Gossip Girl Goes to the Gallery

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Notes

¹ I have decided not to define slang words such as ‘froyo’ and ‘bffs’. These are more easily and accurately Googleable than much of the jargon that goes undefined in academic texts.

² Other influences include Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, which I discuss later, and Michèle Bernstein's (2008) novel All the King's Horses, translated by Bernadette Corporation member John Kelsey (with a translator's introduction that discusses Reena Spaulings). The first version of the translation was distributed section-by-section in pamphlet form at the gallery that would later be called Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2008: 7).

³ Known members of Bernadette Corporation, which was founded in 1994, include John Kelsey, Antek Walczak and Bernadette Van-Huy.

⁴ Although I do not have the space to explain this point in detail, my forthcoming book Girlhood and the Plastic Image, does an extended analysis of the girlphobia of Kracauer's and McLuhan's influential theories.

⁵ A more sensitive but, within its contextual network, still troubling exploration of girliness is BC's series of at least eleven works incorporating semi-nude photographic images of the same young model, Laura.

⁶ BC's practice also performs an important critique of many art collectives' naïve belief in aesthetic freedom and a communality that entirely escapes commercialism.