Barbara Berk: An Artist Quietly in the Making

18 Mar Barbara Berk: An Artist Quietly in the Making

Barbara Berk is a curious, quiet maker who has been an active participant in the Southern California art scene for over forty years. Since 1983, she has consistently shown or performed her work in solo and group exhibitions at many of the distinguished university and college art galleries as well as numerous institutions like the Laguna Art Museum, Torrance Museum, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Oceanside Museum, The Woman’s Building, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I first met Berk in 1994 when I was in graduate school. I walked into her exhibition Without Words: Twenty-One Drawings, Twenty-One Days, at The Floating Storefront Studio at Irvine Marketplace. This was a landmark project for Berk because this is where she melded drawing, installation, and performance into one experience.

While Berk was in residence at The Floating Storefront Studio, she was required to have the space open a specific number of hours per week to the public. She decided two things: first, not to speak to any visitor who came into the space during these public hours and second, to make a drawing a day. This wasn’t about not communicating with an audience but learning how to communicate what she was doing without words or eye contact. Berk sat at a table, head down, with a sheet of paper in front of her and using a pencil would make marks on the page with a repetitive and limited gesture, like flicking her wrist back and forth as far as it would go with the pencil in her hand making the mark on the page. She would periodically stop to sharpen the pencil and the drawing would be finished when the pencil was all but shavings. She would silently stop drawing, get up from her chair, and pin the drawing to the wall. Visitors would either get frustrated and even angry with her silence and storm out or they would pause, access the situation, and have an “aha” moment when they figured out what she was doing and making.

In a 2010 article in the Laguna Beach Independent, Berk shared, “My drawings and drawing performances are about the physical act of drawing and about drawing as an extension of my body. Many drawings use repetition by taking a simple gesture and repeating it until it transforms into something else.” Using a literary reference, I liken Berk’s process to the writer Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”; with each repetition of the word or gesture, its meaning evolves. Berk goes on to say, “I often use my body’s limitations, such as physical endurance, or the reach of my wrists, arms, or legs.” In this way her drawings are simultaneously performance, evidence of a physical act, and art objects unto themselves portraying circles, ellipses, or other geometric forms found within nature. These forms are often used to express the abstract, metaphysical, or spiritual. This type of meditative drawing is an action and an acquisition of knowledge through silent observation, movement, and communication.

The acquisition of knowledge, experience, and self discovery are at the center of Berk’s artistic evolution. She grew up in Chicago in a humble and productive household with parents who strived to give their children a solid education and send them to college. As a child, Berk’s summers were spent at the Art Institute and perusing the museum. During the school year, afternoons were spent taking piano lessons from a young woman who came from a large well-to-do family who was studying music at the University of Chicago. It was the exposure to this lively household filled with art, a vast library, and seven siblings working in all kinds of professions that introduced Berk to a wider idea of the world and how one could choose to live in it. She voraciously pursued her education and achieved a BA from Clarke College, Dubuque, IA, followed by an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York; an MA from California State University, Fullerton; MA from Instituto Pio XII in Florence, Italy. She studied at the University of Vienna and Akademie Di Bilhaurer Kunst in Austria. She went on to teach at many prestigious Southern California educational institutions including Otis College of Art and Design. While teaching she continued to study and travel the world and developed a mutually satisfying relationship with the Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Turkey, where she taught summer drawing and design classes and introduced a summer study abroad program for students from the United States between 1995-1998.

While drawing is at the core of her formal output, Berk is always smudging the boundaries between media as she explores different ideas through paint, wood, video and found objects like books. Many of her works like drawing sculpture drawing (2002) or drawing books (2006) blur the distinctions between action, documentation, and art object. She uses her curiosity, humor and experimentation to get to the core of the experience she is devising for herself and her audience which could be a group of people in a gallery, a camera, or herself alone in the studio. She gets to this place by setting up parameters of her visual and physical experiments and exploiting the neutral area between stasis and movement.

In the mid-1990s, Berk made a series of sculptures using books to explore the interplay between the visual and verbal. unidentified flying object (1996), is a wall sculpture she made by simply and patiently interlocking the pages of two hardbound books together to make the shape of a bird in flight and simultaneously reference the shape of an A-frame. I see this object as a rich metaphor about dual actions of flight and shelter, the literary and the visual. There is no glue or tape, it is the simple commingling of the pages of two distinct stories into one discreet object with multiple interpretations. Akin to Ann Hamilton’s work at the time, Berk took a scalpel to Janson’s infamous History of Art known for omitting the work of women artists and sliced it into one continuous orb of text. This paper-weight of a ball delicately balances on the deflated hardbound cover of an influential and oppressive “art bible”.

Much of Berk’s work is an interaction between two and three dimensions. One of her video/performances entitled circling (2010), is a single camera shot of her in a completely dark room with a large spool of luminescent wire that she slowly wraps around her body from her feet to the top of her head while audience members nervously talk, doors open/close, and traffic whirs by. Her shape grows legible halfway through the five minute performance until she shimmies out of the wire and leaves a Cy Twombly scribble glowing on the floor which will disappear when the lights flick on. In this drawing, the ground is darkness itself and the marks are made with light and no traces are left behind except for a digital recording.

Berk’s signature traits are the intangibility of her art and her keen observation of the mundane and profundity of daily human life. She attempts to start from a clean slate each time as she sets out to explore an idea, gesture, or material. When she approaches a new project, she always asks herself these questions: if I did this, what would happen, what would it look like? Why should I do it? Is it compelling enough to actually do it? What is art, drawing? What is an artist? Who am I as an artist? What does it mean to be human? Berk takes her role as an artist seriously. She quietly conjures aesthetic moments by looking intensely at the world around her as a means of self-discovery and uses her mind and body along with humble materials of light, shadow, graphite, pigment, paper, and photography to reveal nuances of existence we may have overlooked or forgotten in the process of getting through the day. The Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has said, “How we choose what we do, and how we approach it. . . will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.” Berk’s desire is to have a life be the sum of her art and vice versa.

For more information about Barbara Berk visit her website at w.w.w.barbaraberk.com

Meg Linton is a visual arts curator, writer, and is the Lead Producer for ACTING LIKE WOMEN, a documentary film directed by Cheri Gaulke about 1970s-1980s feminist performance art in Los Angeles. She is best known for the exhibitions, programs, and publications she organized during her tenure as the Director of Galleries and Exhibitions at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles; Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; and Curator of Exhibitions at the University Art Museum at CSU Long Beach. You can find her on Instagram @meg_linton