The Contagious Retrospective: Q+A with Bernadette Corporation

Artist collective Bernadette Corporation fuses commercial iconography with an activist attitude. Comprising three core members, Bernadette Van-Huy, John Kelsey and Antek Walczak, BC often enlists collaborators and hired professionals—such as artists, writers, stylists, and photographers—to produce work under their ersatz brand name. Through this combination of group authorship and slick formatting, the collective weaves tales and images of exotic, blank beauty, revealing what results when the usually hidden networks of expertise which create and deliver our culture's dreams and images through the circuits of public media are put in the service of art or poetry, rather than business.
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Words are People: Q+A with Karl Holmqvist

Swedish-born, Berlin-based artist Karl Holmqvist uses a wide range of formats—poetry readings, installation and sculpture—to bring out the primal qualities of language. In his hands, news articles, conversation snippets, and pop lyrics form a textual mesh and blend into a multiplicity of private indictments, incitements, and convictions, decoding and recoding the experiential and communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing.

Although "Words Are People," recently on view at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, was Holmqvist's first solo show in New York, his influence can be seen on the investigative, identity-based practices of multidisciplinary performance artists like K8 Hardy (who is name-checked, among others, in a text work installed in the gallery's courtyard) and Ei Arakawa (with whom Holmqvist has collaborated), and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin, whose brash mellifluous scripts, like Holmqvist's poems, repeat and rearrange expressions and utterances to unsettle their original meanings. Read More

Performing Is Storytelling: Q+A With Chris Kraus

"I am a person who really had to experience what it would be like to be in jail," Chris Kraus muses out loud in character, in her 1986 film Foolproof Illusion. Kneeling outside on a winter day, she wears a black bra, studded belt and fingerless gloves, pencil skirt and sheer black pantyhose while patting handfuls of snow into a strange, two-pronged phallic sculpture. Shaking her wig of enormous blond curls, she sniffs, "But when I got there I was very unhappy because nobody would talk to me. Now, if Artaud had been in jail, he would have been a hero in steel pantyhose. But I was insignificant."

Kraus has a mind-bending talent for theorizing and performing femininity in the same monologue. The Los Angeles-based author and Semiotext(e) editor spent years directing independent films after training with the innovators of avant-garde theater in 1970s New York, a lineage that includes actress and theater director Ruth Maleczech and filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Marie Menken.
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Get Smart: Eileen Myles

Extracting precise impressions and rough truths from flash encounters and seemingly peripheral moments, Eileen Myles' prose disjoints familiar formats from the novel to the art review by relentlessly inhabiting the exactness of her particular experience. A New York icon and writer-about-town in literary and post-punk, feminist, and queer circles, since the 1970s, Myles has published numerous books of poetry and fiction, plays and a libretto, edited two anthologies, and written essays and articles for a wide range of magazines and journals. Many of these essays appeared in her collection of non-fiction, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays on Art (Semiotexte, 2008), highlighting her interests, influences and collaborations, and showcasing the interconnected relationship between writers and the art world in New York, California, and, of course, Iceland.
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