Paintings by Joseph Bernard

Herr-Chambliss Fine Arts

Hot Springs, Arkansas

August 5 – September 30, 1993

Catalog Essay

Joseph Bernard’s glimmering paintings, as seen from a distance, have the presence of icons, breathing rectangles that open like chambers onto a sacred heart. Up close, measuring out a pulse, are things we would find under-foot or airborne – film left on the editing room floor, stranded seaweed, pollen sacs en route, colored dustings – all afloat in an amber resin, all dancing one way or another in the exquisite balance of afterlife.

There is an almost monastic concentration about these works, Bernard as a scrivener of seeds and filaments, spices, pods, and feathers, as one who finds mastery and a strict sense of order useful in the search of implausible truths. This, then, is the craft of an obsessive and beautiful soul intent on bringing the ephemeral materials of his world into view for higher contemplation.

Judy Metro, Senior Editor - Yale University Press

Linear Thinking

Detroit Artists Market

Detroit, Michigan

March 18 – April 15, 1994

An excerpt from the catalog essay

Joseph Bernard also implies the preservation of cultural artifacts in his collaged paintings, formally akin to Persian carpets of pattern juxtaposed against pattern within a rectangular format. Yet here numerous artifacts are inside the artifact, which thus becomes a fractal of cultural record. The lengths of discarded advertising film layered with flower petals, threads, onion skins, viscose paint, all suspended in layers of urethane, transform into sounds and substances which seem familiar yet unknown. The quality of rubbed stone or of smoke in a work like Ritual evokes a touch or smell which is known through the body, summoning memories of the most profound epiphanies from childhood. But the work also suggests a density of experience which is perhaps a prelude to heaven, like Blake’s “universe in a grain of sand.”

The meditative de-acceleration of time and distance created by the layers of glass-like urethane provide the psychological space needed to focus on the fundamental sensations which each draw forth from the body. The titles assist in provoking the necessary compilation of intellect, senses, and emotion. Exile, with its mildewed paper effect and moldy color behind the car and highway film images, recalls outcasts, social diseases, and bizarre adaptations of chemical warfare such as the infected blankets given to the Indians. Each work also provides a resonant audio sensation and metaphor of music; Lord of the Dance, which not coincidentally shares the Van Morrison song title, also implies sheet music in the calligraphic use of seaweed within bars across the picture. Red Onion Skin Blues actually has voices trapped within the audio strip used to build up the surface. Joseph experienced virtual soundlessness and extreme isolation from touch in the hospital when he had polio a few months after his father died. The gloved workers, the burning of all books which he had touched when he left, and his solitary grief deeply altered his visceral memory of sensation. Extended contemplation of his work offers a well spring of sensation given back in powers of ten.

The great endurance, frailty, and infinite capacity for knowledge of the human body is a part of aesthetic experience for each of these artists. Their work demonstrates that one of the failures of modernism is the denial of what humans collectively know through their bodies, regardless of cultural reference, and that includes both instinctual and learned behavior which is part of biological and spiritual human survival. The nature / culture paradox is described in their poetic artifacts derived from an archeology of the viscera.

Gerry Craig, Curator, Linear Thinking

The Detroit Institute of Arts Presents

INTERVENTIONS/Joseph Bernard: VOCABULARY

by Stephen Goodfellow 1995

Bernard's piece is placed with adjacent works by Cornell and Tinguely because of a shared interest in collage techniques. The juxtaposition reveals how artists who use a similar method can produce works that are so varied.

In the tradition of collage, Bernard incorporates materials that are seemingly unrelated and that are not usually associated with art. He refers to them as "a private inventory of object-images." The inclusion of pieces of film is, in fact, an autobiographical reference because as a student he worked in film.

Bernard describes his materials as "organic cast-offs" and "disposables." Their aestheticized, tapestry-like arrangement is a subtle commentary on the obsessive nature of collecting and preserving fragments of culture.

The work's title equates the making of visual art with language. His "vocabulary" is composed of the variety of materials with which he composes and articulates his ideas.

Museum of Modern Art MOMA Press Release

Independent Film and Video Programs

Big As Life 1999: An American Histroy of 8mm Films

MOMA

February, 1999

Thursday, February 11 at 6:00

Big As Life 1999: Moving Out

Splices for Sharits. 1980. USA. Directed by Joseph Bernard. 7 min.

