feAture slater bradley
indeterminate, as the characters he plays feel like assemblages of cultural using recently discontinued Kodachrome Super 8 stock. What we’re
excerpts as opposed to specific icons. A Romantic air of loneliness and left with, then, is a “conversation between two dead languages”, as he
melancholy underscores Bradley’s creative and directorial autonomy. In puts it. Each speaks its own version of future-perfect, the tense of a city
The Abandonments (2006), one of the two videos Bradley will exhibit built upon an ideal of progress, yet each describes a spot of land that
at Blum & Poe, Brock plays the role of a suited Victorian dandy (top never cleanly slotted into the New York mythology. Considering this,
hat, tails – the works) who meanders through a particularly desolate it’s unsurprising that a man of Bradley’s creative temperament would
swathe of Roosevelt Island. The ill-defined connotation of the setting be drawn to Roosevelt Island, or that his tripleganger, Benjamin Brock,
– a small strip of land abutting the eastern side of Manhattan – bolsters actually lives there. These types of phenomena have a logic all their
the surreality of watching Brock trudge, leaden-footedly, with a CGI own, originating at some point in that half-reality where a copy meets
raincloud following overhead. At one point, without warning, Brock its original; an idea, its inception. It’s the logic, in short, of ‘Slaterland.’
bursts into a rendition of Singing in the Rain, the cloud looses its wispy
coffers and Bradley lets it be known: his tongue is planted firmly in Work by Slater Bradley is on view at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, until
his cheek. Yet it’s impossible not to read the subtext of the joke. As 22 December. See Listings, page 118, for further information
with past videos, Bradley’s performative use of pop culture is neither
simply a mode of escapism nor a flimsy placeholder for the emotional
lives of his characters and audience. Our triplegangers may be proof
that we are replaceable, but they also offer the promise of change:
there will always be artefacts to uncover, genres to adopt and personae
Works
(In order of appearance)
to become.
A fitting companion piece to The Abandonments, Bradley’s
Recorded Yesterday (2004), single-channel video, silent, 2 min 2 sec
Phantom Release (2003), single-channel video with sound, 2 min 50 sec
latest film, Blackwell’s Island (2007), is unlike any past: no characters,
Both from Doppelganger Trilogy, 2002–4. courtesy the artist and Team Gallery, new York
music or narrative of which to speak, just a sequence of tracking shots of

Skoll, 2007
Roosevelt Island, set against the backdrop of Manhattan, using footage
gold marker on c-print
recorded by the inventor Thomas Edison in 1903 and by Bradley in 2007.
20 x 25 cm (frame 51 x 46 cm)
courtesy the artist and Max Wigram Gallery, London
Here the montage runs the gamut: approximately aligned overlays
produce an eerie, trans-historical synchronicity, while isolated shots
Blackwell’s Island, 1903/2007
(after edison), single-channel video with sound, 11 min 40 sec
and symmetrically flipped composites draw Bradley’s spatio-temporal
courtesy the artist and Team Gallery, new York
mapping into dense, psychically allusive terrain. Formal differences
The Abandonments, 2005–6
aside, this film thematically resonates with the trilogy and other Bradley
single-channel video with sound, 6 min 5 sec
works in its invocation of the distant or near-distant past. As Bradley
courtesy the artist and Team Gallery, new York
explains, much as the individual works of the trilogy were recorded on
period-specific equipment to create a consonance between personal
and material obsolescence, his footage for Blackwell’s Island was shot
77 Artreview
Slater bradley.indd 77 6/11/07 13:11:09
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