An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which excite agreeable Sensations (1773): Slater Bradley and Banks Violette

Decomposing California Gray Whale, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, #3 - Slater Bradley
Decomposing California Gray Whale, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, #1 - Slater Bradley
Decomposing California Gray Whale, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, #2 - Slater Bradley
Out of Sync With the World - Slater Bradley
Team Gallery will present a two person exhibition entitled An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which excite agreeable Sensations (1773). Made up of recent videos, photographs, sculptures and graphite drawings by Slater Bradley and Banks Violette, the show will run from the 6th of September through the 11th of October 2003. Team is located at 527 West 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, on the ground floor.

The exhibition’s title comes from an essay by J. and A.L. Aikins, first published in 1773, which attempted to comprehend the pleasure derived from objects of terror. Philosopher Noel Carroll, who analyzes works as disparate as those of Shakespeare, Bram Stoker, Goya and George Romero, refers to these cultural properties as “art horror.” Why anyone would want to indulge in art forms whose purpose is clearly to disturb, is the enigma under investigation. 

Carroll’s contemporary project defines horror as the gap that separates an ideal and moral outcome from its probability. In his view, as an author decreases the likelihood of a “correct” social resolution so does the level of distress increase in the spectator.Carroll’s formulation, put forth in his The Philosophy of Horror, takes into account the spectator’s demands on art and how those expectations, in turn, reveal the moral stance of the viewer rather than that of the author. What we expect from art and how artists both meet, and fail to meet, those expectations creates a tension in our readership which some label negatively but which others cite as a cause for celebration.

Our attraction to the problematic — the way that the repulsive can glitter — is part of the dread-pleasure that operates in the works of both Slater Bradley and Banks Violette. The themes that have been central to the work of both artists, and which have been mined throughout their appearances at Team, are suicide, ritual murder and the allure of youth culture. Bradley uneasily mates a youthful magazine-friendly aesthetic with an almost obsessive interest in suicide, while Violette looks at the image mechanics that decorate the will to murder.

Terror and melancholy, the aspects of Shakespeare’s work which attracted the Aikins’ in 1773, are more than clearly evidenced in Bradley’s beautiful images of decomposing whales and in Violette’s dissections of Americana, Alcoholism and Annihilation — in Bradley’s anxiety-provoking dissections of “acting” and in Violette’s glamorous, colorless renderings of landscapes and logos alike.
TIME OUT NEW YORK — Slater Bradley and Banks Violette by Jane Harris
  • TIME OUT NEW YORK — Slater Bradley and Banks Violette by Jane Harris
  • October 2, 2003

  • Named after the late 18th- century essay by J. and A.L. Aikins that inspired it, Slater Bradley and Banks Violett's exhibition explores our uneasy attraction to images that provoke both dread and sorrow. 

    In a suite of six color photographs, Bradley documents the slow decay of whales beached along the Pacific coast, and the people who gather helplessly to watch them. Under the diffuse, golden light of sunset, these giant creatures assume a sublime ugliness. 

    Human skulls appear regularly in Violette's exquisitely rendered graphite drawings. They are frequently set alongside American flags, horses, and empty bottle of Jack Daniels, juxtapositions that suggest both the decadence and demise of a mythic America.
PAJ – A JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE AND ART — THE DISAPPEARING SUBJECT Looking for Slater Bradley by Elisabeth Kley
  • PAJ – A JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE AND ART — THE DISAPPEARING SUBJECT Looking for Slater Bradley by Elisabeth Kley
  • January 1, 2005

  • From Inside a Times Square Burger King Where The Soundtrack Is Being Played Backward to Recorded Yesterday, Bradley maintains an equivocal presence in his videos. Even when he’s physically there, filming himself with a hidden spy camera, he doesn’t show himself at all. In Trompe le Monde, the double device allows Bradley to pretend to search for a nonexistent self. He can seem to reveal his intimate life, yet still hold on to his secrets. By replacing himself with a double, Bradley seems to be trying to disappear, experimenting with what it would be like if his consciousness no longer existed and his body just kept on going. In the Curtis, Cobain and Jackson videos, false individuality dissolves into false celebrity. Impersonating icons into which numberless fan identities have been submerged, Brock becomes a universal stand-in, a Doppelgänger for the world.

 

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