In this short article I draw on Bernhard Sachs early years in Adelaide and the art scene that he encountered. Experimental practice and an embrace of the avant-garde were mandatory during this period. Practice was a way of life. Bernhard came to this program from university, he already had a grasp on history through his own family and European philosophy. I believe that he embraced the art school and what it offered in terms of advancing intellectual thought in a more poetic or fluid way. He became a great teacher and a protagonist for experimental models of practice and thinking through art.

Processes of the practice

I want to focus on the performativity of Bernhard’s work, its roots in his art school practice and his incubation as an artist in the school and experimental art scene in Adelaide in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I believe that history and how it is made and remembered is a pivotal part of Bernhard’s practice. He was constantly involved in re-telling history: his own and the history of the world he inhabited. As I have been drawn into the After History project, which was instigated by the artist from his death bed, I have become aware that we are all performing a history of the artist in the present, after his death. This whole idea would have appealed to Bernhard as a continuation of his practice after his passing into another history/time/void. There are different agencies in all of these positions: individual and group, communities, memory and personal experience. In the memorial aspects of the project, pursued through the exhibition, the book and the symposium, Bernhard sets forth a performative model that inhabits the present through us. Like his epic performance work The Polish Game (2004), our performance involves a group of individuals who are required to participate with minimal direction from the creator.

When I was first engaged with research for Bernhard’s posthumous book project, I came across Sean Lowry’s lucid essay for the Monash University Museum of Art’s Collection about the drawing (During Philosophy) Landscape at T, South Australia 1959 (Our Salt, Our Desolation), 1989. Lowry writes that Bernhard was ‘drawn to the ways in which personal and public memories could infuse one another, sometimes producing situations in which mediated historical events mask personal lived experience'.

I spoke with artist Derek Kreckler recently. He collaborated with Bernhard in the late 1970s/early 1980s and he remembers Bernhard was always obsessed with salt, blood and death, and with the Death Camps under the Nazis in Germany during WW2. At art school, Bernhard became famous for nailing dead fish to trees and using rabbits in his actions and installations.

Burial rituals with embalmed rabbits appear in what I believe is documentation from the Time Capsules Action in 1978 at the Experimental Art Foundation. Here he created a diagram of oppositions that appear under the primary opposition ‘Labyrinth/World, Actual freedom (ground under our feet)/The illusion of freedom (the myths of our times)’. And ends with two statements or conclusions, the last being: ‘freedom consists in the recognition of the illusion of freedom. (The concept of contra-labyrinth is impossible)’. The action involved a burial ritual of embalmed rabbits who appear in the diagram under the illusion of freedom. The speculative philosophical propositions are enacted in a poetic and ritual experience.

Later Sachs talked about the inclusion of blood in his works, especially the collection of swabs from his multiple blood tests. He wrote in an email to Barbara Bolt (16 June 2021): ‘I began keeping some of these as there have been periods over the last years where these have been frequent’. He goes on to link this to the Shroud of St Veronica and the Shroud of Turin and says that these references are evident in his drawings and prints in the 1980s and the ritual burial of rabbits and fish in performance/installation works in the 1970s. 

Bernhard and I were both at the Adelaide School of Art and in the late 1970s and early 80s we were part of a group of undergraduates committed to experimentalism and often mentored by Bert Flugelman, the head of the sculpture department who got us involved with events and exhibitions at the Experimental Art Foundation. We believed in the intersection of art, life, and philosophy and we were hungry for critical engagement. In 1978 with Flugelman’s assistance a group of us established the South Australian Workshop (SAW) a well-equipped sculpture studio that finally closed in 2004.¹

Many of us saw Joseph Beuys—the artist, philosopher and teacher—as a radical model because of the sculptural link. Beuys, the expanded field of sculpture, installation, and performance art that inspired a generation, fermented in Adelaide through spaces such as the Experimental Art Foundation (est. 1975), the Mildura Sculpture Triennials (est. 1961) and the Women’s Art Movement (est. 1977) that brought a feminist perspective. It was a time when experimental practice was everywhere.

Experimentalism in expanded sculpture, various approaches to conceptual art and performance actions were dominant in Adelaide both at the art school and the Experimental Art Foundation. Three men initiated this—Noel Sheridan the director of the art space, a charismatic artist and curator from Ireland, Donald Brook an art theorist from the United Kingdom and Bert Flugelman who was born in Vienna and escaped the Nazis in 1938. They were all immigrants from Europe. They all had international reputations. Their vision of an experimental art space was realised through the volunteer labour of the sculpture students who literally built the space by gutting an old factory and refitting it. In return they were mentored and given opportunities to exhibit, access to a great darkroom, the probability of being published in the Foundation’s small press publications and exposure to an astonishing array of international artists and writers. 

In 1974, Donald Brook was campaigning for what he called ‘post object art’. In his catalogue essay for the Concepts exhibition at Contemporary Art Society, he wrote:

There has always been post-object art of some sort, and conceptual art as well, on some understanding of the term. What is new now is the extent and clarity of the recognition by artists, that what they are manipulating need not be in the medium of oil paint or stone, but may be a process, a system or some other insubstantial and spatially or temporarily extended stuff. The entities that they generate are not, for the most part, medium-sized, portable, inflation-hedging lumps of cult furniture.²

Brook was an influential art theorist and gave the Power Lecture in 1969. He gave numerous lectures at the Experimental Art Foundation and attended many performances. Tracts of his writing and ideas were written in large text across the wall as you walked into the space.

