There's a Peter Pan syndrome at play in the art world, with a number of male artists appearing, on the evidence of their work, drawn to the idea of inhabiting an eternal adolescence. Why don’t they want to grow up?

25 JUNE 2009. Evening. I’m in London’s Soho having dinner with Slater Bradley. The Brooklyn-based artist is in town for the opening of an exhibition at the Max Wigram Gallery centred around a new videowork titled Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2009). Like Bradley, a native San Franciscan, the traditional Sunset has been relocated east, to the streets of Manhattan, through which an angst-ridden or perhaps just mentally disturbed youth wanders, occasionally muttering lines from further east still—borrowed from M. Agayev’s Novel with Cocaine (1934). In London, however, we’re simply waiting for burgers. Just before they arrive, Slater’s phone begins to hum—SMS whispers that Michael Jackson has died way back west, in LA. What follows is not a mouthful of beef and relish, but rather a series of feverish attempts to confirm the reports from waiters, fellow diners, and various mobile Internet devices. Because celebrity gossip site TMZ, at that point the only outlet carrying the story, was a source neither of us was prepared to designate reliable. And while I’m not now clear as to why we thought having an anonymous waiter confirm the rumour would have, by some strange alchemy, transformed that rumour into fact, it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. In fact everything did. 

 In the space between oneself and society’s defining icons – a space defined by desire, adulation, and envy – Bradley inserts his real life doppelganger. Bradley casts another as himself, so that he in turn can play another. With this inflation of the double, Bradley transforms the doppelganger into a tripleganger: the interplay between oneself, one’s double, and life’s icons – a triangle of desire and displacement in which intimacy and distance share the same space.

SLATER BRADLEY ROSE TO PROMINENCE seven years ago as part of Team Gallery’s stable of New York-based twenty-somethings who collectively gave Pop art a dark twenty-first-century makeover. Alongside Banks Violette’s black-metal-inspired minimalism, Cory Arcangel’s vintage electronics and Ryan McGinley’s scenester snaps, Bradley’s referentiality-adroit work felt, at least superficially, at home. There was his video The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000), in which Chloë Sevigny delivers a screed on dilettanism from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903) over the soundtrack of Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), and then The Doppelganger Trilogy (2002–4), Bradley’s suite of constructed ‘lost’ performance footage of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, all played by Benjamin Brock, who equally resembles Bradley. After befriending the artist in the late 1990s, Brock went on to become his perennial onscreen alter ego, dramatising Bradley’s negotiations with the cultural field in a way that felt dead-on to anyone who ever experienced the pull of fandom, or yearned to be someone else. When the trilogy was purchased by the Guggenheim and exhibited in its New York museum in 2005, Bradley became the artworld equivalent of his musical icons.

6. In 2003, Slater Bradley created a photographic work titled after Nirvana's single, "I Hate Myself and Want to Die". When Kurt Cobain wrote this nihilistic song, he intentionally played into the stereotypical image imposed on him by the mass media, imbuing the song with an implicit message. Slater Bradley used this title to recreate the imagery associated with Cobain, adding an additional layer of meta-perfomativity. Twenty years later, this work was included in the exhibition Memory Palace in Ruins. For this occasion, the artist made a significant revision, presenting it to the public for the first time with the new title, "I Love Myself and Want to Live".

When it formed in 1976, Joy Division became a touchstone of post-punk, young-adult, (mostly male) angst. Named after the women in the Nazi concentration camps who were set aside for sexual slavery, the band created some of the most dirgelike music since 18th-century Puritan hymns. The death by hanging lead singer Ian Curtis on May 18,1980, only magnified the band's gloomy aura. 

In tandem with the current mania for all things late- 70's and early-80's, there's been a resurgence of interest in Joy Division among musicians and artsy young dudes like Slater Bradley. His currect show takes its title for a video of Joy Division shows at the Apollo Theater in Manchester, England. Among the works here that address the band directly is a wall painting replication the cover design of "Here are the Young Men," as well as a murky video in a rear gallery that apparenctly feature the doomed Crutis at the microphone. 

Most of the show, however, is dominated by another motif: the doppelganger. Bradley includes a series of phootgraphs of a friend who, in a manner that evokes the notion of a ghostly alter ego, looks like the artist. Each image features this person in a different pose: leaning, bereft, against a tree wound with Christmas lights; dosing alone on a train; and stading in a graveyard on a headstone with BRADLEY spelled out in low relief. 

"Doppelganger Trilogy," his 2004 lo-fi video series, showed his "veritable double," Benjamin Brock, dressed as cultural icon from Bradley's youth like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. "I think the 'Doppelganger' piece was practically begging for YouTube to exist," Bradley says. 

Legendary curator Chrissie Iles' fifteen page meditation on the totality of Slater Bradley's Doppelganger project from the catalogue Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman: Look Up and Stay in Touch.

In the early 1920's, towards the end of his life, Claude Monet stood on the Japanese bridge over the ornamental water lily pond in his garden at Giverny and took a photograph of his shadow. His head, wearing a hat, can be seen reflected in the surface of the water, barely visible at the periphery of the black-and-white photograph's bottom edge. The ghostly presence of the artist in Monet's enigmatic self-portrait anticipates Slater Bradley's doppelganger project eighty years later, in which the double operates as a mechanism through which to interrogate the transience and permeability of identity. 

With all the controversy currently swirling around Jackson, the energy felt very dark, uncomfortable, and uncontrollable. And sure enough, that energy would nearly destroy the film and the project. After a processing lab “break,” the first accident of its kind in fifteen years at the only super-8 lab in the city, I was devastated. Six out of nine rolls were partially or completely destroyed, unthinkable and unbelievable. Yet, when I viewed the remains of this accidental, spiritual heartbreak and became joyful. The destruction and subsequent transformation of surface and intent is an exacting metaphor for Jackson’s own transformation and demise. Recorded Yesterday records Jackson’s epic fight to keep dancing through time and space as he hopelessly disintegrates in front of our eyes. The piece awakens our humanity; his struggle becomes ours again in a way that the real Michael Jackson has yet to reassimilate. Jackson has gone from beloved to freak as yesterday forever stalks him, joining Curtis and Cobain as another example of a cultural assassin, assassinated by the very culture that loved him to death.

Eleven years ago, Slater Bradley was introduced to his doppelgänger by Chloë Sevigny. “It was a weird series of events,” says Bradley, who’s known for the haunting, morbid imagery in his work, which includes video, film, painting, and photography. “People would be like, ‘Oh, I saw you and I said hi, but you were acting kind of weird.’” When Bradley finally met the man, a model, he decided to incorporate him into an epic video cycle, casting him first as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, then as Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. Now Bradley has decided to kill his muse. “It’s sort of inferred that he dies by my hands,” he says, “which, if you’re going to do a doppelgänger project for 10 years, you have to do.” These days, his 8mm movie camera is trained on the empty lot under the Manhattan Bridge and across from his apartment, where he’ll be filming dancing ballerinas on Kodak’s discontinued Kodachrome film. “Nothing’s ever too high-concept for me,” Bradley says, “because nobody ever gets it anyway.”

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.

"I SAW NIRVANA THREE TIMES; I loved them," says Slater Bradley. The 29-year-old artist's fourth solo show at Team is a tribute band with a twist: an elegaic fiction in photo and video, marking the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. The show hinges on a faked Nirvana performance (Phantom Release, 2003) starring Bradley's own "doppelgänger," Benjamin Brock, who, dolled up in stringy coif and gray hausfrau cardigan, is also a dead ringer for Cobain. Bradley (also showing in the Whitney Biennial next month) claims inspiration from the Website digitalnirvana.net where obsessive fans trade video clips of the band's performances. He and Brock have a similar stunt before, in 2002, with "live" footage of suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Just a block away, Bradley will also open his first New York curatorial effort, "I, Assassin." (The title refers to artists, curators, collectors, critics, and dealers; "it is simply their targets that vary," he writes in the press release.

The double and Bradley seem involved in a delicate dance, a chess game so to speak. As in Fassbinder's film Despair, Bradley seems seduced by the mirror, but frightened that his rival might be more potent or ready to replace him; that why Dirk Bogarde must kill his duplicate in Despair. The scratchy video of suicide-victim Ian Curtis betrays the displaced romantic wish fulfillment for Bradley, or the double, to die like Curtis and finish the game. 

In the end, we gain insight into the construction of the bogeymen and phantoms who roam the interior of the young white  male psyche. The current fashion for synth-bands in New York like Spandau Ballet may be tired, but Bradley's combination of Joy Division and his own occult-influenced streak of identity politics makes on interested to see his next move.

Slater Bradley's video Phantom Release, 2003, is a sort of dramatization of a Nirvana concert in which Bradley's friend Benjamin Brock, playing Kurt Cobain agonizes his way through the song "Negative Creep." With his stringy platinum hair, Value Village cardigan, and vacant yet soulful gaze, Brock (who also poses in four large-format photos that are on view along with the video) perfectly captures the Cobain mien. A similar impulse toward passing informs the video's style, of lack thereof. Its unfocused zooms and randomly framed shots convincingly imitate the kind of amateur footage that is distributed among fans like celebrity samizdat. In a sense Phantom Release is a companion piece to Bradley's video Factory Archives, 2002, a counterfeit Joy Division bootleg in which the impressively protean Brock plays Ian Curtis. By putting his friend, who in turn is a proxy for the artist himself, into the personae of these much romanticized idols, Bradley enacts the dissolution of identity that is the underlying danger of celebrity worship, and, maybe its ultimate thrill.

On the surface, Slater Bradley's atmospheric, multilayered show is about a morbid, downer goth world of death wishes and apparitions. The ostensible protagonists are the artist – 27 and based in New York – and a spiritual double. They appear as life-size sculptural chess figures, and in an updated version of Victorian "ghost photography" set in a Queens cemetery. 

The tension between the fact and the fiction, the quick and the dead, is most striking in two piece that refer to Joy Division, the 1970's band that achieved cult immortality after its leader, Ian Curtis, hanged himself. A wall painting exactingly reproduces the cover graphics for the band's only live video, but a video of a singer performing a Joy Division song has no connection to the band itself; it was digitally created by Mr. Bradley. Its ghostly image makes a perfect conclusion to a show about the recycled illusions that are the reality of pop culture. 

To catch additional Joy Division vibes, head to the group show "Unknown Pleasures" at Daniel Reich. It includes a painting of Curtis by Amy Gartrell, and extends Mr. Bradley's dark-side aesthetic with a video game prototype titled "I Shot Andy Warhol," designed by Cory Archangel, and intense, lively neoretro work by Paperrad.org, the Boston-based comic book collective.

A video and photographs celebrate the cult of Kurt Cobain, who killed himself ten years ago this April. Bradley, twenty-nine years old and something of a cult hero himself, is a seasoned channeler of adolescent despair. Here he perpetrates what might be called a true hoax: a convincing video of a performance by Nirvana–a "lost tape" with mythic status among Cobain fans–with lip-synching and air guitar by friends of Bradley. Cobain is played by Ben Brock, who also poses in character for the show's photographs. The effect is sensational, cold excitement, haunted by death in a thoroughly lively way. 

Don’t Let Me Disappear, Slater Bradley’s ten-minute movie at Team Gallery on Grand until 18 February, is the fifth and final episode in his decade-long doppelgänger project. This sequence, in which Bradley’s lookalike is the model/actor, Benjamin Brock, examines what he calls “formative influences on my identity, growing up in the 1990s”. The first three were short, staged videos focusing on three of pop music’s most famously doomed figures: Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Michael Jackson. Bradley finally killed off his doppelgänger by
appearing as himself with Brock in a video shown at the Aspen Art Museum last December. How did Brock feel about that?

It's better to burn out than fade away. 

                                                                                                 -Kurt Cobain, 1994

And the rest is rust and stardust.

                                                                                                 -Vladimir Nabokov