Be Corpse

For their New Commission, Bernadette Corporation chooses to produce a book, titled Be Corpse.

An extract from the forthcoming book follows:

Be Corpse is a drama in three acts:

Act one – Fog Before Night
Act two – Night After Fog
Act three – The Foggy New Night

The main theme is zombies.

Be Corpse is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Be Corpse would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form. With Be Corpse, Bernadette Corporation asks: How many amateur screenplay writers are there in existence compared to how many amateur novelists? What is the difference between a zombie and an insane cannibal?

Before the mind could distinguish between skin and air, before perception made its arrangements with the hard, flat edges of the earth, the body was there, invading space, waging nonstop war across a continuous front of stimuli. Upon its first distinction between external pressures that can be moved away from or removed, and internal pressures which are constant, the organism then set out on an adventure to change the external world while undertaking involved and interconnected activities to reduce the stimulation of the instincts. In this ensuing rich mental life, somewhere between the polarities of subject/object, pleasure/pain, activity/passivity, the sovereignty of the body was excluded. It became a mirror, a signboard, a device, a site of production, a trained pet.

Bernadette Corporation’s Be Corpse is co-published by Art in General and Sternberg Press. It is part of Art in General’s New Commissions Program, which is made possible by The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and the Booth Ferris Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Henry Buhl Foundation, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Peter Norton Family Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, Jerome Foundation, George Mills and the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund.