Semiotexte : Bernadette Corporation : Reena Spaulings

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Mumia Abu-Jamal

Jean Baudrillard

Bernadette Corporation

Michèle Bernstein

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Catherine Breillat

William Burroughs

Pierre Clastres

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Shulamith Firestone

Michel Foucault

Veronica Gonzalez

Félix Guattari

Sylvère Lotringer

Jean-François Lyotard

Christian Marazzi

Cookie Müeller

François Peraldi

Peter Sloterdijk

Mark von Schlegell

David Wojnarowicz

Heather Woodbury

Nina Zivancevic

Bernadette Corporation

Reena Spaulings

The money sure comes in handy, too. Only it’s funny money. It seems completely disconnected from any relation to labor. "Holy shit a little money is alright. I just think I might have gotten a little more of it though. Why is it that when you do so little for it, no amount of recompense is enough.
Holy shit this is six months' worth of standing guard at the Met. I just think that when you're serving time for it, a sense of reality allows the dollar amount to remain small and still seem OK, to trickle in at the same pace as the hours do, whereas when you're selling nothing you're selling an essence which is priceless. Why is it that essences are so light? Holy shit it’s my economy, an economy of essences.

Set in post-911 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers billing itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, it is about a female twenty-something who is discovered while working as a museum guard then becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle On Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect. Not unlike Reena Spauldings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

About the author:

The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. Then in 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that, from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called "Made in USA." Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over, 2000, and Get Rid of Yourself, 2003, as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world.

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"Just as Godard sought with Tout Va Bien not only to make a political movie but also to make a movie in a political way, so this novel is more about the political connotations of the collective process of production than the final result. In the creation of a character whose 'thoughts and actions are not spanned by the author's mind' B.C. play a game that follows the same lines of their own quasi-corporate front and their profiling of the black bloc's refusal of political identity, subverting the capitalist fixation with 'individualism' and the art world's need for stardom - a literal getting rid of oneself."

– Emily Pethick
Frieze Magazine