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.

VH: Your works often seems based on, or influence by, literature. Is there a particular excerpt or quotation that we could reproduce in this leaflet in connection with Intermission? From Frankenstein, maybe? You indeed treat Michael Jackson like Frankenstein in this work, like a solitary creature in the woods, trying to escape his fate in a frozen landscape: the only way is to climb into a tree. He is trying to find his place and this place is a tree. Didn't you think about Frankenstein?

SB: No, I didn't. 

For Intermission, Brock transformed himself into Michael Jackson by means of a surgical mask and climbed a snow-covered tree overlooking a deserted lake. Silent-movie-style intertitles spell out lyrics from Jackson’s song “Childhood,” accompanied by a soundtrack combining Berlioz’s “Dies Irae” with snippets of parents and children talking about nature (given the video’s subject, their mention of vultures inevitably conjures pedophilia). Summoning up both innocence and loss, the video is like a Joseph Cornell box tinged with contemporary bile. In The Abandonments, Brock tap-dances with an umbrella under a digitally rendered thunderstorm to “Singin’ in the Rain,” a cross between Gene Kelly and a renegade from an insane asylum, dressed in top hat, goggles, and tails.

An energetic jump-cut sequence in the opening frames of a work in Slater Bradley’s exhibition of six new, contemplative videos lingers briefly over headstones at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, among them the one marking the grave of the pioneer French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Perhaps it is coincidence, but several of the videos on display at Team Gallery refer to cinema. In “The Abandonments” (2005-6) a young man dressed as a dandy tap dances in the rain with an umbrella, an imitation of Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” In “Uncharted Settlements II” (2006), shot at a “Star Wars” convention at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, the camera follows someone dressed as a storm trooper mingling with devoted fans, also dressed as their favorite “Star Wars” characters. But the most adventurous cinematic reference is to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the inspiration behind “Dark Night of the Soul” (2005-6). The video tracks a figure in a space suit, above, wandering through the exotic scenery of the American Museum of Natural History after hours, to the poetic sound of a flute. The chic, odd camera angles suggest detachment, making the suited figure seem as if he were visiting some strange, remote world.

Balladic videos by the medium's vertiginously hip Peter Pan cast him or his collaborator, Benjamin Brock, as Michael Jackson being pathetically boyish in the snow; and old-school British dandy channelling Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain" (soaked by a digitally animated little cloud) on Rossevelt Island; a "2001" astronaut prowling the deserted Museum of Natural History; and one among many "Star Wars" Stormtroopers marching and milling at a desultory fan convention. Stylistic virtuosity (wittily referential cinematography, sonorously layered sound) and tasty allusion (Oscar Wilde here, F. W Murnau there) subilize without imperilling a determination not even to think about growing up.

It's better to burn out than fade away. 

                                                                                                 -Kurt Cobain, 1994

And the rest is rust and stardust.

                                                                                                 -Vladimir Nabokov