"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.
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.
