Bernadette CorporationThe Gay SignsMayMay 17th - JulyJul 8th, 2017Gaga L.A.

S walks in the park, chatting with a low flying eagle that’s sometimes a seagull (species confusion). The bird comes and goes as S walks and thinks about media and mediation since Nietzsche. There’s a fresh idea of media that is in all of us. We are this idea, as it streams through us. We comprise it. With these special qualities a medium is the thing that never stops producing itself. And so how does it help to have ideas about it? So time for example is a medium par excellence, comprised by us, makers of time. Bound in a constantly surprising way to the ongoing circus that we call the human anatomy. So it’s erotic now… it wants. And it wants life/death. There is a quality called in death, which means, not dying, not dead, but in death, which is a weird way of being that also always supports itself.

Trying out forms such as beer pong tables, the alphabet, LED lighting and infinity mirrors, The Gay Signs is populated by a few familiar characters: Nietzsche (author of The Gay Science), Sylvere Lotringer, seagull, hillbilly, Heliogabalus (the Syrian-born emperor of Rome, as told by Antonin Artaud), as well as Kanye and Kim. Meanwhile, the space of the speech bubble is a sort of lake mirrored to infinity, or an endlessly spreading stain or spill. A portrait of a medium that is a constant stream, an agonistic game, where a winning toss results in the insertion of yet more intoxicating fluid into the body of one’s adversary. The game surface horizontalizes language and image, getting the work off the wall and closer up to the pelvis.

Sylvere’s elegy to the world via the alphabet.
What is a diagram?

Where what is said matters more for its continuous rearticulation of a medium as the channel of power. So reinvention and disruption become the new, updated components of a constant stream. A medium is the thing that you are able to become blind to. It can be a vehicle for character to the point where only character appears. This is a dynamic of disappearing. To find the medium look to those who exist most purely as character. Especially unassimilated character with (therefore) maximal potency or magic. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the mirrored lake, a drowned hillbilly chimes in, reminding us that intoxication is also part of the equation: we can almost see his mind. The bird comes and goes, each time more fucked up, drugged or drunk, flying while falling and thinking strangely. S keeps on, and the next time he meets the bird it’s dead on the ground with x’d out eyes. The bird has a final idea. S supplies a punch line and keeps on.

Bernadette Corporation (est. 1994) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Stedelijk

Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013); Artists Space, New York (2012); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2011); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2010).