George Herbert Herms was born on July 5, 1935, in Woodland, Calif., near Sacramento, one of three children of Irene Lucille (Rieder) Herms and William Herms, who worked for Yolo County as an agricultural adviser.
George regarded his father’s job — which involved clocking into the same office day after day — as a fate to avoid at all costs and dropped out of the engineering school at the University of California, Berkeley after his first semester.
He was scared away from the field for good after few early jobs in the nascent computer industry; one, working for the business-machine manufacturer Remington Rand, involved feeding punch cards into a room-size Univac. He later recalled a lecture at the company that he found especially alarming, entitled “Electronic Brains Need Your Brains.”
As he wrote in a 1972 exhibition catalog, he was searching for a way to use his entire self — “to find a work, not just for my brain, but my soul, hands, heart, balls, spirit, senses.”
After leaving Berkeley, he traveled to Mexico on a spiritual quest, walking and fasting in Veracruz for 10 days with a typewriter on his back. (As he often said, all he ended up with was a broken typewriter and a sunburn.) Back in California, he lived in Topanga Canyon with a sandal-maker who called him Sid, for Siddhartha, and introduced him to Mr. Berman, who became a close friend and mentor.
Mr. Herms was soon creating his first works of what would become known as California assemblage. Living in Hermosa Beach in 1957, he made art from detritus he found on the beach and installed it on the foundations of some razed houses nearby. Mr. Berman, one of the few who saw it, described it as “courtyards of rust and decay — God’s night humor.”
