In this modern age of polymath creativity and work-as-life/style, it’s common to meet an artist who also makes ambient house and brands on the side. But these myriad roles rarely cohere conceptually; they’re usually the product of simple hustling and blogosphere groupthink. Bernadette Corporation is the opposite of this. Since its inception in the early 90s, this groudbreaking collective has been, alternately or simultaneously, a fashion house, a magazine publisher, a film production company, and an author (or, simply, a group of artists), each time excavating the slippery zones between PR, artistic production, and mass-marketing. Their continual interest in the circulation and translation of imagery across platforms and markets (from street flyers and glossy magazine pages to anti-globalization films and the pages of a novel) has influenced an entire generation of artists, including Ryan Trecartin, K-HOLE, and DIS Magazine.
Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years, the group’s first retrospective, opens this Sunday at Artists Space in New York, before traveling to the ICA in London, in March.
Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years
September 9 – December 16, 2012
Artists Space
38 Greene Street
New York
Photography: BC Reloaded, 2012, by Bernadette Corporation with Benjamin Alexander Huseby
