Slater Bradley

Bradley’s practice is an unusual hybrid of grand travelogue, gloomy diary and cultural commentary. Diverse filmic genres – music videos, silent film, 1960s avant-garde cinema, home movies and Hollywood musicals – play a role in the myriad aesthetic references picked up by the artist. Since 1999 Bradley has enlisted the help of Benjamin Brock, a friend who looks very much like him, to create a body of video and photographic works referred to as the “Doppelganger Works”. Originally passing off photographs of his double to create a fiction around his own imaginary autobiography, this process quickly matured into photographs of Brock styled and posed as the artist’s own pop icons. Bradley’s most seminal work to date, the Doppelganger Trilogy (2001 – 04), consists of three videos conjuring the cult music icons Michael Jackson, Ian Curtis, lead singer of British post-punk band Joy Division and Kurt Cobain, lead singer of American “grunge” band Nirvana. In the trilogy Brock plays all these roles and Bradley has certainly benefited from the elasticity of his Doppelganger’s persona transformed by costume and posture. In the trilogy these three figures share their status of “fallen heroes” — two by suicide and one by a protracted descent into disrepute. In Bradley’s videos they are perceived through the distancing lens of desire and memory, each video is fashioned as deteriorated stock or the recording of a faux concert performance, a technique reminiscent of what would have been employed to capture the event when it actually took place. Bradley’s “restagings” reference specific moments in his own life when he first encountered the work of Joy Division, Nirvana and Michael Jackson, and through them, the lure of celebrity and fan worship. His most recent production includes the film Dark Night of the Soul (2006), a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”, in which the Doppelganger wanders in awe through New York’s Museum of Natural History in a space suit, apparently in a return to a world which is a different planet. As always in Bradley’s work, here also music is fundamental to this work where a slow transcription of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” replaces Ligeti and the romantic contributions of two very different Strausses identified with the 1968 film.

Bradley (b. 1975, San Francisco, US) lives and works in New York. He has shown in major exhibitions in the US and internationally including solos at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY, 2005), the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, 2007), UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, 2006) and Kunsthalle Mannheim (Germany, 2006). Previous group shows include, among others, Youth of Today (2006) at Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt a/M); The Gravity of Art (2005) at De Appel Foundation (Amsterdam); Superstars – The Principle of Renown (2005) at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and the 2004 Whitney Biennial (NY).

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