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 documentary Get 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-movementassociation. 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 as Moby 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

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...