Bernadette Corporation

EO

Let’s take it from the top. What’s the origin story?

BV-H

Oh no. If I had known we were going back to ancient times, I would’ve prepared my brain to time travel. [Laughs.] We started in 1994. I didn’t go to Cooper Union, but Bernadette Corporation was made up of people who were mostly students at Cooper. I was born in Queens in New York, went away to college at Brown University, and came back when I was 21. The art temperature at that moment was very pop. From what I could tell, many art students had adopted this Warholian position, behaving like fashion victims. My friends and I were interested in Malcolm McLaren and what he did with the Sex Pistols. We weren’t interested in being in an art gallery or anything like that. We were interested in making a popular product that would affect as many people as possible.

EO

What did you study at Brown? Were you in the semiotics program? [Laughs.]

BV-H

Oh, it’s a good question. I studied economics. [Laughs.] Bernadette → Corporation. But honestly, we started in a more modest way, I was asked to throw a party in the VIP room at a nightclub, co-hosting with Michael Alig. Do you know Michael Alig?

EO

No. [Laughs.]

BV-H

He was a very famous club kid.

JK

…and murderer. [Laughs.]

BV-H

He was already famous before the murder, but then he was really famous after he murdered a drug dealer. There was a movie made about him called Party Monster played by Macaulay Culkin. A lot of the nightclubs were run by Peter Gatien, a nightclub mogul with a patch over one eye. And Michael Alig was an insane club kid who did massive amounts of drugs. And he ended up in one of these hazes. He owed a lot of money to a drug dealer called Angel, who used to go around to different clubs in an angel outfit, paired with big wings, the works. Alig owed Angel lots of money and eventually Alig hacked Angel up and put him in the freezer and then got rid of the body, brought the parts into the bathtub and poured Drano on him to break down his body and then dumped everything in the Hudson River. I remember there were flyers everywhere on lamp posts saying, “Have you seen Angel?” That’s how we started and I asked these Cooper friends to do the party with me. We did them as happenings and then that gig was quickly over, but then we continued with the name and were trying to think of a product to make, and we just started making this fashion line.

EO

What did it mean to be a club kid at the time? Was that the main hang?

JF

Clubs were different back then. There were a lot more clubs, but they were bigger too.

BV-H

I think we were maybe closer in time to the 1960s and ’70s and were sort of living under that shadow of Max’s Kansas City. At the time it was played out with going to clubs and stuff like that. [Laughs.] I don’t even know if people go to clubs anymore.

EO

They’re not the same. Yeah, it’s not really the vibe. We tend to post up at bars and restaurants, but the people who do party are more oriented towards rave culture. But I feel like clubs you’re talking about were like arcades, these really weird big worlds within a larger world that you inhabited.

BV-H

Yeah. It was a multi-floored universe.

EO

How did you come together? Aside from having these ideas, what has kept you together?

BV-H

At the beginning we just formed for these party nights. But then we kept the name and then it ended up being mostly just three or four of us at any given time. We just decided to start producing, and just got to it. There wasn’t much thinking involved.

EO

Who was living in Paris?

BV-H

At the beginning it was four of us. It was myself, Thuy Pham, Sonny Pak, and Antek Walzcak. Antek was the one who eventually moved to Paris a couple of years into us doing BC.

EO

So you’re the common denominator through all of these different iterations of groupings.

BV-H

Yeah.

EO

Jim and John, when do you two come in?

JK

Well, some years went by. I was at all the BC fashion shows, which were great. There was one at CBGBs, another at Deitch Gallery. How many were there? Four?

BV-H

I think so.

JK

So I saw the fashion shows. Antek and I both went to film school at NYU. There was a split with the fashion designer at BC and they were kind of reforming the group or rethinking it. I joined at that point and Bernadette had an idea to start a magazine called Made in USA. That’s when I came in, to help start the magazine, in 1999 or 2000.

EO

Did you have your own practice at that point? What was NYU like and how did you find your way in the art scene?

JK

Yeah, I was mostly working on music videos and film related stuff. A bit of art stuff too. We were all orbiting around the American Fine Arts Gallery, which was important to a lot of us in the ’90s. So that was the social context. But yeah, I was writing and working on films at the time.

EO

But what did American Fine Arts mean to you guys? Bernadette, you worked as a costume designer for Harmony Korine’s 1997 film Gummo, right? Is that true?

BV-H

No, I didn’t. I mean, they just credited me that way because Chloë Sevigny did the costumes, but I think she was nervous because it was her first time doing that, so she asked me if I could come down, for security. so I was there and around but I didn’t do anything.

JF

I’ve known John since we were in college at Columbia University, since I was like 18, 19 years old. And we’ve been good friends ever since. Everybody in Bernadette Corporation, to me, the link was pure friendship, because we all loved to do this type of work. John and I actually, once we got to know each other, I’ve never been very far from him ever since in my life. I’m 60 years old now.

