“ Now that I’m an
artist and have
made a name for
myself, there’s no
reason for me to
continue to claim
anonymity”
seclusion of Jackson: “They’re about trying to fill the void when
someone is dead and you need more footage of them. You need to
get the same high you once did when you were younger, listening to
their stuff, but there’s no footage left.” The contradictions inherent in
Bradley’s aspiration – the fact, for example, that these devotional acts
of fandom are equally the greatest of fakeries – strikes, in a way, at the
paradoxes inherent in relationships built across the divide of celebrity
and real life: between art and death.
Bradley has now risen to a level of visibility where amateur
methods would smack of disingenuousness. He remarks, “I wasn’t an
artist during the early work: I was an amateur, and an amateur video
has no author. Now that I’m an artist and have made a name for myself,
there’s no reason for me to continue to claim anonymity.” After taking
such incisive looks in The Doppelganger Trilogy at how we incorporate
and remember pop culture’s icons, it’s somehow appropriate that
Bradley would now train his gaze upon his own newly minted celebrity.
In his recent series of drawings shown at London’s Max Wigram
Gallery in September, for example, he pens with gold marker over the
backgrounds of past photographs: shots of Brock dressed as Curtis,
Cobain and Jackson. One thinks of Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe
(1962), created soon after the starlet’s death, where the painted gold
background at turns glamorises and memorialises her silkscreen head.
Bradley’s drawings assume a similarly elegiac tone, reflecting both
upon the musicians of the trilogy and upon an earlier era of his own
creative output.
Bradley’s relationship to his primary actor, Brock, has also shifted.
In the trilogy, German scholar Paul Fleming notes, Brock’s status as
surrogate for Bradley and his cultural heroes exceeds that of a mere
doppelgänger, or ‘identical replicant’; insofar as Bradley ‘casts another
as himself, so that he in turn can play another’, Brock consequently
becomes a ‘tripleganger’: a heretofore unknown figure, built to fit the
shifting, mirrored surface of postmodern identification and influence.
In Bradley’s newest works, Brock’s role is even more existentially
Slater bradley.indd 76 2/11/07 14:14:54
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