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Slater bradley
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Slater Bradley created his own world populated by
the lost icons of his youth; now he’s staking out new
territory on New York’s forgotten island
words TYler CoBurN
s l a t e r b r a d l e y r o s e t o p r o m i n e n c e seven years ago as part of his late-autumn exhibition at LA’s Blum & Poe, Bradley occasionally
Team Gallery’s stable of New York-based twentysomethings who used the term ‘Slaterland’ to describe the particular creative universe
collectively gave Pop art a dark twenty-first-century makeover. he inhabits, as if by way of explaining how he’s managed to survive the
Alongside Banks Violette’s black-metal-inspired minimalism, Cory cannibalising trends of the artworld for this long. While it has assumed
Arcangel’s vintage electronics and Ryan McGinley’s scenester snaps, many guises over his short career, ‘Slaterland’ has also frequently
Bradley’s referentially adroit work felt, at least superficially, at home. reflected Bradley’s concern with the dynamics of cultural mythology:
There was his video The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000), in which Chloë the processes by which icons and spectacles are erected, and by which
Sevigny delivers a screed on dilettantism from Thomas Mann’s a community of devotees, amateurs and hangers-on are mobilised
Tonio Kröger (1903) over the soundtrack of Godard’s Le Mépris around them.
(1963); and then The Doppelganger Trilogy (2002–4), Bradley’s suite Many of Bradley’s early films were predicated upon a relative
of constructed ‘lost’ performance footage of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain anonymity of authorship – and, conceptually, intended to pass for
and Michael Jackson, all played by Benjamin Brock, who, crucially, the real thing, as news broadcasts or fan archives. In Female Gargoyle
resembles Bradley. After befriending the artist in the late 1990s, Brock (2000), a work Bradley shot on the fly during his perambulations
went on to become his perennial onscreen alter ego, dramatising through New York, a woman perches on the top ledge of a building,
Bradley’s negotiations with the cultural field in a way that felt dead-on evidently contemplating suicide. By inserting a black band with the text
to anyone who ever experienced the pull of fandom, or yearned to be ‘Amateur Video’ above the frame of the image, Bradley suggests this
someone else. When the trilogy was purchased by the Guggenheim scene of personal drama to be a fragment of a news broadcast, thereby
and exhibited in its New York museum in 2005, Bradley became the illustrating how the qualities of amateur documentary can be exploited
artworld equivalent of his musical icons. to lend credibility to reportage; and how easily the exceptional events
Of course art that takes as ephemeral a subject as popular culture of everyday life are transformed into media spectacles.
risks dating itself just as quickly – criticism that could be made of some As Bradley explains, The Doppelganger Trilogy, with its
of Bradley’s contemporaries. Yet as the dust clears on the trends of the obsessive attention to detail – from the branding of Nirvana’s guitars
early 2000s, Bradley’s conceptual interests have proved more durable to the choreography of Jackson’s crotch grab – attempts to address
than many initially imagined. In conversation during preparations for the repercussions of the suicides of Curtis and Cobain and the gradual
artreview 6874
Slater bradley.indd 74 2/11/07 14:14:15
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