John and I actually had, I don’t know if you call it ‘a practice,’ but we did a lot of things in terms of collective writing, sometimes just the two of us, but sometimes other people involved. But we did a lot of work in terms of inventing systems of writing and using those systems. And so when he got involved in BC, I was just very happy to be around. I loved our times whenever we’d be hanging out. I never was an official member of BC until Antek left. I was very involved in writing things and anytime there was a collective writing project, as far as I know, I was invited to take part in that.

JK

Yeah, and it wasn’t just the novel, there was also The Complete Poem, an epic poem that was book-length. We wrote it for a gallery show at Greene Naftali. Jim was deeply involved with that. That was 2009.

JF

And there was a screenplay, it was a collective project.

EO

Can you talk about why you named it Made in USA?

JK

We had trouble coming up with a title. I remember there were a lot of options on the table and they just all got crossed out and it was the only one left, Made in USA.

BV-H

The only other one I remember was ‘Hot.’

JK

I remember ‘Champagne’ was one.

BV-H

It was really unfortunate. We just couldn’t come up with a name and the best we could do was ‘Hot.’ Out of fatigue, we recycled one of Jean-Luc Godard’s. [Laughs.]

EO

Did you anticipate the market shifting? And did you see your place in that as you did these things?

BV-H

I can just speak about the beginning and from my point of view, no. Like I mentioned, amongst the people that I was with, there was a really strong pop sense and we headed out from there. And also the Sex Pistols example. We just jumped into the water and then we just went from there.

EO

Why do you think people resonated with Bernadette Corporation so much at the time?

BV-H

I think because what we were doing felt so wild and had so much fuck-you energy that resonated with people, it was sort of like an explosion.

JK

I didn’t know anything about fashion at all. I didn’t really care about it, but when I went to the shows they were wild. I remember watching a guy in a white vinyl suit, like having an epileptic fit during his catwalk moment. I wasn’t sure if it was part of the show or not, and it was a really weird moment. And everything was so street level then. My image of BC was people that were always out and about on the street, like on the Bowery. I just remember social life kind of drifting in and out of clubs, galleries, and people’s apartments. There was a great energy and a lot of momentum and a lot of interconnection too. I feel like back then, the DIY thing that Bernadette was talking about was a hands-on street level way of connecting one thing to another, whether it was films or music, bands, fashion, art. It was all super interconnected.

EO

As a person that was coming to it from film, did you feel like you needed to fully understand what was happening in fashion to participate?

JK

I don’t know what there was to understand. It was just happening. I didn’t really feel like I needed to understand fashion to participate, street style felt like a new thing at that moment. Bernadette could talk about it much better than me.

BV-H

I forget how to talk about it because it was so long ago. But I think one of the things that we did, which felt really new to everyone, was that we were incorporating minority street cultures, when it really hadn’t been done before. We were mainstaging certain Puerto Rican styles and a lot of the sportswear styles that were just considered low-income and in bad taste at the time. We invaded the runway culture with all of those different styles that just weren’t considered part of fashion.

JK

And probably also casting your models out of club culture a bit, not relying on professional models. That was a thing.

BV-H

Yeah, it was. But we did use professional models for the most part. Again, in New York City at that time, fashion was really very white, and about the designer’s individuality. And we used a lot of minorities and celebrated the style of the masses.

EO

Was this intuitive or were you directly responding to something?

BV-H

It was intuitive, but of course, we had our ideas and our concepts and what we wanted to see. There’s a lot of concepts and a lot of politics involved, but we did everything very fast and in the moment.

EO

What was happening in the late ’90s?

JK

In the late ’90s, we were doing the magazine and put out three issues then 9/11 happened, while we were working on our film Get Rid of Yourself. A lot of it was filmed in Italy during this big anti-globalization protest. At that point we’d joined forces with our French friends who were active under the names Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. You can find traces of them throughout the novel. Their writing mixed in with ours.

EO

What led you to make the film?

BV-H

From my point of view, the magazine was more a rebound thing because the fashion line imploded and then the group split up. We were already known as this fashion group. So, in my head it was like, “Well, what else can we do?” And so I thought of a magazine and then John joined Antek and me. He brought this new view and approached things differently.

EO

Can you specifically name what he brought that was different from what you guys were already doing?

BV-H

Thuy, Antek and I, we all had very different paths but we coincided of course. Thuy definitely had more art training than I did. He went to Cooper, where he studied architecture. I think he was very interested in these seismic alternative culture phenomena. Like Warhol and the Sex Pistols. Antek. [Laughs.] Antek and John went to film school together at NYU.

JK

He was an undergrad, and I was a grad student.

