Page 37 - David Bermant Foundation

36James ossi’s reflections on DWB:At the mention of the name, Dave Bermant, a thousand contradictory memories and messages flash and argue and laugh and digress. There is no escaping the inner conflict that arises just by hearing the name, Dave Bermant.My earliest memory of Dave: I had a few photos of square, iridescent soap bubbles, and I drove through the gates of his stone and brick castle on the edge of Long Island Sound, on the cusp of New York City, on the Westchester Riviera, next door to the famous Zealot-And-Blow-Hard, Reverend Ike—and down the street from Playland’s noisy kiddy rides and the famous, ancient Dragon roller coaster.I was there because an hour earlier I had just met Ivan Karp, who was, to my mind, Chairman Of The Board Of Art Gallery Gods And Smokers Of Expensive Cigars. He glanced at my photos and simply said, “Go.” He slipped the address in myhand and added, “I’ll call. Go now.”The stone columns seemed like they were a thousand feet infront of the Castle. The columns were massive and menacing, as the former owner’s architect demanded. However, their vulgar phallic hostility was circumvented and turned into a kind of laughing post because their present owner, Dave Bermant, topped each ten-foot-high stone column with a stroboscopic, wonderful, whimsical, whirling, swooping luminescence of some giant fantastical insect from a galaxy far away.I parked under the grandfather elms and near a large, sparkling Japanese kimono. The material for this kimono wasn’t featherweight silk, but four tons of concrete—a gravestone of sorts. The sparkles in the monument were fiber optics imbedded in the concrete and moved rhythmically, spelling out words in strange tongue and alphabet from that other galaxy.I took my photos up the flagstone walk to the Castle