Black Piece 3, n.d.

​Wallace Berman madeBlack Piece 3by gathering photographic
images from newspapers and magazines—clock faces, hands, flowers, ancient
coins, the cosmos. Using a Verifax, a 1960s predecessor to the photocopier, he reproduced
those images on an advertisement for a handheld transistor radio. Though the
work relies on both images and instruments of mechanical reproduction, Berman
mounted the individual negative, or inverted, images to a board by hand. The Hebrew
letters refer to the ancient Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah, which
derives deep symbolic meanings from the Hebrew alphabet. Since the term kabbalah
means “transmission” or “reception,” Berman called radios “the kabbalah of the
twentieth century.” If the visual messages that his radios broadcast seem
indecipherable, this is because he was in search of a more mysterious,
spiritual set of spiritual meanings in everyday, commercial mass-culture
imagery.