BV-H

I think Antek wanted to be the next Godard and have a personal career as a filmmaker.

JF

We’re talking about this interest in culture, DIY, and street fashion and this and that. There’s this other thing, which John mentions, the movie Get Rid of Yourself which we made with Tiqqun. There’s a political side that really appealed to me, like radical, revolutionary, political work. I had been involved a lot in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa and then the movement to free Black and Puerto Rican political prisoners in the United States. And then a lot of other things after that, ACT UP and the street level political work, but very effective stuff. But I’d been through a lot of it. And BC had this wild, anarchic energy. But then when it was this link up with Tiqqun and these movements that were happening in Italy and Semiotext(e) was also a real connection to political things.

But the sexy and the political, like it wasn’t just like, you should do this, you should do that. It was hot. It was more hot than fashion. It set you on fire and was a very exciting moment. And so when it came, this link up with the stuff in Europe and the building movement in opposition to the World Economic Forum and other things like that, then 9/11 just killed it. Really smothered a lot of that pretty quickly. I have been through so much political work, which is a collective work, too. Same kind of thing, talking to people. What do we want to do and what’s exciting to us? What’s interesting? What's sexy to us? With the writing, there was a real outlet for that kind of destructive/constructive energy in a way that's really, really hot. So our collective work isn’t just a fashion, art, or style thing.

BV-H

Jim is really right. I just don’t remember so far back. But it’s really hard just to say that it was just fashion, for example, because right from the beginning, we were using the platform of fashion in a political way. But the work was also extremely literary from the beginning. Our interest in literature was even more powerful than the interest in fashion. I don’t know if you know, but Jim and John have their own history with Semiotexte. That’s actually how I got to know Semiotext(e), because they worked intimately with Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus and they edited books. 

JF

Right. That’s true. Yeah.

JK

Sylvère was our professor at Columbia University.

EO

What made theory sexy then? Sylvère famously brought French theory to New York. Can you guys speak to that moment in college?

JF

Let’s say there’s these structures that you hate, that make you feel dead, make you feel bad, and you see it everywhere, and it’s in your face, and you’re swallowing it every day. And then you have something that actually plugs in things in a different way. Suddenly, walking on the street, you actually have a different sense of leverage where—I hate to say your heart—but really where your desire lies. It’s not about righteousness with Sylvère. If you look at those first issues of Semiotext(e), that’s the one thing they lacked, in terms of if somebody’s trying to deal with political things. They lacked that dimension of righteousness. But what they had instead was desire and connection in ways that were not happening otherwise.

So then when you understand the theory, that’s what made it sexy. If you look at any of those issues, you’ll see there’s the transgressive. For instance, back then, believing in and connecting to the transgressive was the most forward, liberatory thing you could do. So the transgressive had a different kind of value and occupied its own place in the world back then. And now it’s more like the transgressive has to be cloaked in this righteous thing of, “this is the way it should be.”

EO

Talking about the transgressive and thinking about transgression, it sounds like at that point it was something that you could encounter on the page and then directly apply to your life. It was a guide or manual, this thing that you could use.

JF

That’s right. What would look to other people like going down in flames, was actually...

EO

A call to arms.

JF

Yeah. It was something happening.

JK

Those Semiotext(e) issues affected us so much in college. Just to pick one up, just the material object, there were so many weird connections that were so alive and happening in the pages of those issues, connecting theory to art to politics to sex.

EO

It comes back to Bernadette's point about Bernadette Corporation being about pop. Did it feel like Pop culture at that time?

JK

Semiotext(e) was more like the bad seed within academia, making connections between academia and the downtown club world, the art world. That was Sylvère's thing. He was somehow going between these two zones, making thought happen between those two zones, and letting that contradiction affect the theory. It was theory that was happening in multiple dimensions in New York, smuggling it in from France and making it go crazy in New York.

JF

The theory was about that as well. French theory in particular is about zones and thresholds.

EO

As an outsider, it seems BC personified that.

JK

When Sylvère and Chris learned about BC through us, they were just so excited to bring it closer to Semiotext(e).

EO

Can you guys talk about your involvement with Semiotext(e)?

JK

We studied with Sylvère. I interned at the magazine. I helped him with some of the books. So did Jim. He was also a dear, close friend.

JF

And so was Chris.

JK

Yeah, Jim and I were there when Chris was writing I Love Dick.

JF

When she first started writing rather than being a filmmaker. We were there when she was a filmmaker too. I was in a bunch of her films. That’s what she did before she was writing. Even before I knew Chris very well, I worked on this book Still Black, Still Strong, which is about the movement to free political prisoners in the United States.

EO

What was it like being around her while she was writing that book?