Intrigues I-VII. 1981. USA. Directed by Joseph Bernard. 52 min.

The Function of Film. 1982. USA. Directed by Joseph Bernard. 10 min.

The influence of other artists or sources of creativity (Delmore Schwartz's writing as well as Joseph Bernard's own, in addition to the more obvious tribute to filmmaker Paul Sharits) are acknowledged and integrated in Bernard's three films.

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Center Galleries, Detroit, Michigan

March – April, 2001

On Language: Text and Beyond

Joseph Bernard

Mel Bochner

John Cage

Suzanne Caporael

Merce Cunningham

Andrea Eis

Kenneth Goldsmith

Hans Haacke

Jane Lackey

On Kawara

Germaine Keller

Glenn Ligon

Howard Meister

Duane Michals

Christine Monhollen

Mike Rollins

Ed Ruscha

Excerpt from exhibition catalog:

Detroiter Joseph Bernard presents language in a purely visual context. Bernard began his artistic life as a filmmaker, making collage films in the tradition of Stan Brakhage. While he moved to painting in the mid-80s, Bernard’s work continues to evoke a celluloid experience, characterized by a film-like flicker of light across a field. In his newest work, such as Chalk Lessons, Bernard offers subtly-colored, Jasper Johns-like meditations on the properties of the text. Fractions of letters, numbers and grammatical marks mimic the pattern of language, including the pauses, breaths and hesitations inherent in spoken dialect. In an emphatically Cagean way, Bernard explains: “I am as taken with the spaces between the characters as I am with the characters themselves.”

Michelle Perron, Director - Center Galleries, March 2001

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ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Joseph Bernard

March 2009

I was schooled as a painter but for ten years, I worked exclusively with small format (S-8 & 16mm) silent films. These were, for the most part, film-as-film abstractions, non-narrative efforts more closely akin to absolute music. Over a hundred were completed. My camera's macro lens allowed an intimacy with objects that went beyond their conventional identity. Issues of color, light and movement became an obsessive new world, a new way to see.

Following film-making, I returned to a related hybrid of sorts; collage painting. After some false starts, wood panels (technically called oriented strand board) became the 'support' of choice. Added to the mix of acrylic paint and inks, I used other materials that would generate marks, lines and transparencies. Objects such as decals (handmade transparencies of photographic images with the paper removed), hair, seaweed, thread, feathers, petals, onion skins, strips of movie film, tape, stencils and crushed cans provide image. After having bleached, painted, taped onto and scrapped into many of my later films -- some chopped into thousands of pieces then rejoined by splices -- this process of manipulation/collage became a personally embraced vocabulary and ultimately means for the newer paintings.

I think of the surfaces of these collage paintings as being 'built', puzzle-like, with objects as image and among those objects, I would include pieces of color/shapes of paint, chiseled 'removes', all collage materials and recycled pictures from magazines. The latter I now combine with decals made from my own paperless photographs.

I need to devise paintings that, in the making and without warning, shift, change, even reverse original intentions. Paintings that fit certain intuitive criteria and invert others. The activity of making, that is, the “process” itself should provoke, blind-side, help find things. I believe discovery is the core reason any art gets made. Making is the search. Intentions achieved, (original or revised), become the prize.

The content of this work often makes oblique references to findings in music, writing or others' art that has affected me. I'm also sensually attracted to wet-looking, deeply saturated colors; details clotted with information in decayed and veined foliage, worn passages, underwater stones or aerial views of erosion and tidal flats. I'm drawn to coded sources like maps, navigational charts, board games, blue prints, x-rays, herbarium displays, musical notation, manuscripts, handmade signage and graphic aspects of cultures beyond my own.

These pictographic elements trigger evocative sensations of something understood beyond the literal. They intimate a commonality, a sharing from another time, other parts, lost thoughts. This is, in a manner, somewhat similar to the method taught at The Actors Studio called “sense memory” which relies on recall. Jung also dealt with this connection of a favored object misplaced, belongings left in childhood then later remembered in adulthood. Much in art is made from recallings, conscious or otherwise.

My eventual return from films to painting meant activating a single 'frame' with sustained dynamics and meaningful content that would hopefully provide a complex, interesting read. Good painting has, in addition to the unexpected, a constellation of points and voids, spatial layers, as well as metaphoric or associative offerings. Of course there are those that do it with either more or less.

Overall, my intention is to produce an abstraction with presence and ambiguity; a combining image that has open-ended possibilities, something that looks like language but isn't always, something that has meaning but avoids definition. If art has a purpose, it may simply be to provide new possibilities... or get in the way of what's expected.

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Introductory Remarks by James R. Hook for the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture at Indiana University Cinema on 3/11/16

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1970s, multimedia artist Joseph Bernard has created over 100 silent Super 8 films that work to radically expand our understanding of cinema as an expressive form. His work offers a rich contribution to traditions of formalist and experimental filmmaking and has often been discussed in terms of—but remains steadfastly irreducible to—qualities of rhythm and color as well as the influences of abstract expressionism, photography, documentary, self-portraiture, and collage.

Mr. Bernard earned his BFA in Painting from Hartford Art School in 1970, graduating Summa Cum Laude, followed by his MFA in 1972 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied with the legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. As a teacher himself, Mr. Bernard has taught art courses for over thirty-five years at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, where he received the title of Professor Emeritus in 2007.

While preparing for today’s conversation, Mr. Bernard shared with me that he believes he has learned as much from musicians and poets about filmmaking as he has from other filmmakers. This is readily apparent when watching Mr. Bernard’s films themselves. These aesthetically ravishing and densely layered works are a far cry from a cinema constituted through narrative, character, setting, and traditional representational symbolism; rather, his is a cinema of rhythmic structures and metrical patterns, visual dynamics and textures. In short, Mr. Bernard’s work embodies a nearly unyielding awareness of the total expressive range and vocabulary of what we call the cinematic. His films reactivate formal and affective possibilities that were widely forsaken mere decades after the birth of cinema in the late-1800s. This was a moment when, as film historian and theorist Tom Gunning has famously explained, early modernists (such as the original Dadaists and Surrealists) saw their at-first unbridled enthusiasm for the potential of cinema as a new communicative technology quickly turn to disappointment at its all but instantaneous “enslavement to traditional art forms, particularly theater and literature.”

Mr. Bernard’s films are routinely classified as silent—and, indeed they are, in the sense that they contain no literal sound track and are to be presented without live musical accompaniment. Still, as composer and music theorist John Cage—who Bernard has cited as one of many artists to whom he has paid homage—has written, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” In terms of their affective impact, Mr. Bernard’s films are anything but silent. This is art in which there will always be new things to see and “hear” with every repeated viewing. One could make the argument that Mr. Bernard’s films are dialectical insofar as they frequently bring together opposing elements and resolve their tension in such a way that something new and novel is created. Thus, his films can feel frenetic and meditative; abstract and concrete; tactile and ephemeral; quasi-scientific and quasi-spiritual; faintly remote and warmly intimate…often all at the same time.

And finally, like the most provocative and rewarding works of that vexed category we call experimental art, Mr. Bernard’s films consciously and consistently show us how what an eye conditioned only by Hollywood-style bombast might deem as “less,” is in fact a vital precondition for allowing us to truly feel and see something more. Before inviting Mr. Bernard to join us on stage, we will now screen his film Night Mix from 1982, which runs just under 11 minutes.

Program Notes: James Cathcart, Programmer for Third Man Records & Belcourt Theatre, Nashville 4/19/16

Joseph Bernard, a painter, mixed-media artist and former student of Stan Brakhage, made over 100 works on 8mm film over the course of just one decade (1975-85). Punctuated by an ever-shifting conceptual framework and Bernard's nomadic state of being, the films are kaleidoscopic abstractions of light and texture, as well as personal expressions and a mode of self-inquiry. They dually create an ethereal space while invoking the specific locale of their creation (Detroit, Chicago, New York, and the salty oceanfront of Provincetown, MA). In 1985, Bernard withdrew from filmmaking completely, frustrated by the cost of materials. As Phil Coldiron notes in a recent Cinema Scope feature on Bernard, "American experimental cinema is considerably poorer for both the brevity and obscurity of his career.”

Now, after three decades of purgatory, Bernard's films have been resurrected and are enjoying a second life. The original 8mm masters have been digitally scanned and restored, and are receiving overdue praise and exhibition across the country. Forty of them have been assembled in a stunning Blu-ray retrospective, titled PRISMATIC MUSIC. Bernard has selected several of his works to be exhibited in two thematically distinct programs for Third Man Record's Nashville and Detroit locations. The screenings each offer a unique lineup, prefaced by an introduction from Bernard himself.

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