Afterward

I first met Bernhard Sachs in 1991 in his St Kilda studio. It was a windowless, sunless and unventilated room at the centre of an ad hoc labyrinth of studios, embedded within what seemed to be a derelict, once-elegant, hotel ballroom. The stagnant air in there was so thick with graphite and charcoal dust that Bernhard offered me the respirator he used while working. A decade later we reacquainted when I began working at the Victorian College of the Arts. Back then and throughout his career that I experienced as a colleague (and in conversational if perilous years of bohemian bar-hopping), his art struck me as being afflicted—and I use that word with due caution—by an especially despondent kind of rage. This was a temperament expressed in an indignantly esoteric mourning. One face of this complexion was personal with the loss of his wife. The other was cultural—due to that 'tyranny of distance' from a history of art and its intellectual setting (and its language) from which I would say Bernhard felt, by the accident of birth, exiled. In his art, that incidental aspect of birth became constitutive of a deeply Romantic crisis; it became, as one despondently modernist philosopher put it, 'the trouble with being born'.¹ So inconsolable—one could add, insatiable—was Bernhard’s mourning that I’d say it might be instead called melancholia (indeed, it’s not hard to picture him brooding in his arcanum like Durer’s famous dark angel). That’s a melancholy at least in its Freudian sense: an unassailable introjection of loss, and a chronic inability of the ego to attach to a new love object. Unlike mourning, in Freud’s famous distinction between the two, it is untreatable. But at its best, Bernhard’s melancholia causes any diagnostic caution with the word “affliction” to dissipate. Out of such affliction a stunningly cryptic and beautifully phantasmic art was created with a perverse, even forbidding, joy. In the spirit of that perverseness and its perverse joy, I offered this 'afterward' to the exhibition of Bernhard’s work at Linden Gallery.