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BERNADETTE CORPORATION: 2000 WASTED YEARS

Artists Space

A retrospective. A moment to browse every page of the group three editions magazine

Made in USA. No? Can I see the cover at least? No? Just a virtual edition that I could see at

home?! Hum, ok. So it is the moment to see the acclaimed and polemic one hour long

documentaryGet Rid of Yourself(2003) in high resolution and with some making of

information, right? The exemplification of what Bernadette Corporation believed and tried to

represent with a not-so-corporate-at-the-same-time-institutionalized group-movement-

association. Also no?! Hum. Just the trailer? Right. But it is the moment to understand how

crazy the parties that they organized were and to place the audience in an environment that

could demonstrate the NY downtown scenario where the group was created. Is it described in

the texts? That ones?! That letters will put me there?! Hum...

Whatever.

The word of the last paragraph is almost everywhere in Bernadette Corporation's

works. Almost at the end of Get Rid..., for example, someone (it is not credited and, maybe,

it is not important...) explains what can be understood for 'whatever' in the context of the riots

during the G8 Summit, in Genova, 2001:

And these moments where you find yourself alone, really alone, in the middle of a riot, that's

when you've lost your part. You don't know what keeps you going. It becomes obvious that being

in a riot is simply the fact that, for once, you feel that being 'whatever' is not the same as being

someone who is nowhere. These are really two different things. Being 'whatever' is a situation of

improvisation, like I said before. And to be nowhere, alone in the crowd, to be what we normally

mean when we say 'whatever' is a kind of suffering... an immediate suffering.

That information, nevertheless, will not be obtained in this show. The only register of

the documentary is a quick trailer inside of a vitrine-stand-fair-model, sharing space with a

more private room with some inspirational books for the group, such asMoby Dick with a

picture of the pop singer Rihanna in her bathtub in the cover and the content substituted by

comments of her blog. Whatever.

Some other works are in an installation which has a glass as an intermediate to

interact, simulating a fashion vitrine and playing with the desire that the piece provokes in the

audience. Consumerism. That is the way to contemplate the work which connects Duchamp's

ready-mades with contemporary pop culture only she could be other (2011), a clean and

modern faucet that has the phrase it is not sure it is rihanna only she could be other

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sandblast etched and hand engraved.

Even a work that already has a glass as intermediate, like a TV screen, was in the vitrine

as well. Public-screen-screen-work. And the Happy Slap (2011) was not in a vertical

constitution, but horizontally, what makes the audience see an extremely happy girl receive a

slap in her face in a very close way and from an upper view.

Although the show has a lot of explanations about the group separated by year and

illustrated with several pictures of historical happenings, the sensation at the end of the

exhibition is that something is missing. The visual looks fantastic, authentic, inspirational,

superb, fabulous, but the content, specially for a retrospective, needed more substance to give

the audience the perfect idea what is the Bernadette Corporation.

Oh, wait...