When we do fashion now, we are basically presenting information about the contemporary body and using the model as a stand-in for the artist or poet. At Meyer Kainer Gallery, we exhibited images of a nude model wearing nothing but diamond rings and necklaces from a jeweler on the Upper East Side. This was not a fashion statement on our part; it was just using the average, generic fashion image to speculate on contemporary poverty, which is sort of a non-idea with a non-image. It was a way to show up with nothing—an actual nothing that we could bounce ourselves off of for a moment while thinking about what happens when artists, like fashion, become just information. We didn’t make any of these images; they were commissioned to professionals—photographer, model, designer and stylist. The images are a series of basic instructions from us to them, re-distributed in the gallery as work. They are communications turned into content.

BERNADETTE CORPORATION in conversation with ANNIE OCHMANEK

The first issue of Made in USA is devoted to how people create their own spaces, spaces that can be invisible or imaginary. You may have heard this trend called DIY (do-it-yourself) or Amateurism. We like to call it the EMPTY WIDE SPACE trend, a place we can all disappear to, instead of being anti-everything and writing the new manifesto, or instead of being pro-everything and buying the latest CD.

The origins of Bernadette Corporation lie in the organization of parties in downtown New York, their mock incorporation and ambiguous branding strategies suggesting a slipperiness of intent that developed between 1995 and 1997 into a women’s fashion line. In keeping with the original premise that a corporation was “the perfect way to alienate alternative politically-correct types,” the image grammar of BC’s clothing and styling focused on the mass-produced sportswear styles of ethnic minorities ghettoized in the urban territories. At a time when the fashion industry was confronted with a DIY rebelliousness, BC took its cues from the political-literary wing of the historical avant-garde. They engaged in quotation, concepts, fictions, appropriation, provocation, hoaxes, and anti-artistic postures of crass commercialism.Between 1999 and 2001 Bernadette Corporation turned to publishing, releasing three issues of the magazine Made in USA. In the same way that the poet Stéphane Mallarmé oddly inhabited the contemporary fashion journal of the 19th century with his self-published La Dernière Mode, BC spread itself across the pages of a magazine in a polyvalent mode, with funny mute images and writing that went from poetic sincerity to buffoonery to references to French theory and a fetish for cinema critique.