Wallace Berman

Los Angeles artist, publisher of the hand-assembled journal Semina, and maker of Verifax collages: grids of a hand holding a transistor radio, each radio showing a different image, the whole thing captioned in Hebrew letters.

⭐⭐⭐ THE PUREST CASE IN THE WING OF SECTION I's IDEA. Berman had no Hebrew to speak of. He used the letters as FORM — as a grid, a rhythm, a sign that something is being spelled — and his 1966 film is called Aleph. A tradition's alphabet, borrowed by a Californian as pure visual grammar.