JF

It was amazing. With her films, she had this embattled sense that she just couldn’t get a fair shake and that everybody hated them, but she had such an identity as a filmmaker, and I Love Dick is about being a failed filmmaker. Because besides helping them with all these books, John and I helped them build their houses. We were the work crew—we called ourselves The Agency—and they’d say, “Is there any chance The Agency could come out to Long Island this weekend or next week to help?” I remember riding with Chris in the car and she said, “I found a voice. I realized that all you need to do with a book is to know who you're writing to. Then you can write everything.” She says, “So I’m writing these letters to this guy Dick.” She told me the situation. She was on fire immediately; she said it wouldn’t stop.

BV-H

Did she know that she was going to write the book when she started the letters?

JF

Yeah, she wanted to write a book. I think the whole thing with Dick wasn’t premeditated because she had so much hunger, and she possessed so much force, but it couldn’t find a way in the films. It wasn’t happening with films. We worked hard on her films, over and over, hour after hour.

EO

What do you think was the disconnect in the films?

JF

Because Chris is such a literary person and her films were full of literary effects, not just in language, but even in the way the water was washing over the radio while the radio’s playing Chuck Berry—which is so beautiful to see—but really, that’s a poetic thing. I say literary, but I don’t mean in terms of the canon, I mean in terms of the writing mind. Her mind is so fast, and her verbal mind is so fast, and all she does is read: she reads, reads, reads. People from now, people from before, and always trying to have a conversation and put it together her way. She rewrites things. She rewrites people’s lives. Once her books started coming out, it was like, “Oh, shit, I hope I’m not in this one,” because it was never particularly flattering. And even if it was supposed to be flattering, it also didn’t ring true. But it had its own truth because it had so much energy and spin. You realize that the depiction is more true than my actual life is, in a way.

JK

I remember her writing it when we were together upstate, and she was sending letters back and forth with Dick, and at the same time trying to imagine the book. I don’t think she had a title yet. I remember this really strange feeling of being in the middle of somebody’s brain when they were still trying to figure out this new kind of book. It was still total chaos, and emotional. And the letters from Dick could have come back differently and it might have been a totally different book, but every night, there was another crisis or another huge doubt about where this thing was going. It was super exciting.

JF

The failure of the relationship with Dick was so perfect. And she recognized it. It’s almost like she recognized it as the thing that had been going on with her life all the way up to this point. She was determined to bring it to a head one way or another. So this thing came along and it was the same old thing, like she hit a brick wall, because she’s who she is and he’s who he is, so she just went full transparent, “I'm going to write all of this.” When she came up with the title, she had another title, because she was worried about calling it I Love Dick. It was sort of too on the nose to do that. Her one was Philosopher Queens. . . something, something, I don't remember. [Laughs.] It was a sentence that contained the words Philosopher Queens. And we were like, “Oh, man, no, you got to just go with I Love Dick, man.”

JK

The Bernadette Corporation came up with the title for I Love Dick.

JF

No, no. [Laughs.]

JK

I'm lying.

BV-H

So did you guys have a lot of input in I Love Dick?

JF

No.

JK

Only in the sense that we were like a captive audience, on the page-to-page level of her writing it and reading it out loud to us. It was great.

JF

I actually went upstate with her for about eight days just to read the stuff as it came out and ask “does this read? In what way?” And to confirm that it does. We would go on long walks, but she was well into it by that time. She just needed somebody...

EO

To listen.

JF

Just somebody to read it. Somebody to say, “Does it work just like with a play or a movie? Does it actually work like equipment? Does the equipment work?”

JK

It doesn’t become real until there’s other people there.

EO

How many other people were around when you guys were in the mix? Was it just you two?

JF

The Agency? [Laughs.]

JK

Yeah, it was just us and Chris, and Sylvère was there, too.

JF

I don’t know if David Wojnarowicz was around at that point anymore, but he was a close friend and confidant.

JK

Was he around when she was writing I Love Dick?

JF

I don’t remember the timeline, if he was alive.

EO

What was the general reception of them and Semiotext(e) at that time, amongst your friends or amongst the...

JK

Chris and Sylvère? There are so many worlds that they were plugged into. Chris was very plugged into the downtown poetry scene. Sylvère was very connected with Columbia and European thinkers and art people. Sylvère was sort of a pariah within academia.

EO

What was the reception of Sylvère as his student? Was he this bright light, like someone moths would flock to a flame for type of vibe?

JF

Pretty much. He was wild in the classroom.

JK

Sometimes he would come in wired, without a syllabus even. And he would think on his feet and throw stuff at us and ask for suggestions. It was all very collaborative and exciting. He was always working on several issues of Semiotext(e) or several books at the same time as he was teaching. So everything was in the same vortex.

