Within a simple wooden box in Wallace Berman's Untitled, an assortment of round stones, some hand-painted with Hebrew letters, rests against a Plexiglas window, settled in what appears to be a random pile. The Hebrew letters inscribed on the stones do not form actual words but call attention to Berman's interest in Jewish mysticism, specifically the kabbalah, a text that itself requires a scholarly and creative deciphering of arcane signs and symbols. Such a remove from linguistic function immediately restores to these letters the source of mystery and contemplation they possess in the kabbalah, in that God is believed to have created the universe by means of the Hebrew alphabet. But the letters' wondrous, inchoate meaning also assumes the ordinariness of objecthood, reflecting Berman's fascination with the shapes of the letters themselves.

Like other members of the Beat movement and the poets of his generation, Berman pursued an interest in the commonplace and a belief in the transformative potential of the everyday, blending a neo-Dadaist/ Surrealist sensibility and a spirituality founded in mystical kabbalistic beliefs. Berman personified the Beat Generation, especially its interdisciplinary concerns and its strong association with literature. After moving from New York to California in the early 1950s, he founded Semina (seed), a handmade magazine of art and poetry that was also a folio or assemblage scrapbook, which he published and sent to friends. As its editor, Berman exercised little discrimination, concentrating instead on shaping the context so that each folio issue would possess an overall collage-like aspect. Such an openly interpretive positioning of meaning, to be completed by the observer/reader, was integral to the poetics of neo-Dadaism, which was spelled out in the first Semina packet in a poem by Hermann Hesse: "Wherever the seeds of light, the magnificent, falls / Comes change."

In the 1968 film Easy Rider, director Dennis Hopper, a collector of Berman's work, gave the artist a bit part, consisting of sowing seeds in the arid soil of a desert commune. A modest homage to this prominent member of the West Coast Beat Generation whose cross-cultural pursuits, in addition to his art, included photography, poetry, music, and film, the role symbolized not only Berman's broad cultural influence but also his distance from the East Coast art establishment. In the 1950s, Berman, along with other California artists such as Bruce Conner, George Herms, and Edward Kienholz, produced his own version of Pop Art, employing a process of accumulation to produce a style that has come to be known as California Assemblage. Citing this historical, albeit peripheral, movement as "completely autonomous, full of rich narrative and the closest development to a true surrealist root in the American vernacular," artist/critic John Coplans went on to credit its distinct character to Berman's influence.

In addition to its more obvious metaphor of dissemination, Berman's incidental movie role of propagation is also symbolic of the repetition and the chance effects that characterize his work. In his collages and assemblages, an almost cinematic recurrence structures the poetic flow of imagery, allowing the varying number of individual units, often loosely organized according to a grid, to interconnect or function independently. Language provides the principal undergirding to the associative potential of the works' poetic images, an unpredictable chemistry whose power is echoed in the random arrangement of Hebrew letters. For Berman, it is the fundamental, inexhaustible assemblage of language-rather than its restrictive codes-that is primary.