John Berndt

John Berndt (* 1967 ) is a musician, subculture activist, former neoist and internet entrepreneur from Baltimore , USA .

Life

After composing experimental electroacoustic music as a child, John Berndt came into contact with the experimental art scene in his hometown of Baltimore in 1985. The neoist, musician, experimental filmmaker, anarchist and subculture veteran tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE , with whom he worked closely until 1989 , had a formative influence on him . From 1985 to 1989 Berndt published several issues of the multiple neoist magazine SMILE , wrote numerous neoist manifestos and experimental texts and appeared as an action artist. In his texts and performances he tried to combine experimental art with philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes.

In 1986 Berndt studied art in Florence, worked with European neoists such as Reinhardt U. Sevol, Vittore Baroni and Pete Horobin and took part in the 64th Neoist Apartment Festival in Berlin. In 1988 he was blindfolded and participated in the One Millionth Neoist Apartment Festival in New York as a blind chronicler .

Berndt was concerned with the radical undermining of conventional categories of truth, reality and cognition through a radical-experimental, at the same time artistic, philosophical and political practice, as he understood Neoism . For this purpose, Berndt also temporarily joined Stewart Home and his projects, which had split off from Neoism, the Festivals of Plagiarism and an art strike from 1990 to 1993. But from the start he criticized what he perceived as their inadequacies and careeristic motives. In 1988 he opposed the Festivals of Plagiarism with a Festival of Censorship , which propagated censorship as a means of expression. He wanted to supplement Home's anti-art historiography project with a history of anti-scientific and anti-humanist thought traditions. His sources were u. a. Martin Heidegger , Alfred Korzybski , Charles Fort and Henry Flynt . Berndt has been working closely with Flynt since then, including a. also as editor of his theoretical writings and as the first publisher of his record Electronic Hillbilly Music .

From 1990 onwards, Berndt largely turned away from Neoism . He became an internet entrepreneur, but also - alongside Jean Joseph Rolland Dubé , Tristan Renaud and others - a member of the Groupe Absence in Montreal and a correspondent for the Italian Luther Blissett project . In Baltimore, he founded the High Zero Festival and the High Zero Foundation for improvisational music , the performance art venue Red Room and the record label Recorded for experimental music. In addition to his professional activity, today he mainly performs as a saxophonist and improvisation musician. a. together with the violinist Jon Rose , the experimental instrument maker Neil Feather and the saxophonist Jack Wright , and has completed international concert tours with them. He has also had a long-standing collaboration with the Mail Art artist, writer and humorist Al Ackerman .

Fonts

Stewart Home (Ed.), Mind Invaders, London 1997; by John Berndt: Counterrevolutionary Communism (p. 16–18), Dialectical Immaterialism (p. 129–133) and Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the so-called Millionth Apartment Festival (p. 179/186)
Luther Blissett, Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0, Turin 2000; by John Berndt: A Luther Blissett Manifesto (p. 79)

literature

Stewart Home: The Assault on Culture. London 1989, p. 94.
Oliver Marchart : Neoism. Vienna 1997, p. 46f.
KK Ruthven: Faking Literature. Cambridge 2001, p. 139 (on John Berndt's Manifest Plagerism )
David Roman: Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Indiana University Press 1998, p. 262.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Berndt, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American artist
DATE OF BIRTH	1967