Underskog

”A door opens. A cash register opens. A can of sardines is opened. A mouth opens. The unzipped zipper opens up a view…” This sequence of openings goes on for about half a page and describes the opening montage in the Bernadette Corporation’s Eine Pinot Grigrio, Bitte (2007), a filmscript never intended for poduction, published as a book. If there is any overarching signature that can serve to wrap the eclectic practice of the Bernadette Corporation (BC), a New York based artists’ collective who’s ouvre has spanned the last sixteen years, it is precisely a succession of openings, openings of new ventures in the overlap between art and its neighbouring industries. Hailing credos like ”All creativity is equal”, and ” Simply choose a name and spend a lot of time together, ideas will come later”, the group’s output consciously and effectively undermines the highly marketable idea of any singular individual as the locus of artistic and creative production. After first having dabbled in haute couture – with a commercially viable clothing line that explored the grey zone between art and fashion, in the mid- to late nineties – BC turned to publishing in the same cultural schism with their magazine Made in the USA, where exegises of art and literature was juxtaposed with fashion related content. Then, in 2001, they went on to document the protests surrounding the G8 summit in Genoa in July of that year (Get Rid of Yourself). Finding amidst the disruptive ”terrorism” of the so-called Black Bloc the emergence of a politics without subjects. This was followed by their first foray into the realm of literature, a collectively written novel (Reena Spaulings, 2004). Currently BC is involved in an underground film factory operating in Berlin (Pedestrian Cinema) Underpinning this diversitude of guises is an incessant return to the problem of how subjectivity is propagated as a force for liberating the self from the tyranny of capital, when precisely the oposite is the case. This pervasive fallacy has rendered our desire

open game to anyone who can profit from steering it. Though marking out capital as an omnipresent evil might be a slightly dated position to take, homing in on its workings within the much hailed production of subjectivity that both art and fashion see as their holy grail, is as timely as ever. To navigate the pitfalls of these worlds, where the paradigme of self-styling rules the ground, is imperative for retaining your integrity as an artist.

That’s why BC’s Corporate Story only mimics the structure of a coherent narrative but never goes beyond the hollow rethorics of fashion. An impenetrably idiosyncratic assemblage of footage serve as backdrop for a tongue-in-cheek voice-over that supplies something sounding vaguely like the pitch for a business venture, but the overtly smug voice that speaks frequently reclines into wry and ironic unspecifics, subverting the promotional agenda that adheres to the form they emulate. ”Pretending we are business people while we sleep all day like cats.”