They read:
1.     Our apprehension of the world is active, not passive, and art displays an emergent apprehension.
2.     Art is only incidentally and not essentially aesthetic.
3.     Art is concerned with every kind of value and not particularly with beauty.
4.     Art Interrogates the status quo: it is essentially, and not incidentally, radical.
5.     Art is experimental action: it models possible forms of life and makes them available to public criticism.

Bernhard lists Saltworks on his CV. These works consisted of a mix of installations and actions for the Experimental Art Foundation’s Performance Week at Carclew House in North Adelaide as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1980. Sachs and Forrest collaborated on the installation Amnesia Zone * Salt * Interior that showed a series of photographs and a three-channel video of salt pans and environs at Dry Creek in SA. The performance/action Interior * Exterior * (Immigrants) was a collaboration with Kreckler at 11pm. The audience was seated inside behind two slide projectors showing two sets of slides projected from inside the room onto two windows. One showed images from Berlin in the 1950s, the other side showed images from the same period in Australia.

Simultaneously, outside the window in the grounds of the house, two figures mark out an area with survey poles, illuminating their activity with a hurricane lamp. After they had set up the poles they moved towards the windows and shone lights into the eyes of the spectators in the room.

The third part of Salt Works was B52 * Year Zero * Exterior, another collaboration with Kreckler. This work was installed in the conservatory of the grand house. The floor was covered in salt, a chair supported a slide projector, and above the chair was a blueprint of a uniformed figure looking at a window display of chemical glassware, a similar picture was placed in the foyer on the main notice board of events; a CB/shortwave radio was broadcasting the emergency channel, and on the window which served as the only access to the room was a small sign reading ‘Do Not Enter/Pouch Rat'.

Although these are early works, they already draw on the practices and approaches that the artist was to develop throughout his career. The photographs contrasting Germany and Australia in the 1950s, the mapping out of zones of inclusion and exclusion, and the action of interrogating the audience with bright lights suggested a narrative of crossing borders and fleeing from danger and incarceration. I see the uniformed figure and the glassware as a reference to the death camps of the Nazis where people’s belongings were taken and collected for profit.

Like everyone who contributed to the symposium and many of those who will come to participate, I have an enormous respect for Bernhard Sachs and his practice as an artist.

Sach’s practice is dedicated, unflinching. It is not interested in markets and commodities. His trade is in the histories of ideas and ideologies, in the turmoil of world politics and the catastrophes humans wreck upon each other in the name of nations and states, in the pursuit of power, money, and belief. Bernhard understood that the making of history and the tragic noise of humankind, repeat endlessly because we just can’t think and feel at the same time. We get seduced by power, by the surge of the crowd, by our desire.

This was Bernhard’s project, the downfall of history, doomed to repeat itself. On many levels, his approach is profoundly depressing. There is no hope here only revelation as we come to understand the world through the artist’s eyes. Despite the artist’s entrenched pessimism, the process of the practice has much to teach us. The psycho-pathology of humanness is layered through Sach’s work, his attention to personal and subjective history is as poignant as his focus on world history. Memory and history collide, writing and re-writing each other. Bernhard took a Freudian approach to life and work. Death, pleasure, and desire are entangled as the life blood of a practice always steeped in histories that are inscribed on the body as much as the mind. The materiality of Bernhard’s practice is palpable, insistent.

Sachs was committed to an avant-garde that has already failed but nevertheless persists at the heart of practice, in the experimentalism that drives it. Although the western artworld has been contorting itself for almost a hundred years, trying to maintain an ethical and political practice in this field is beyond many. This is why Sachs’ work is significant. He speaks to generations of practitioners trying to establish a voice for an art that matters. An art that has purpose, an art that contributes to the critical ideas of its time. It’s not an easy art. Practice is not easy in Sachs’ school of thinking. It’s a commitment to the socio-political world through its role as witness. Practice is a way of life. 

The physical and psychological activity demonstrated through the repetitive reworking of ideas and images to create an archive of over-drawing and re-dating to enable layers of physical history within one work is quite astonishing. Almost breathless in its performativity. Twirling the two-dimensional surface through ecstasy and obliteration until the work becomes extinct and is thrown into the void of its own living history. This is a wild approach. An attempt to archive the practice in the present. To bury and perhaps commemorate its passing.

There was a ritual aspect to the practice and evidence of a narrative in his work, albeit cut up, erased, re-made, forgotten, and remembered again. He loved the idea of archives both living and dead.

So much of Bernhard’s work is autobiographical but he also stretches his experience and his history so that he can accommodate a wider analysis of the past and failures of various ideological positions. Situating his own blood in his work is a sly sabotage—an insistence that the wounded/diseased corporeal body needs recognition; that everybody is the body of Christ. The stamp that he used to mark his work is modelled on the Vatican stamp.

Bernhard took his practice seriously. It was almost a religion.    

It is very appropriate that Bernhard’s memorial exhibition After History is at Linden New Art.

His MA exhibition was held here at Linden in the late 1990s. The University of Melbourne conferred the degree in 1997, he’d been exhibiting in major festivals, biennales and galleries for twenty years by then. I was one of the examiners and I remember being entranced by the installation of the work. In many ways, it was an opening into Bernhard’s process as the installation appeared to mirror the studio which had been curated by the artist. It was like stepping into a labyrinth. I remember feeling slightly claustrophobic, there was so much stuff. Carefully archived, in drawers, little cabinets. There were drawings everywhere with notations, quotations, and studio paraphernalia. The space was created as an abandoned studio; its history loaded through the associations established by the placement of objects and pages. The examiner became witness. In Bernhard’s world view, art is a philosophical project that allows ambiguity, poetry, ritual. It understands its own failure, in many ways it chases failure, allows it to be. His is quite profoundly a studio practice.