JF

It wasn’t ever like, “This is what you’re responsible for, and now you need to take responsibility for this and learn it,” and then demonstrate mastery. It wasn’t that model at all. He was figuring it out and we were helping him. We were just poking around and going along these lines of desire, like a certain movie he was really into in connection with death. It was so hard to piece it together because it wasn’t pieced together, but not out of disorganization, but because it was an incomplete thing that we were doing. He was bringing us into it. It was so on the border of inarticulate, in a way. But that made the connections much more exciting because nobody knew what they were going to yield, including the teacher.

EO

Let’s get into the book, Reena Spaulings. It seems like fashion was the vehicle for BC in the beginning, the same way publishing was for Semiotext(e), where it was able to infiltrate these different scenes simultaneously. I feel like we’re in this renaissance where the world is experiencing a serious shift towards collectively working. I think that that’s what I want you guys to speak to across writing and this general social movement. It’s what sparked our interest in inviting you to speak.

JK

The BC writing projects were very committed to ideas of multiple authorship or collective writing, and really formalized that possibility. Each of the writing projects was a serious attempt to invade the idea of authorship with a gang, or unruly horde, of writers. The poem, even more than the novel, was super systematic in terms of what Jim was saying before about elaborating a system for writing together.

EO

You keep bringing up the poem. [Laughs.] It seems there’s a bias. What about the poem?

JK

It’s not a bias at all. The poem probably wouldn’t have happened if the novel hadn’t happened. The novel was a bit chaotic. There were maybe three or four of us always working on it and then dozens of other people out there in the world who we were asking to contribute, who didn’t have the same overview as we did. But we became a writing team in the “writer’s room” sense.

EO

But what was the hope or end goal with the project?

JK

We had read this book called The Genius of the System about Hollywood in the studio era. And there were these amazing descriptions of highly efficient rooms full of writers where the studio boss would come in smoking their cigar and say, “I want a film set in the South Seas, a romantic vehicle for such and such actress.” And then within the writer’s room, each person would have their own specialty. Maybe there’d be a funny dialogue guy and another person specializing in romantic scenes. So that idea of the writer’s room, without having ever done it, was super exciting to us. And we thought that as soon as we activate ourselves in a writer’s room kind of way, this novel could probably be done in a few weeks because of the manpower and organization. But it ended up slowing things down in a great way.

JF

Unlike decisions that can be made intuitively by a single author, even from their unconscious, these had to be fully conscious. Are we going to speak in the first person? Are we going to switch from first person to third? These are block-headed things that had to be decided on. But on the other hand, you get this incredible speed, power of association, and density of imagery fast. We really pounced on those advantages of collective writing. But the real thing was, there’s a hatred of authorship, even in terms of art. Why the emphasis on the name of the person? So now it’s clear that everybody with a name makes that name into a kind of corporation anyway. Their name is out there doing something and they’re working for that name, they’re almost at work. It’s a lot of fucking work just to have an Instagram, or whatever. But what is there in poetry? What is there in fashion? When the name isn’t there? Think of a poem without the name of the writer. I’m not talking about the sorts of things that always get said about the Gothic artists, the stonemasons whose names we don’t know, but they did all these masterpieces. No. But there’s something exciting about that film, Get Rid Of Yourself. Like what John was saying about the gang, you replace this individual block with lines of desire and energy. I think that impulse, which was a politically joyous impulse driving it more than just some literary advantages to writing collectively.

JK

Tiqqun was also a collectively authored publication. So that was a happy meeting. They totally got it right away, or we got each other. They never signed their names to anything.

EO

Why was it called Bernadette Corporation? Bernadette? [Laughs.]

JF

Because she learned that in her economics degree. [Laughs.]

EO

No.

BV-H

No, it was actually mostly Thuy’s idea. That’s the name we took when we were doing the club parties. It was kind of inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer novel at that time. And it’s the role that corporations played in that sci-fi landscape. Basically, a corporation is a way to disappear, to have impunity. It’s a legitimate kind of thuggery.

JK

It would sound kind of like a big business image or something cinematic, at least.

BV-H

In Neuromancer, the corporations were this kind of organized gang, but they were above the law and untouchable. Also, adopting that name was a stance against artsy-ness…

JF

Fine arts…

BV-H

Fine artists’ individualized expressions. So we just kind of went with the most mainstream un-artistic name that we could.

JF

I had nothing to do with the choosing of the name, but I find it funny as well to claim corporate status. It always made me a little giddy seeing that corporations are these giant things, giant super personal identities. Even better than being an author or an artist, you’re actually a corporation. It’s an even bigger identity, one that also shares a personhood, and I enjoyed that.

EO

But what was the conversation around identity at the time? And did that come into focus of what you guys were doing?

JK

There was a thing called identity politics. [Laughs.]

EO

Yeah, right. Forgot about that. [Laughs.]

