Notebook is a section where I share candid thoughts and personal reflections on various topics.
We don’t try to fortify ourselves or our positions.”
Bernadette Corporation
In 2012 I spoke with artist collective Bernadette Corporation on the occasion of their exhibition “2000 Wasted Years” at Artists Space in New York, the group’s first retrospective since they began working together in the 90s. BC’s decentralized artistic approach took a critical position toward the commoditization of the singular artist’s identity while exploring capitalism’s strange existential slippages via experimental literature and auteur films. Their collectively authored works include an eponymous fashion line that produced collections between 1995-98, several films (Get Rid of Yourself, Hell Frozen Over, and The B.C. Corporate Story), the magazine Made in USA, and the book Reena Spaulings.
I was a pretty fresh interviewer at the time this was written for Art in America’s website, and the convo was a bit stilted due to my shaky skills (greatly improved since then), but the artists were gracious. In the quote below, they discuss the concept of “seductive contagion” in their film Get Rid of Yourself as a way to disrupt tendencies toward aesthetic and ideological purity.
Read the interview in full here.
I remember hearing the word “contagion” a lot in France. The opposite of that is purity, and perhaps one thing that Bernadette Corporation has consistently been against is certain ideas of purity, especially aesthetic purity. You see this happen frequently in places, for example, like the art world, which is quite heterogeneous and everything’s got its own place, but with everybody in their places. Styles are defined by purity, maybe it’s a particular way of handling material, say, or references and so forth. And contagion is, in a sense, the opposite of that purity.”
Bernadette Corporation