Untitled (Verifax Collage)
Wallace Berman
WALLACE BERMAN, 1965, VERIFAX COLLAGE
A crashing motorcycle, a bulldog revolver; sprouting lilies, Egyptian deities. Tying these disparate motifs together succinctly, Wallace Berman revolutionised the act of collage and laid the foundations for copy and digital art in the process. A Beat Artist who saw art not as a profession or a commercial enterprise but as an intrinsic and essential part of everyday life, Berman’s Verifax collages question the nature of originality. Taking the hand fragment from a 1963 advert for a cassette player and overlaying found imagery directly onto the Verifax machine, Berman scanned these loose compositions. There is no ‘original’, the copy of the ephemeral piece is the only artwork. With each assembly of motifs upon this 'screen', the ageing machine corralled seemingly random vignettes into “poems” of arranged imagery. Berman made hundreds of Verifax collages, leaving behind a constantly unfolding poem of repetition, deviation and chance.