One cannot look at Berhard Sachs work without recognising his abiding interest in Western philosophy. In particular Heidegger, the German metaphysical tradition, but then also Marx, Freud, the Frankfurt school generally, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek—most contemporary European philosophy really. He read deeply in these areas and held a truly impressive library and frightening number of photocopied books on the subject. Unable to cover all this, I will concentrate here on his interest in Ontology.

Bernhard and I discussed philosophy many times because, like Bernhard, my first degree was in philosophy and, like Bernhard, primarily in social theory and contemporary European philosophy. Bernhard often proudly boasted that he failed the subject. I did not. However, Bernhard subsequently pursued the subject with far more discipline than I. Doing philosophy at university taught me two things. One—I am not by inclination or temperament a philosopher in the formal sense; and secondly—to paraphrase the comedian Steve Martin—you only remember enough undergraduate philosophy to fuck you up for the rest of your life.

Artists are dilettantes in philosophy. Or, perhaps, better—Vikings! We raid those peaceful foreign fields, looting them for treasure and carrying off the spoils with scant regard for the farmers who so diligently till those fields. Bernhard’s interest was in metaphysics, mine in epistemology. And while he looked a whole lot more Viking than me, he spent far more time in those fields than I.

Albert Einstein once said, if you couldn’t explain your theory to a twelve-year-old, it was probably wrong. Bernhard took rather an opposing view. Little wonder then, he was highly attracted to the theories of Martin Heidegger. More on that later, but a definition might be useful here.

Ontology questions Being. What it is to exist and often, what really exists beyond mere appearances. It is by nature hermeneutic and doubts manifestations of the quotidian. Some branches consider simple existence—the Ontic (or Kant’s ‘Immanence’)—that a rock or a chair may have (what is the chair-ness of a chair?) but most is concerned with the Being of existential, animate beings—human beings, being a particular interest. Ontology seeks to define fundamental, universal states thus veers to the metaphysical and the idealist. The blame here can be placed with Plato. Remember his Ideal Forms are immaterial ideas instantiated in the real world as shadows, inferior copies. For any real-world object or existence, there is a perfect, idealised form imperfectly realised in the material world (the ideal chair from which all chairs share an essential essence but in a degraded manner.) And, bummer!, these essential forms are also essentially unknowable! Except through rational thought and the mind, not by examining the real (reflected) world. So, reason and thought are supreme—not the stinking, illusionistic world of materiality. Thus commences an Idealist tradition that has dominated the whole of Western Philosophy from then on, leaving the world a rather second rate place of false appearances, science a backwater, and artists banished from Utopia as they just make inferior copies of inferior copies. Thank you, Plato. We would have to wait until Marx and his famous inversion of Hegel and his formulation of Historical Materialism and the dialectic, for Western philosophy to regard the world with anything more than a veiled contempt. (You can see how arse-about Plato’s thinking is by the way. It is so much more likely people see things in the real world and then devise common essentialist abstractions from that, rather than the other way around.)

Marx was a revolutionary thinker. I think more Marxists should read him. And as one of my philosophy lecturers once profoundly remarked ‘Marx was not a Marxist’. But if you think history and culture are not formed by universal zietgiest ideas clashing on the plane of reason to form a new synthesis that define social conditions, but rather, that in order to think, produce a society, or have culture—you must first be able to eat and thus live!—then you too are a Marxist! Pretty much everyone is these days, but few know it.

Bernhard was a Marxist politically, but despite this, there was something of the German Idealist tradition central to his fascination with ontology. I blame Martin Heidegger, who is very much within this tradition. Reading Heidegger is very likely to provide great insights into Bernhard’s work and could even be claimed as central. Heidegger did write a book called Being and Time, after all, which is pretty much the fundamental subject for almost all Bernhard’s works. A confession here though—I am not the one for that task. I have scarcely read any Heidegger at all. What I have read—and it is very little—I regard as wilfully obscure reworkings of other philosophers ideas replete with endless, unnecessary neologisms that muddy the waters. In his History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell wrote Heidegger off in just two sentences saying,

Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language here is running riot.¹

Cruel but fair.