JF

I remember when Julian came and he was with Tiqqun. And he was here and he had a meeting with Bruce Benderson, if you know Bruce Benderson. Somebody had told him, “Oh, you’re going to the States, you’re going to New York, you have to talk with Bruce Benderson as this sort of cutting edge political person, thinker, activist.” And he came back from that meeting with Bruce Benderson. He told me, “John,” I was so interested because I had known Bruce, I’d seen him read, and he was like, “There’s no way, there’s no way I can even talk to him. Because all he is into is identity politics.” That was at the beginning of the super booming of identity politics. But definitely I was seeking something other than my identities.

JK

And Tiqqun kind of used the model of the black bloc as a group-authored sort of opacity, as a resistance to representational politics. The black bloc realized that at the level of spectacularized mass protests. Wearing masks and anonymous black clothes, swarming in and disrupting the neoliberal culture of televised protest marches. So that was kind of a model for them, for their thinking.

EO

Can we talk about how you guys came up with Reena Spaulings?

JK

The book?

JF

The book? The person? The gallery? The idea?

JK

It started with the book and...

BV-H

I think that show Gossip Girl was on and so we paired this machine of the studio system and we tried to plug in writing this perfect bestseller type of teenage fiction. Turned out differently but that was our model.

JF

But it wasn’t just the show. It started with the Gossip Girl books in 2002.

JK

Yeah, there wasn’t even a show at that point.

BV-H

Oh, there wasn’t. I thought that’s what got us to the book. But...

JK

No, I just remember seeing all the teenage kids on the subway reading this viral novel series.

EO

Whoa. So you saw people reading Gossip Girl which inspired the work?

JK

It was young adult fiction about life in high school. I think it was maybe one of the first books to use social media or text messaging, when you flip through the pages there was digital communication too. Gossip Girl was anonymous, and she would address the student body via phone messages.

EO

And why were you drawn to it?

JK

When I was a kid I liked the Hardy Boys. And I remember my teacher asked everybody in the class to write a letter to their favorite author. And I wrote to this guy, Franklin W. Dixon, the Hardy Boys author. I got this letter back saying there is no Franklin Dixon. The books are written by a committee and it was such a. . .

EO

Wait. These books are written by who?

JK

Committee.

EO

What does that mean?

JK

There was no author, no Dixon. They were written by a group of authors. [Laughs.]

BV-H

It was probably some disgruntled worker who sent you that letter like trying to break some young boy’s heart. [Laughs.]

JK

But it was shocking but also kind of fascinating to imagine like, Oh my God the author does not exist.

JF

But you know those Hardy Boys books, when you get the picture and then the caption, which is just a piece of the writing near the picture, and I mean they were a total aspiration. If you could be that, if we could be that kick ass it would have been amazing.. [Laughs.] But I also remember when we started, it was just this desire to have a novel. And our first discussion was what should it look like? How many pages should it be? How big?

JK

We visualized the object. It had to have some weight to it. It had to have a spine. I remember that. [Laughs.]

JF

And we had to fill it with writing. [Laughs.]

JK

Yeah. That was the goal. We even had charts at one point, some big charts on the wall.

JF

Totally. And every chapter had its own system. We realized it had to have a system. Otherwise, there’s no way it would hold together with all these different contributors. We had to come up with this boneheaded thing. But we were also prepared for that by OuLiPo. Do you know who OuLiPo is? The French writing group, where they did a lot of experiments with schemes for collective writing, scheme, not just for collective, but schemes for writing, for generating literature, opening the potential of literature.

JK

Writing machines, writing systems.

EO

But what specifically resonated with Gossip Girl?

JK

I remember I had translated a book by Michèle Bernstein. She was one of the Situationists and for a money job she wrote these breezy young adult novelettes. Bonjour Tristesse would maybe be a model for what she was going for, but it was kind of a secret portrait of the Situationists at the time, but hidden within young adult fiction. So that was a great thing. But also Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young Girl was in our hands at that point. As I said, it’s a collectively authored theory taking the idea of a self-managed consumer subject as a theme of the book and using writing from women’s magazines and cutting and pasting it into a collage theory. That was a thing for sure.

EO

Can we talk about Reena Spaulings?

JK

Well, imagine Gossip Girl being rewritten by a Situationist or something like that. Taking that form and making it do something else, kind of occupying it.

BV-H

Yeah, for example, all of this production by an author, by an artist, by a self, that’s the dominant culture. I think it was our desire against that. Basically that we would go for something that everyone has, for example, something super generic, super mainstream, suggestive of something that we all kind of take part in or that belongs to all of us or something.

EO

What about women? Bernadette is a woman’s name.

BV-H

Your question about why Bernadette Corporation, the other part of that answer was that there’s this corporation, I don’t know if it still exists, called Beatrice Corporation. [Laughs.] And it’s just that idea from 20, 30 years ago, it’s like Siri or Alexa. It’s like you have this female face but a boardroom full of men. That’s why they took my name.

