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.
The peregrinations of a vain young man. Beautiful and angry, he strides up Manhattan, frowning at his reflection in the window of a bookstore; looking aghast at a limo, sliding down the handrail outside St John the Divine. The references are filmic, musical and literary. With his collar up, pulling a cigarette packet from his coat pocket, he’s James Dean. Walking in his black boots along the cracks in New York’s pavements, he’s a young Bob Dylan. In Central Park, where he finds a lumberjack hat, he could be that most iconic of misunderstood adolescents, Holden Caulfield. The sense of shifting personae is accentuated by the fact that Bradley’s protagonist in the film Boulevard of Broken Dreams (all works 2009) is, once again, Benjamin Brock, an actor used by the artist because of their physical resemblance. Here we hear the angst-ridden Everyman recite snippets from Novot with Cocaine, M. Ageyev’s 1934 book about hedonism degenerating into oblivion in revolutionary Russia.