“I think theory should be misread. To demand the integrity of a theory is a very strange concept mostly made for people who aren’t theoreticians.” — Sylvère Lotringer, circa 1990*

The centerpiece of BERNADETTE CORPORATION: THE GAY SIGNS**—a new exhibit at Gaga Los Angeles, in MacArthur Park—is ABC Pong (2017), a long table displaying, on one half, words engraved on an acrylic sheet indicating triggers for a free-association word game. Encased in the other half of the tabletop is a monitor screening a visually altered HD video of Sylvère Lotringer playing the game—the editor, publisher, writer, filmmaker, theorist in his Los Angeles apartment holding forth on art, semiotics, and the nature of time.

BERNADETTE CORPORATION: THE GAY SIGNS

HOUSE OF GAGA, 2228 West 7th Street (enter on Grand View), Los Angeles.

houseofgaga.com

gagareena.com

*Lotringer, in ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, ed. Stan Douglas (New York: David Zwirner Books/Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016), 61.

**A play on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882).

Image credit: Sylvère Lotringer, film still from The Art of Time, 2010, directed by Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly. Image courtesy of the filmmakers.