"you don't have to listen, goldenberg said, and you will understand
everything much the better"
Konrad Bayer, der sechste sinn
At the beginning of
the fifties a group of outsiders was formed in Vienna around the writer
Hans Carl Artmann, a man definitely adept in the art of living. It
consisted of writers, painters, jazz musicians and freewheeling
personalities in general. Artmann himself fostered a grand contempt for
artistic and literary production as isolated activities. It was a
matter of changing life - not only life in general, but DAILY life -
into poetry ("You may be a poet without ever having written or even
uttered a single word", he declared in a manifesto). It is easy to
trace the precursors: the surrealists, Dada, Lautréamont,
Villon ...
The group around
Artmann (later the so called Vienna Group) crystallized itself with
(besides Artmann) Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener
and Friedrich Achleitner as the main members. The experience of
collective community was great, not to say overwhelming: they arranged
scandals in the streets and in sinister hovels, they put up plays and
wrote texts together, they kept company so intensely and with such
qualitative demands upon ther being together, that their individual
lives many a time were dissolved into that of the group itself. They
formulated a practical critique of the artist as one of many
specialists in the separated and separating capitalistic society (on
individual experiences and their expressions, namely). This was done
with a brutal frankness that in this decade only compares with the
activities of that lettristic group in France where Guy Debord played
the role of Artmann.
Unlike the frenchmen
who developed into the Situationist International, the Vienna Group was
never capable of bursting the artistic limits. Their invocations turned
into ricochetting bullets; Artmann became quite famous (as a crazy
bastard) and the others more or less tired of always having to be
thrown upon their own resources. The group was dissolved in the early
sixties.
The most consequent
member of the Vienna Group was Konrad Bayer (1932-1964). It is no
coincidence that his own literary production begins where the Vienna
Group ends. It is inconceivable without precisely this direct and
double experience of isolation and community; of the possibilities of
communication and their inexorable dissolvment. Significally enough,
Bayers first book ("starker tabak" - "Strong Tobacco" - 1962) was
written together with Oswald Wiener, but already before that he had
distinguished himself as the most uncomprising member of the group,
especially with his plays that spit on conventional theatre as well as
on its actors and audience.
In 1963 he published
"der stein der weisen" ("The Philosopher's Stone"), a collection of
dry, lyrical texts which he explicitly regarded as a basic tract. Here
he establishes a view of life that runs through all his works and
superficially may be called pessimistic: human beings are living their
lives isolated from each other, get in touch only temporarily and have
nothing more than their language in common. Not surprising some
academic dunces have reproached Bayer's texts for cruelty and
lovelessness (Mr Professor, Konrad is nasty!), when they are nothing
but elementary probings of our conditions of living, descriptions of
our relations to the categories of existence in this society. To prove
my point here is a short text from "der stein der weisen":
everything may be called this or that.
everything also wants to be called something else.
the apple between my teeth is a taste.
a stone in the skull causes a lump.
the woman before your eyes is so far a sight.
As a whole Bayer's
texts are negating. They repeat again and again that it shouldn't be
possible to live in this way. They describe and curse this boredom and
void that have burned their brand marks deep into the flesh and soul of
modern man.
His two posthumous
"novels", "der kopf vitus berings" ("Vitus Bering's head", 1965) and
"der sechste sinn" ("the sixth sense", 1966) are both about our
endeavours at tear to pieces this tight and transparent web that
separates us all. Sometimes his words and sentences may seem
disharmonious, but this is not mainly a matter of literary technique,
linguistical experiments. It is the situation of mankind mirrored by
language.
Bayer himself, his
body, his will and his consciousness, voluntarily took a leap away from
all this in october 1964. The air being so bad to breathe, he fed his
lungs with gas.