EO

But what is the philosophy behind that?

BV-H

It’s just that women are supposed to be more caring and helpful, less threatening.

EO

Can you guys speak to that? Come on, Jim. You’re a man of words. Don’t let me down now.

JF

First of all, Bernadette, I don’t look at her as helpful and caring. [Laughs.] She’s more like a power figure to me and clearly it keeps this thing going by wielding that, if not power, that force, that energy.

EO

Okay. Come on, John.

JK

The question is about why the female identity?

BV-H

Of the group or why it’s used by corporations?

EO

Yes, the group, and Reena Spaulings is also a woman’s name.

JK

Yes, but it’s also the name of a book. It’s like Anna Karenina or Daisy Miller.

JF

And let's be serious. . .

BV-H

In our culture, there’s always the It girl or something. So it’s just co-opting this prevalent condition.

JK

Well, don’t forget Gossip Girl: this idea of a super savvy, technically proficient, anonymous force.

JF

It’s also, I mean, we were as sick as everybody else was of these male…

JK

Yeah, this is way before Barbie. [Laughs.]

JF

You got the list of male artists, no matter how great you think they were, even in Semiotext(e). If you look at Chris’s position entering Semiotext(e), she talks about it all the time, and she’s going out with Sylvère. Sylvère’s like a rock star at the time. And then the tables turn. Chris became the rock star. At the time, it was clear that if you’re going to be an artist, the female artist thing was more exciting than a male artistic ego. If we’re going to commit ourselves to an ego, if we have to choose between just male and female, I mean, it was clear we were going to go female. We were sick of the, I don’t care if it’s John Cage, somebody as beautiful as that, but if you look at all the artists that were featured, William S. Burroughs, Foucault, I love them all, but it is a drag. It’s a dead end in a way. And it’s a denial of the world in a big way. So I think it was a very clear way through for us.

EO

Can you guys speak to the process of editing?

BV-H

Jim and John could speak to the editing process because it became a bit tortuous because it was always open and everyone could change anything. We had to do so many rereads because things were always in flux.

JK

And we didn’t know where the book was going. I think at the most we saw like three chapters ahead of where we were. We would kind of make decisions about what was going to happen in the next chapter and the one after that, or what kinds of elements or devices we wanted to feature in the upcoming chapters. But when we started the book, I don’t think we had the whole arc of it figured out. It was a little bit like walking into a labyrinth, unfolding step by step. That’s how I remember it. Also we would decide on some basic structures of a chapter and then we would solicit other writers to supply us with content. For example, a conversation between two characters in an elevator or something like that or describe the scene backstage at a Strokes concert in Central Park. There was a lot of blindness there and a lot of openness and we’d come up with systems to make that work.

EO

How did it arrive at Semiotext(e)?

JK

Well, we wrote the book and offered it to them and they immediately agreed to publish it.

JF

But about editing it, me, John and Jutta spent many, many, many hours around the table. Do you know Jutta, the painter? Jutta Koether. She was very important in the making of Reena Spaulings too. First, you had to come up with, like John said, the structure. Then there’s the manner of soliciting text to give people an assignment and how that would fit in. Then there was the editing of all that material chapter by chapter. It just so happens that every chapter has a different generative principle like Ulysses does or some other books, like Faulkner’s books. It’s like a high modernist idea where a different concept would generate a different chapter. But this was just really for completely practical reasons that it came out that way. That’s one thing I remember about the editing process.

JK

Also, most of the writers weren’t writers professionally. Even people that didn’t speak English as the first language. We asked all kinds of people.

EO

What have you learned from Bernadette Corporation or what have you learned from Reena Spaulings?

JK

Repeat your question. [Laughs.]

BV-H

From the experience?

EO

Okay Bernadette, let’s go.

BV-H

No, I was just asking another question. I wasn’t going to answer it.

EO

I think I really resonate with the project because you guys are so driven by systems and concepts. I was curious why you always needed to have that kind of philosophy before going into all the projects.

JF

If there’s three or more people working on a thing, you can’t just have some writing and put some writing next to other writing. I mean, you can do that, but that’s just putting someone’s writing next to someone else’s writing. We wanted to transcend that sort of scrapbook thing and have it completely conceptualized. So you actually have to think about it, maybe more than an individual author has to. You have to come up with those things just so that it could be joined together. It’s really hard to just join random or somewhat random texts. It's the nuts and bolts of the writing that has to be decided upon and agreed upon and committed to. Then it goes together in surprising ways, ways that you wouldn’t have foreseen, very effective ways. One of the things I did learn from Reena Spaulings, the novel, is that we tried really hard to transcend our own identity and create the identity of this novel and of these characters, Reena and Maris in particular.