Bernhard would have hated this by the way. He regarded the entire Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition as beneath contempt and Lord Russell as particularly despicable. I have sympathy with this. I often say the trouble with English philosophers is that they all want to be scientists and the trouble with European philosophers is they all want to be poets. Neither of them is any bloody good at it and should stick with philosophy. No doubt philosophers say something similar about artists…

To return to the topic and an objection I raised with Bernhard often is: the issue with metaphysics is hinted in the name. Meta/physics, BEYOND the physical. So how can you know about it? Following the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant, we recognise we are subject to the limitations of our perceptions. We cannot know of things that we cannot perceive with our senses. And even this is a limited knowledge of things, as we cannot pierce to their true nature, we cannot know the Thing-in-Itself, as Kant put it. To claim otherwise is the realm of metaphysics. Idealists argue that reason can get you there. Through reason, you might uncover pre-existing fundamental states, however, even a priori knowledge constituted in reason must be verified in the world—as the Logical Positivists pointed out. For me then the issue is mute and becomes epistemological. Epistemology refers to theories of knowledge—how do we know things, what structures/shape our understanding and so on. Ultimately, there is just the material world and our perceptions of it—including our seeming insubstantial thoughts, so —let’s just get on with trying to figure out how to describe this thing before us. After Kant, the issue becomes one not of Being and knowing its transcendental nature but of the world as is immanent and how our understandings of it correspond. Epistemology in short.

Correspondence has been the issue since. And the subject of my PhD, as it happens, where I argue the mirror metaphor which was assumed to underwrite correspondence, has been smashed but reconfigured in the form of a mirror ball. It is a fascinating read! I highly recommend it.

Bernhard rejected this, my refutation of ontology for epistemology, suggesting I look at arguments proposed by Adorno in his book Metaphysics. Here you will find some nonsense about—if you assert there is nothing beyond the physical world, or even if there is, it is unknowable since it cannot be instantiated in the physical world—even in language—you posit a transcendental materialism. That is, a metaphysical a priori state of Being based in materiality that must precede the world itself! I….Goddamn you metaphysics! I hate you philosophy!

The ontological question is one Bernhard returned to throughout his work. And here to be fair to Heidegger (by the way did I mention Heidegger was an enthusiastic, card-carrying Nazi who slept with his Jewish female students? No? Don’t let me prejudice you against him…) he did assert that the nature of Being for the human at least (he called the Dasein) is within time. (Much like Heraclitus in the fifth century BCE.) As Beings we exist not just in three dimensions but in four. Time is a recurring theme in Bernhard’s work. Whether it be the slow accretion of layers in drawings, the reworking of the works over time, witnessed by the crusty kraft tape he used to re-adhere works to the wall, or the time stamps he manufactured to signal this reworking. The work materialises the process and procession of time very deliberately. It also refers to personal memory and collective deep time, which we call history. The focus of this history was both political, social and artistic, the work is awash with these references across many fields and visual traditions.

So, even if you throw Heidegger out of the equation we are left with Bernhard’s work ceaseless returning to the ontological question: what is it to be? ‘To Be, or not to Be, that is the question’ as Shakespeare had it. Or in Bernhard’s case, ‘2B or not 2B, that is the pencil’. (Sorry. Sorry Bernhard, that was a cheap gag. I feel ashamed). But his response is as much poetic as it is philosophical. This is the beauty and worth of art and literature, and why Bernhard was an artist, not a philosopher per se. Art’s fictive nature is material and imaginative, able to exceed the limitations of the rational, or the idealised. It does not attempt to produce premises, but to apprehended what cannot be directly apprehended, or to acknowledge and picture the uncertainty of this apprehension. It can evoke the profound mystery of Being. All of which, indeed, remains a true mystery, despite my objections to metaphysics.

I once asked Bernhard whether he was interested in Bergson, in particular his notion of Durée. A conception of time that, for the ontological being, does not move steadily forward as a series of instance but rather stretches both backward and forward, meaning perception itself is enmeshed in both memories and impressions that shape our consideration of what we are regarding, and also anticipates what is to come. Thus, a moment is not singular or momentary indeed, it is stretched both forward and back, a fluid process of becoming rather than still or a mechanical clock-like progression.  How did he regard this essentially elastic conception of time and being? I can’t remember what he said exactly (we were both pretty drunk) but I seem to recall him dismissing it as completely bloody obvious—and then possibly banging on about Heidegger again. (Who, in my prejudice, I am guessing stole and paraphrased the idea.) But as obvious as it might be, it is nonetheless, one way to regard aspects of his work. They are not stilled images but distillations of processes that occur in a fluidity of time, a Durée. There is a temporal depth to them, one that also forces the viewer to consider their own existence in relationship to them. Particularly when they are at very large-scale where we become—unlike an easel painting where you essentially look through a window to another world, safely on this side of the looking glass—physically enmeshed in the image. Your own embodied experience is employed in the processes of perception and is made evident, thus your own sense of being is starkly revealed. This is also true of his installations and the maximalist arrangement of the works in many of his exhibitions, which often covered every available wall space.

The rational, mathematical space that arose around the Renaissance and as described by Irwin Panofsky (one physically and conceptually based on the invention of the planar glass mirror according to my PhD—again, a terrific read!) was not one embraced or even accepted by Bernhard. It wasn’t denied either. Rather an alternative was posited. One closer to a medieval or pre-modern condition where time was not sequential, but less regimented and often simultaneous, and where space was far more disordered than our own mechanical/ mathematical conceptions. Indeed, this is an embodied and particularised experience of time and space rather than the abstracted, generalised conception of space that follows Newton. Famously, Bergson argued with Einstein who argued that space/time was an indistinguishable continuum rather than discrete experiences or states. Given the triumph of science since, it is hard to argue against Einstein. Yet Bergson, and even Heidegger, still remain poetically evocative in their conceptions, while not being empirically accurate.

Bernhard didn’t hold much regard for science by the way. Suspiciously English. He once interrupted an explanation I was giving him about the Bergson/Einstein debate, dismissing Einstein arguments as scientism. This isn’t scientism! I objected, its actual science!

I once also asked him about the whole alchemical thing given his interest in Joseph Beuys and Anslem Kieffer, their symbolic use of materials that reference the tradition. That and the fact the alchemical project of transmuting base lead into everlasting gold is an analogy for spiritual transformation—the corporeal becoming immutable. He gave this one pretty short shrift too. And I am with him on that. Bloody alchemical hippies.

Bernhard’s work was deadly serious (while often including great humour) and, intended to address big questions—as art has done traditionally, but seems unwilling to do so in the present day (while claiming the status of doing so). It would be too simple to ascribe this to the ‘end of grand narratives’ or other post-modern palliatives. Bernhard was acutely aware of post structuralist philosophy but was hostile to that mode of postmodern described by Fredrick Jameson, a kind of pastiche (think David Salle). He was on board however with the heterogeneous and the dissemination of différance indicated by Jacque Derrida. Ultimately, the end of didactic, Enlightenment, certainty that surrounds us does not preclude contingent truth. (Once again, this issue of post-Kantian correspondence…) Indeed Derrida himself was keen to point to a ‘condition of possibility’, a semiotic limitation—things cannot just mean anything. A hippopotamus is not an elephant, or a flower—a condition of the self-evident when dealing with representational imagery. Therefore, attempts to answer big questions are both possible and necessary.

Mimesis, or perhaps its impossibility, was a particular interest of Bernhard’s (he often spoke of writing a course on the subject) and given his use of representational forms, mostly derived from mediated sources, it would be fascinating to know his thoughts on it. Alas.

The work navigates the contingency of knowledge and Being in a highly considered way, alert to both semiotics and the temporal. It proclaims its own apostatic position in relation to an art world of Insta and of clichéd certainty. It is not philosophy but is broadly philosophical, in the way art is often assumed to be, but usually is not. The work is not disciplined but is rigorous. It is imaginative, not didactic. Deep, existential concerns are deeply unfashionable now in a world that eschews the difficult, or even the lengthy. But like metaphysics, these questions don’t simply go away.

Heidegger did say something useful. Something I both appeal to now, and condemn, equally. Heidegger suggested that Death wasn’t singular but had many categories. One he called ‘Demise’, the other ‘Death’. Demise he described as the physical extinguishment of the organic person. This was distinct from ‘Death’, which was the end of the moral, intellectual, existential project embodied by the Dasein—the human being. This Death has an ongoing life after organic demise until, it too finishes. In this sense, looking at the work of Bernhard Sachs, I would say, and following Heidegger’s terminology, that Bernhard has manifested a condition of Demise, but is not yet Dead.

PS: I also think—Heidegger—idiot! Poseur! Making up neologisms for generally understood conditions! Death and Legacy rather than Demise and Death would stand just as well here. Annoying.

This article is a transcript of a talk given at the Bernhard Sachs: After History Symposium (2025). Haley's conversational tone has been kept in tact with only minor editorial amendments.