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FOCUS by Michael Kirby 173Michael Kirby is a writer based in New York.

Felix Bernstein“Bieber Bathos Elegy” Whitney Museum, New York 15. – 16.1.2016

As Thierry de Duve suggests in Kant af-ter Duchamp, the categorical judgment “this is beautiful” was replaced in the 20th century by Duchamp’s “this is art,” which, in turn, was replaced by Broodthaers’s “this is not art.” In this new millennium, we might add a new and improved aesthetic judgment to the list: “this is queer.” The end result of a trajectory where Duchamp and Broodthaers became the expected, re-peated until they were ironized and lo-botomized to death, which brings us to the present, where everyone wants something that can bring identity poli-tics and affect to their conceptual work, thereby bringing the avant-garde to life in a new and improved fashion. Slipping between YouTube, critical writing, poetry, and theatrical perfor-mance, Felix Bernstein (*1992) finds a loophole in the present, giving us what we ask for (the objet d’art as queerness) while at the same time frustrating our aesthetic demands. There is always a way to circumvent the demands of the present. When Duchamp submitted his urinal to the collection of objets d’art sought by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, it was not a “subversive” move, but rather the discovery of a loophole in the rules that allowed for more aesthetic pleasure than the ex-pectable.Which brings us to Bieber Bathos Eleg y (2016), Bernstein’s recent Whitney per-formance, where the artist’s queer ex-pressivity and Jewish criticality were given and negated at once – satirizing and exceeding the expectations of camp and kitsch. On view was what Wayne Koestenbaum calls Bernstein’s “hy-per-professionally embodied disem-bodiment”. Fittingly, the performance C

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Views FOCUS 174was based on a chapter in his melan-cholic, fragmentary, and diaristic poet-ry collection Burn Book, which blends a tribute to Justin Bieber with odes to both his deceased sister and the child star Eva Ionesco. In Act I, Bernstein played a leather- faced predator looking through videos of Bieber, Bieber fans, and his own home movies. In Act II, a queer chil-dren’s chorus dressed in clothes by fashion brand Whatever 21 (a spoof on the commercial fashion brand Forever 21) was led in an improvised decon-struction of the song Tomorrow from the Broadway musical Annie by vocalist Shelley Hirsch. And in Act III, Bern-stein performed a duet with a projected angel Bieber with live violin and cello accompaniment. In various ways, Bernstein hyperboli-cally and diabolically incorporated a mocking self-reflexivity about what agendas and fantasies the show served. In Act II a sinister, green-lit curator (of the self-proclaimed Queer Art Guardi-anship) announced that: The show will proceed with the follow-ing parameters: Intergenerational med-itations on intergenerationality. Avant vocalist and composer Shelley Hirsch leads a workshop for emerging post-Neo Queer avant-garde Whitney teen youth dressed in fashion brand What-ever 21. Downtown meets TMZ mo-ments rich in charitable events of sad inclusivity and inclusive sadness, of cruel optimism and optimistic cruelty, all symbolizing Felix’s queer nostalgia for a futurity beyond this: a 23-year-old’s mid-career attempt at sustainabili-ty in an art … market … predicated … on built-in obsolescence. Through this endorsement the artisanship of failure shall be contractually mandated pend-ing further perfection.

And in the final act, Bieber critiqued the show and its context in song:

And I’m like your desireis banal you’re a douche you’re just one more hysteric faggotjust like all therestthere is no subversionleftyou transgressand transgressbut there is no subversionleft

you fag,queer devotionis dullall perversion is performanceall performance is banal

Bernstein’s performance style was de-rived from tragicomic humor rather than moralistic, sentimental, expressive revelations of identity, confession, transgression, politics, or brand. He was not simply trying to arouse, freak out, seduce, embarrass, or receive attention from the straight man in the room. Nor was he claiming to be some sort of au-tonomous diva, “doing his own thing” without giving a shit about what the straight man thinks. Neither traditional faggot-Oedipal drama was played out. Instead, he produced a form that was at once exhibitory and insular, without succumbing to either desperate abjec-tion or sex-positive transcendence. He threw both types into a blender and re-turned them to us in a fashion that was upside-down, crazed, and horrific. Watching the show, where a masked Felix scrolls through videos and noisily then operatically then noisily sings Adele, all while on a tiny Pee-wee’s Play-house set, one wanted to say this is punk or queer or camp or experimental, but the nervous shivers it elicited were from a surprise that never solidified into any preconceived genre take on cruel or queer art. What was at play was, then, the dialecti-cal disruption of expectation: so where you expected Pee-wee Herman you

were given comedian Andrew Dice Clay, where you expected musician Antony Hegarty you were given punk singer GG Allin, where you expected performer Sharon Needles you were given Vito Acconci, and where you ex-pected a post-Internet New York School poet you were given Adorno. But then as soon as you expected cruel masculinism, you were given a femi-nist, heartfelt, feminine dweeb. Which turned Felix’s performance into a negative-dialectical horror show, based on the crucial rule that John Carpenter set up in the 1978 slasher film Halloween: The safest house in-spires the most fear. Horror always comes too soon, and right when we feel safe, Michael Myers, the deadpan psycho-killer, comes back to life. Don’t get me wrong, Bernstein is able to do the campy drag and the gothic punk and the ironic institutional cri-tique, but he chose to push beyond them. The job got done, but only in the midst of an escape act. There was no time to pause for affirmation (whether it is was affirmation of negativity or af-firmation of positivity).Sifting through his anal-retentive col-lection of hoarded tastes, he chose not to “sublimate” through social expres-sion and coterie politics, but rather to explode them through a voyeuristic self-pleasuring performed in front of a scared and yet sympathetic audience. And in this way the Duchampian slap-in-the-face returned. Bernstein was asked to bring his gay male criticality to the museum, as a kind of excess. He de-livered, but then brought too much of the too much. This has become his aes-thetic marker and, at least for now, bred a discomfort that is exactly what I, or we, (don’t want to) want.

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