Bernstein's art includes narrative films, poetry, short YouTube videos, durational performance videos, and live performances. In his work, he often plays characters based on cultural icons including: Amy Winehouse, Lamb Chop (puppet), Antony Hegerty, Leopold Brant (a parody of Peter Brant II), and Lady Gaga.[2]
Work
Bernstein's first video was a satirical coming out video for YouTube made in clown make-up in 2008.[3][4]
In 2012, his first narrative film, Unchained Melody, premiered at Anthology Film Archives, featuring his parents Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, the poet Cole Heinowitz, and the singer Shelley Hirsch.[5][6]
In 2012, together with Gabe Rubin, he co-performed and co-directed Art & Language / Red Krayola's opera Victorine at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.[7]Felix Bernstein & Gabe Rubin make music, stage shows, and videos around themes of impersonation, poly-sexuality, and persona.[8] In January 2016, Bernstein, working with Rubin, debuted the stage show Bieber Bathos Elegy at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[9] In February 2016, Nightboat published Bernstein's first poetry collection, Burn Book.[10] His most recent work with Rubin, titled "Folie à Deux" (2018), will be featured at the David Lewis gallery.
Bernstein's article-turned-book "Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry" is a critical and ambivalent survey of language poetry, conceptual poetry and the art in their lineage. Bernstein's central argument is that there has been a shift from language poetry's death of the author to conceptual poetry's death of the writerly to post-conceptual poetry's death of reading. The Goldsmith aesthetic, along with that of postpostmodernism in general (Queer Theory, Speculative Realism, Metamodernism, Gaga Feminism, Alternative literature, New Sincerity), has brought a decline in incisive and dialectical criticality, an overemphasis on social networks, slapdash viral superstars, and a hyper-mediated institutionalization of affect through an unconscious structuralism that masks itself as a romantic return to sheer materiality and the great outdoors.[20]
Drawing on thinkers from Deleuze to Lacan to Love to Ngai to Badiou to Barthes to Perloff, and combining a Zizekian X-ray vision with the biting 'you can't scare me' of youth, Notes constitutes Bernstein's irruption into / refusal of the institutional avant-garde.[21]
Laurent Milesi and Radu Vancu call Notes "one of the most savvy, brazen, ambitious poetic manifestoes of a generation."[22] In the New York Times, Holland Cotter called Bernstein's "blistering cultural criticism," one of the best things in 2015 art.[23] Notes was selected by Seth Price as the best book of 2015 in Artforum. Price wrote,
Bernstein's book is basically a symptomology report, which is one definition of an artwork. Symptoms include youth culture, the avant-garde, queer theory, alt lit, and social media…Keeping a space open can be a political act, and that's what Bernstein's doing with his writing, or his persona, and maybe there's no difference. It's hard to say what this space is, but you could call it a space of trouble.[24]
Publications
Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry. Insert Blanc Press. 2015.[25][26]
