Here I seek to address a series of questions or provocations regarding the material and processual considerations of Bernhard’s studio practice. It should be premised that these thoughts reflect a personal, yet objective, attempt to recollect what Bernhard spoke about when discussing the making of his work. While clearly informed by Western Art History, History and Philosophy, Bernhard’s practice was essentially a studio-based practice. Therefore my focus is the intertwined meshing of material investigations with rigorous theoretical concerns. Finally, rather than attempting to be conclusive about anything regarding Bernhard’s process, it is hoped that the topics raised acknowledge the necessity for further analysis of such a large and important body of work. 

If Bernhard was around today, he would be (vaguely) happy to know that the Labor Party in Australia has secured another term. In the last election he died knowing Scott Morrison was out. 'I thought I'd never see another labour government’ was the last text I had from him.

I had known Bernhard close to thirty years, but our friendship really began in the 1990s. We reconnected when I worked at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) as a technician in the Drawing Department and we maintained contact since. The first time I saw Bernhard’s work was at the VCA back in 1984. I was immediately impressed with the scale of the work, but it was clearly not big for the sake of it, it was sophisticated.

Bernhard’s practice involved drawing, collage, painting, photography, performance and sculpture. He was rigorously intellectual in thinking, making and writing. His practice epitomised the idea of praxis. While I will discuss my memories and thoughts regarding ‘Material + Process’ in relation to Bernhard’s work (at least that which I am familiar with), I will also drift into some theoretical realms, but not to the depth Bernhard would have gone.

In the following text I have decided to develop or expand on three topics, which act like prompts. The first, ‘Big Labour: Cinema and Spectacle’ touches on ideas of scale, spectacle and cinema in Bernhards work. The second, ‘Search and Destroy: Slippages, Erasures, Negatives and Re-Negotiations’, aims to examine a type of physical editorial act, in which there is a manual attempt to peel back layers of history through processes of erasure. Bernhard’s revisitation of past work will also be discussed. The third topic, ‘Material Histories: Xray’s and Historical Stains’, reflects on Xray’s, visual residues or stains in his work.

On the whole Bernhard placed importance on both material and the immaterial. In a sense he used ‘material (+ process)’ to exercise or summon the immaterial—the Spectres of Bernhard.

Big Labour: Cinema and Spectacle

‘Big Labour’ sounds like a slogan, or billboard, or something to do with building bridges, or big boats. In the context of Bernhards practice ‘big’ entailed working large, but also working with ‘big’ ideas, complex philosophical concepts, and making those ‘big’ ideas visually tangible. His work functioned like a spectacle—it was theatrical, operatic and filmic—that was made to be seen ‘big’ (most of the time).

For me there has always been something particularly cinematic about Bernhard’s work, and he was certainly into cinema. I have the video tapes to prove it (approximately 500). We shared a strong interest in Jean-Luc Godard films—especially Alphaville (1965), the mashup of film noir and sci-fi was dystopic enough to get Bernhard going. But ultimately it was Pier Paolo Pasolini who Bernhard was most drawn to. It is claimed that in Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975), Pasolini is consistently guided by a deep-rooted sense of the physical in a range of guises’. And that ‘{t}he corporeal—the quality and materiality of the body—is a driving force that accompanies more formal considerations throughout Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematographic work.’¹ Pasolini had an important impact on Bernhard.

Bernhard's work ethic could be seen academically and in the studio, but it was in the studio that the idea of work would provide the necessary tangible outcome. He had a routine and an ongoing methodology for studio work, and given the scale of the work labour was a necessity. In the studio he was the proletariat, the worker, like Alexander Rodchenko, the Russian Constructionist who had a uniform made for creating art work.

The large drawings always seemed to me as if they somehow breathed. They exhaled charcoal dust, they exhaled traces of the rubber, the eraser. The act of erasure was a physical act, a material editing process. Robert Rauschenberg claimed that the erasure of a De Kooning drawing (Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953) was particularly hard work and ultimately there were still traces of mark making—spectres of materiality. 

Search and Destroy: Slippages, Erasures, Negatives and Re-negotiations.

Given both Bernhard and I were Iggy Pop fans it made sense to title a section of this paper with a Stooges classic. The punk ethos sat comfortably with Bernhard’s desire to destroy the image. While Mike Kelley was destroying all monsters in an anti-rock band, Bernhard was destroying all images in the studio. But his was a love/hate relationship. Christian Capurro posted an essay written by Bernhard in 2004, in which a quote from art historian Dario Gamboni talks of Robert Rauschenberg asking Marcel Duchamp whether he believed in the destruction of art for all mankind. Duchamps response was not for all mankind, only for myself. Bernhard understood slippages, in both language and materials, he hunted them down. He corrected other people's ‘slippages’. We would also discuss Anslem Kiefer’s spills, particularly in the photographs.

For Bernhard the destruction of the image was a type of self-imposed iconoclasm—an image search and destroy. Bernhard wrote about iconoclasm in depth for an article in Art + Australia in which he points out that:

Iconoclastic here means not the destruction of images but the profligate opposite of this: a hyperbolic proliferation of images, which is a self-mutilation inside images themselves.

He could easily be talking about the internet. He goes on to say that there is a ‘fundamental participation in a universal anonymity, self-erasure through the profligacy of images'.²

This process of image destruction, or image ‘self-mutilation’ was discussed in far more depth, but on a basic level for me, Bernhard brought punk to art history (dare I say maybe mixed with a bit of gothic). These days we have Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen speaking about images in regard to ‘machine vision’ and ‘artificial stupidity’. Bernhard was more tech savvy than he thought.

In this article Bernhard goes on further to say that,

{N}o matter where the gaze is cast across the receding landscape, it is contaminated. In all directions there is a metonymic slide where every form, every articulation, has something outside of itself with which it is irrevocably entangled, infected, by which it is drawn into a criminality of sorts, or at very least a criminality with which it consorts.

When Bernhard and I first discussed reworking artworks, it seemed plagued with stigma. Why resurrect an artwork only to subject it to more scrutiny, more torture? The decision to rework old work became a philosophical decision on many levels. How does one subvert notions of chronology and linear time? He was already doing this with his date systems. To rework an artwork is to confront a surface you’ve already created—one embedded with past intentions—while simultaneously acknowledging that you’re re-entering a specific moment in time. In Bernhard’s practice, there was always an anarchic push and pull—a process of layering, (re)moving, and (re)applying, so (re)visiting a work was clearly logical.

Material Histories: Xray and Historical Stains

In the gallery text for After History, it is claimed that the X-ray image was ‘a common device in Sachs’ work, as a way of making evident the physical structure of an artwork'.

I began talking to Bernhard about X-rays and infrared imaging when I was working at the Ian Potter Art Conservation Centre at the University of Melbourne in the 1990s. Infrared analysis enabled conservators to see underdrawing beneath layers of paint. I had been working with infrared technologies in art conservation and for an exhibition by the American artist Fred Wilson. In this exhibition I had worked with Wilson on developing signage that presented fabricated infrared analysis of colonial paintings with hidden histories (using early day Photoshop). This interested Bernhard and we would speak about X-ray and infrared analysis for more creative uses. How could we literally peel back these layers and find out what’s really going on?

Infrared imaging differed significantly from X-ray. While X-ray imagery typically results in a transparency film, our work with infrared was video based, with hard copies produced from selected frames. Much of our discussion focused on the form the final artwork might take. We just wanted underdrawing detail, something we could visually analyse, and use as the foundation for a new artwork. This new artwork was made: it was a small head study that only existed as a digital file, its image now etched only in my mind.

Before Bernhard died, the one book he wanted to give me was on Sigmar Polke’s photographic work. He knew I’d been working primarily with photography after my PhD and understood my interest in experimental processes and challenging traditional photographic histories.

