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Bernadette Corporation

Posté par admin
mercredi 08 mars 2006 [n° 1121]

Un collectif d’artistes

Bernadette Corporation est un collectif d’artistes (Antek Walczak, Bernadette Van-Huy, John Kelsey) dispersé entre New York et Paris. Né en 1993, ses activités ont commencé avec des collections de mode pendant deux ans, suivi par la revue d’anti-mode “Made in USA” et d’autres activités comprennant des vidéos comme “Hell Frozen Over” (2000) sur Mallarmé ou “Get Rid of Yourself” tourné pendant le G8 de Gênes (2003), et aussi l’écriture collective d’un roman.

Artist-collective

The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. Then in 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that, from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called “Made in USA.” Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over, 2000, and Get Rid of Yourself, 2003, as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world.

Künstlerkollektiv

Bernadette Corporation : Künstlerkollektiv, gegründet 1994 in New York. BC ist in verschiedenen Städten / Staaten aktiv, arbeitet vorwiegend in New York. Mitglieder: Bernadette Van-Huy, Antek Walczak, John Kelsey und viele andere.

Bernadette Corporation – Das Gespenst des Künstlersubjekts

Get rid of yourself (pdf) [de] : (2003, mit Chloe Sevigny, Giorgio Agamben, Werner von Delmont) heißt der einstündige Film der Bernadette Corporation, der während “einer Geschäftsreise (einem politischen Urlaub)” im Zusammenhang mit den Antiglobalisierungsprotesten in Genua im Sommer 2001 gedreht wurde und “in dem es um das Potenzial einer auf die radikale Ablehnung politischer Identität basierenden Gemeinschaft geht, und um einen neuen Horizont, an dem sich Ästhetik und Politik wiederfinden” (BC).

“Reena Spaulings”

A collective novel
Reena Spaulings
Bernadette Corporation
by Semiotext
September 2005
ISBN 1-584-35030-X
6 x 9, 216 pp.

“With its group work of writing and editing, Made in USA was an obvious precedent for BC‘s current project, what they are calling a “collective novel.” An editorial team, including artist Jutta Koether 1 and actor/poet Jim Fletcher, have conceived a general framework of chapters, which are being written by some twenty collaborators over many months before being assembled into a finished narrative by BC. The novel revolves around two main protagonists. One is a young woman named Reena Spaulings, an unsuspecting New York anybody swooped up into the worlds of fashion and film by scheming talent scouts who cast her as this season’s It Girl in a high-profile lingerie campaign. The second protagonist is New York City itself, which, early in the book, is devastated by a massive tornado. Postdisaster, the city descends into gang violence. Reena shrewdly adjusts to the situation, using her newfound status to create a start-up venture that seeks to sabotage New York’s cineplexes and theaters. The preposterousness of this narrative may owe to the exquisite-corpse effect of multiple authors taking off from an unknown. But it also derives from BC’s emulation of a Hollywood screen-writing technique whereby a studio boss assigns a stable of writers specialized functions like dialogue, detail, and action. Whatever the case, the resulting potboiler is a thinly veiled “novelization” of New York life post-9/11. With the manufactured insouciance of a second-tier cable show–a story of a girl in a crazy world, trying to navigate men, fame, and the pitfalls of urban life–the work is geared to reflect its time and bears little resemblance to the immense and subtle filters of subjectivity (particularly that of young women) created by masters of the form like Austen, Eliot, James, or Wolfe. BC admit that the novel “may not be quality literature,” but they also state that this is hardly the point. The collective structure allows Reena and her city to be “‘communized’–each somehow interchangeable as enactments of a putting-in-common of [the writers'] separate subjectivities and linguistic capacities.”

To make sense of BC and its many episodes–fashion, magazine, film, and novel–the pertinent question is not “What is an artist today?” but rather “How might an artist evade culture’s demand for marketable identity in her person, products, style, and career?” We are presented with images of the artist all the time, although most often such images only reaffirm cliches or the most conservative thinking: artist as society (or industry) entertainer, artist as child, artist as expressive savant. Far less frequently do artists appear to challenge outright the images that are available to them. Bernadette Corporation provide one such instance. Their practice is of the most experimental sort–a constant throwing off of reflections. One occasionally feels that they are not artists at all but a society-reading machine, a manufacturer of tools capable of prying open or admitting access to different ways of being. Among other things, they have made fashion a tool for seeing youth as a subject of lifestyle regime (and vice versa). They have given us the magazine tool, for imagining the potential of community beyond the checkpoints, what Foucault called “dispositifs,” of the institutional art and fashion systems. In Genoa, their cinema found an otherness, a politics, in the Black Bloc’s tactics of disruption. And with their collective novel, they have recast daily life as an open, many-voiced fiction.

Techniques of Today – Bennett Simpson on Bernadette Corporation (Artforum, September 2004) Bernadette Corporation – Introduction

Collective counscious

“Indeed, like many collectives today, Bernadette Corporation exists largely in cyberspace, demonstrating that artists no longer require a place — a studio, a Chelsea — to make and show work, or a gallery system to promote it. In addition, just as collectivity de-emphasizes the singularity of the artist, digital media eliminate, or transform, the idea of the personal “touch” marketed as creative individuality. (The strenuous call for the revival of painting in the past few years might be seen as, in part, a reaction to the perceived encroachment of digital forms.)”

The Collective Conscious New York Times March 5, 2006

Bernadette Corporation at the Whitney Biennial 2006 : Day for Night 02.03.06-28.05.06
_______________________________

Possibilities of art in a fragmented public sphere

In the Place of the Public Sphere

by Simon Sheikh

“In opposition to high modernism’s ideals of a singular, autonomous and formally complete art work, we may now consider art works as placed in a heterogeneous field, where the significations and communications of the work shift in relation to space, contexts and publics. Just as there is no complete, ideal work there is no ideal, generalised spectator. We cannot talk of art’s spaces as a common, shared space we enter with equal experiences – on the contrary, the idea of the neutral spectator has been dissolved and criticised, and the identity of the viewer have been specified and differentiated by both art practices and theories since the 1960s. This shift also entails, naturally, different notions of communicative possibilities and methods for the art work, where neither its form, context nor spectator is fixed or stable; such relations must be constantly (re) negotiated and conceived in notions of publics or public spheres. This means, on the one hand, that the art work itself (in an expanded sense), is unhinged from its traditional forms (as material) and contexts (galleries, museums etc), and on the other hand, is made contingent on a(nother) set of parameters, that can be described as spaces of experience, that is, on notions of spectatorship and the establishment of communicative platforms and/or networks in or around the art work. It is contingent on, and changing according to, different points of departure in terms of spectatorship. The gaze of the spectator is, of course, not only dependent on the work and its placement, but also on the placement of the spectator in terms of age, class, ethnic background, gender and politics. Or, more broadly speaking, on experience and intentionality. We can, thus, speak of three variable categories, that, in turn, influence the each other’s definition: work, context and spectator. None of which is given, and each of which is conflictual“.

Introduction to a seminar on the potentials and possibilities of art in a fragmented public sphere, after the dematerialisation and/or expansion of art practices

The Art Academy, Odense, Denmark, week 46, 2001 and spring 2002

source : The Society of Control

Groupe Intelligence Collective de la Fing



  1. Jutta Koether at Thomas Erben     April 17, 2005
    Nouvelles Scènes Programmation 2004 Département Spectacles Vivants – Musiques Nouvelles – Le Consortium
    Jutta koether at pat hearn gallery by William McCollum [back]
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