Bernadette Corporation

Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years is the first monograph on the work of Bernadette Corporation, the New York–based collective founded in the early 1990s. The book extends from their retrospective exhibition of the same name held at Artists Space in 2012, constituting a further site to reframe the Corporation's activities and identity of the past 20 years. The book is structured chronologically, loosely following the year-by-year timeline of the group's history that also formed the backbone of their Artists Space exhibition. The publication gathers a vast array of visual and textual material. It includes the Bernadette Corporation's operations within the realm of fashion; their interventions into the magazine culture of the 1990s, as well as the group's own short-lived periodical, Made in USA; the fragmented output of Pedestrian Cinema during the group's Berlin years; and the fusion of poetics, branding and meta-commentary within their gallery shows of the 2000s.

The Bernadette Corporation was formed in a Manhattan nightclub in 1994, and began organizing social events that evolved into unofficial art carnivals in SoHo parking lots. From 1995 to 1997, the collective worked under the guise of an underground fashion label, later issuing the magazine Made in USA and authoring the collective novel Reena Spaulings. For this unique amalgam of poetry and fashion shoot, the Corporation alternates fashion photographer David Vasiljevic's 38 photographs of six male and female models with an epic poem structured on various formal constraints, such as (in one section) the inclusion of words beginning with the letters B and C in each line. Corporation member Jim Fletcher describes the poem's content as "A time and a place, New York... epic means, letting it in." Thus: "What's the beautiful chorus/I hear while basting my capers/It's Bellini on the CD..." The Complete Poem offers a rare synthesis of authors and genres.