, maybe escaping. It's smudgy, like a memory fading, but the dark surrounding it makes it so potent, like a secret. You know, seeing this makes me think of Jess, another Bay Area artist. Both of them made work that was really about digging into culture, pulling things out, and rearranging them. It is so strange to see, the way that both embrace ambiguity and open our minds to multiple interpretations.