![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/as_bcorp_web_26.jpg\" "\\"Installation")
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Considering the Bernadette Corporation\u2019s \u201c2000 Wasted Years\u201d. It\u2019s hard to bring myself to write about Bernadette Corporation. This amorphous collective \u2013 equal parts art, literature, poetry, fashion and film \u2013 has blasted the possibility of language for such an end. I imagine I\u2019ll just write around or through it, or let the text have the appearance of birthing itself, as if it simply pre-existed without any identifiable author. Writing with BC on the brain, using \u201cI\u201d feels uneasy. Yet if I angle in from a detached, objective place, it will read like a joke, a ploy or \u2013 that sneakiest capitalist legerdemain \u2013 a gimmick. For example, I wonder whether to put the following sentences into a passive or active voice:<\/p>\n \u2022 They\u2019ve disarmed irony. And while I let \u201cdisarm\u201d play around in my mind and bounce between its transitive and intransitive uses, I realise that if I\u2019m gullible enough to un-cynically use the first person, then I\u2019m not sure if in this context \u201cI\u201d is Subject or Object. It\u2019s alright; it\u2019s not clear from Bernadette Corporation\u2019s oeuvre in the quote-unquote retrospective in New York\u2019s Artists Space that it is a they, either. Writings have been produced (note passive voice) but who knows who or what has actually written them?<\/p>\n Though the exhibition on Greene Street is a text-heavy \u201cthree-dimensional PDF,\u201d shoppers wandering through SoHo, blithely gulping over-merchandised realities, might on first glance not distinguish it from some LVMH-member flagship store. A kind of timeline is mapped out on polyurethane banners, assembled as if in a tradeshow or a skyscraper lobby, while artefacts that look vaguely purchasable rest in shiny glass vitrines. Mannequins display unremarkable fashions from the BC\u2019s early days as a DIY club-kid entity, and backstage images of modelled looks flash on screens. A closer look, however, reveals that nothing is for sale \u2013 meaning, of course, that everything is.<\/p>\n The retrospective chronology of BC\u2019s \u201ccareer\u201d is long and questionably accurate, and it seems this unreliable transmission of information is the artwork. My guess, a guess, anyone\u2019s guess though, is that despite that it is ghost\/zombie-written by the Corporation in a quasi-journalistic third person, this is still no claim to any sort of identity; just because something like a history has been cooked up around the collective \u2013 and it\/they have recently even given interviews as people with names \u2013 does not mean BC is any closer to taking on a fixed moniker such as \u201cartist\u201d or \u201cpoet.\u201d Remaining unidentifiable allows it to exist on the ever-extending cusp of the end of history, always skipping just an inch farther than its potential co-option into the protean march of Capitalism, and showing it up in the meanwhile.<\/p>\n BC\u2019s mass-published novel \u201cReena Spaulings\u201d and the more recent, unique-edition exhibition-poem \u201cThe Complete Poem\u201d are the product of a collective (or \u201cstable\u201d) of writers. Contemplated through the bleary gaze of the compulsive consumer, these writings appear authorless, like those other textual fever-dreams of the Twentieth Century: the manifesto and the press release. This subsuming of individual identity into a ghostly collective is both Leftist strategy and the nature of the consumer product. Contemporary products also have no locatable author, and appear fully formed on the boutique shelf \u2013 what our old friend Karl Marx called commodity fetishism.<\/p>\n So as unlikely as it might sound, in BC\u2019s world, Twenty-First Century style brand identity is equated with the self-identification of a political faction. Indeed the absurd late-Nineties attempt at a fashion magazine, \u201cMade in USA\u201d \u2013 \u201cnamed after Godard\u2019s worst movie\u201d and recently reissued electronically on Badlands Unlimited Press \u2013 paired \u201chigh culture with high fashion,\u201d mixing Frankfurt School-esque texts with black and white images of dead-eyed, mostly asexual fashion models. \u201cGet Rid of Yourself,\u201d a video-tract aestheticising protesters at the 2001 Genoa G8 summit and featuring indie film goddess Chlo\u00eb Sevigny, annoyed more than a few Leftists with the implication that the black of the Black Bloc had something to do with the noir of contemporary fashion. But \u201call politics is aesthetic and vice versa,\u201d BC had said in a 2005 statement; the idea was to keep the line between them \u201calive and problematic, rather than suppressing it and denying it.\u201d<\/p>\n I chuckle to myself, or rather a melancholy chuckle is had in the faceless, yawning gallery of cultural consumption: this is where the shoe fetishist meets commodity fetishism, where luxury auto meets the Autonomists, where the Society Of The Spectacle meets the society pages. But nobody\u2019s actually laughing, BC is not pop and it\u2019s not light. Irony is, according to BC, \u201can untenable stance.\u201d By disarming it, they create a sort of direct politics that in turn disarms the enemy in (what \u201cReena Spaulings\u201d calls) a \u201cfresher war that would produce the not normal situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Mara Goldwyn<\/strong><\/p>\n
\u2022 Irony has been disarmed (by them).
\u2022 It\u2019s disarming (me).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/creationofafalsefeeling16.jpg\" "\\"Bernadette")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/as_bcorp_web_27.jpg\" "\\"Installation")
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