But I learned that you can’t divert or subvert your own identity, but if enough force is applied, and I mean force in a good way, not coercive force, when power goes into something, identity will adhere to it. And that definitely happened with Reena Spaulings. The book took on an identity of its own, the character and BC took on an identity as a result of the novel itself. It had one identity, then it took on another identity. And then it was everybody’s job for a little while to understand, well, where do I fit in? We had to reshuffle and readjust because this thing came through with so much power that it was an identity vacuum. Something’s got to come in there. So it’s fun to go back and look at it after all this time when it really does have a life of its own. I have to actually remind myself how it happened, because the self it took on is even more significant than how it happened.

JK

To go back to that question that started Jim’s answer about concepts, I would say for the novel, whatever concepts there were, were really at the level of making the writing happen. They were concepts that were generative of the text. They were mechanic in a way.

EO

Thank you. Do you guys want to answer the question of what you’ve learned from Bernadette Corporation and what you’ve learned from Reena Spaulings? [Laughs.]

JK

Sorry, I’m blanking. [Laughs.] Two thousand wasted years.

BV-H

I think it’s hard to learn from it because it changes so much and we also change so much.

JK

Yeah, we didn’t learn, we changed.

EO

What have you enjoyed the most about the experience?

JF

Is that worse?

JK

I mean, everything we’ve done was a total surprise to me because it was never something I could have done myself, that any one of us ever could have done on their own. Whatever we were making was only possible with all of us doing it and it always came as a surprise. Impossible products. I love working that way.

EO

Do you guys feel the same? Jim, Bernadette?

JF

Absolutely. It was a total surprise. It cracks me up and I love it. I loved rereading it.

BV-H

What is fun about working with people is that you always learn so much, just how other people think and what they’re thinking.

EO

Bernadette, how do you feel knowing this thing has grooved from a club promotional name?

BV-H

I don’t really take stock of things. I think it’s hard to say how I feel about it. [Laughs.] Oh god no, John, can you answer that question? Jim?

JK

I can’t answer how you feel about it.

BV-H

Can you answer how you feel about it? That’s a really hard question.

JK

Sometimes I can’t believe how ambitious we were.

JF

Yeah, that’s true.

JK

Like, let’s write a novel.

JF

Let’s write the best novel. That’s what it was. Let’s write the best novel.

EO

Having been like descendants of Sylvère and Chris, you didn’t think that you were going to encounter success? I often feel like people keep you around for a reason.

JK

Yeah, but we kept them around too. I mean, we were out of college at that point.

EO

Oh, really? Well, yeah, how old were you guys?

JK

It depends on which thing. I think when I started working with BC that was 1999. So I was in my mid-30s.

EO

Oh, really? So you guys were older.

JK

I was older. I’m still older than Bernadette.

JF

We were older.

JK

I’m always going to be older than Bernadette. [Laughs.]

BV-H

I'm not as old as they are.

EO

Okay, Bernadette. [Laughs.]

JF

I’m 60.

BV-H

Well, when we started in 1993 or ’94 I was 23.

JK

When we wrote the novel, I guess I was about to turn 40.

EO

You were 40?

JK

When we wrote the novel. It was 2004, wasn’t it?

JF

I was 40 years old. I’m telling you, old ass. This was not about ambition either. I was personally just dead ass. It wasn’t about ambition. It was about striking a blow. And I didn’t want to do it in my own name or anything. I didn’t even really care. I didn’t ask to be part of Bernadette Corporation. We just said to anybody who contributed to this novel, this novel is written by Bernadette Corporation. If you wrote, and if you did anything in this, you’re in Bernadette Corporation because it’s by Bernadette. Just by that very fact alone. So it wasn’t a personal artistic aspiration. I mean, I had aspirations, but I never had any hope just because I knew Sylvère. Chris was not that famous at the time anyway; that novel, I Love Dick, got published because she had an inside connection with Semiotext(e). It was by no means obvious that Chris was as great as I thought she was at the time. She didn’t have enough people who thought she was great. That’s why she liked us. But it wasn’t like we were the next up-and-coming thing. And really, there was no place of desire for me in terms of being an artist or a writer. Another white, male, straight, American fucking writer? That’s so fucking done. It’s so gone. It was like, I didn’t want to do anything like that either, but there wasn’t any chance. Even poetry itself, like when we wrote the poem, it’s like what does poetry have now? We all had this sort of thing like there’s something so great about poetry, but there’s something so awful about it too and so dead about it so let’s do something about this but let’s strike a blow.

JK

And another great thing about working with Bernadette Corporation is that because it was a corporation we could be totally free to do the most ambitious things, but there was also a level of joke to the ambition, like just choosing impossible projects but because we were a corporation we knew we could do it.