Like Bernhard, Sigmar Polke used X-ray analysis as a tool, ‘to explore hidden layers and past artistic decisions within existing paintings’ Polke's X-ray analysis of Goya's The Old Women or Time (1819-1823 ) uncovered an earlier composition of a Resurrection of Christ, which resonated with Polke's interest in the paranormal. As with Bernhard, in much of Polke’s work the stain had an acceptable and important presence. Stains are something you clean up, make disappear, erase. A stain is produced by accident, or through some form of slippage or mistake. A stain in photography might be considered indexical, a residue of time past, the residue found in Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning drawing. In Australian history it is acknowledged that the land is stained with blood, through colonial massacres. This is often said of numerous historical events.

Bernhard had previously referenced other historical events, or artifactual events, such as the Veil of Veronica—a relic said to bear a positive image of Christ’s face. In contrast, one might also consider the Shroud of Turin, which presents a negative image of Jesus’s body. Both sacred cloths evoke a representational residue that blurs the line between presence and absence, material and imprint. Yet for Bernhard religion was a stain in the same sense that Derrida reflects on the Spectres of Marx, the spectres of history and philosophy all reside within the stain of materiality, of drawing and performative gestures.

A stain is indexical, suggesting that the signification of a ‘stain’ carries a meaning that is directly linked to its context and reference point, rather than being purely symbolic. In everyday life the ‘stain’ is considered dirty. Bernhard’s work was a type of ‘dirty protest’ like Richard Hamilton’s reflection on The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Hamilton’s work The Citizen (1981-3) highlights the stain as a form of protest. The stain of excrement soiled for a hunger strike. Bernhard loved the idea of painting with shit.

In a sense, Bernhard materialised events—or perhaps more accurately, he orchestrated situations in which events could become materialised—with a distinct, visceral physicality.

The Polish Game (Ocular Lab 2004) was a visceral, carnivorous encounter. As Stephen Haley commented, ‘{t}he space was transformed into something between a grand Baroque palazzo and a less than Platonic cave'. The space was entirely wallpapered with his work. The dinner was an endurance test for me since I was never a big eater, but at least I was not a vegetarian. Haley goes on to highlight that at ‘the end of the night (in the middle of the morning) the meal's carcass was abandoned to remain as the centrepiece of the exhibition over the weekend.’ Art really does stink. I might even make the comparison to Carolee Schneeman who claimed that her work Meat Joy (1964) had ‘the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent: a celebration of flesh as material.’ But for those at Bernhard’s Polish Game the meat was real, and dead.

Conclusion

From the beginning of this paper, I proposed that Bernhard’s work was primarily studio based, but ultimately his practice needed to be an ‘intertwined meshing of material investigations’ with rigorous theoretical concerns, and an academic approach to research. Albrecht Dürer was high on his later life research list. His last trip to Germany involved visiting museums to see Dürer works firsthand, in the flesh. He spoke fondly of his experiences with curators who gave him access to these works through special collections.

Ultimately Bernhard took pleasure in working with materials, he allocated time to let the medium dictate aspects of the surface, the skin of the work, the X-ray stretcher arms were the bones. I do wonder whether for Bernhard the idea of the medium taking over gave him the freedom to relax didactic readings in preference of a more ambiguous and hence poetic way of working, like a painter.

To conclude I am reminded of the Caravaggio painting The Incredulity of St. Thomas (c. 1601-1602) in which the finger slips into the wound of Christ. Bernhard’s version of this painting would be to shove the whole fist in. Not that this visceral gesture would be determined by violence, but would acknowledge the violated, whether this be a history of violation or a personal comprehension of violation. While working on this version Bernhard might even consult Lucio Fontana.

There is much more I could discuss, especially regarding our PhD conversations, but another time maybe. Bernhard’s friendship and artwork will always play a significant part of my life.