Don’t Let Me Disappear

Don’t Let Me Disappear - Slater Bradley
  • Slater Bradley
  • Don’t Let Me Disappear
  • 2009 - 2011
  • HD video projection with four-channel sound color, sound, loop 10 minutes 25 seconds
Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Slater Bradley. Entitled Don’t Let Me Disappear, the exhibition will run from January 12th through February 13th, 2012. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a one-person exhibition of new work by New York-based sculptor Ross Knight. 

Don’t Let Me Disappear consists of a single video from which the exhibition takes its name. While he has worked in a variety of media, Bradley is best known for his work in film. This highly literate work, an update on his previously shown Boulevard of Broken Dreams, follows Bradley’s Doppelgänger, model and actor Benjamin Brock, as he wanders alone through New York City. Brock, who distinctly resembles Bradley, has been a consistent subject of the artist’s work over the past decade. While he acts in part as a stand-in for the artist, he does not neccesarily portray him directly, instead representing a variety of figures, a kind of everyman. 

The work strongly alludes to perhaps the best-known wanderer of New York City, The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Like the Doppelgänger, Salinger’s iconically alienated character walks aimlessly through New York’s streets, critical of and emotionally removed from his surroundings. The Doppelgänger perceives an artificiality as he examines the city; his anguished expression as he absorbs the city recalls Holden’s condemnation of its “phonies.” At the end of Bradley’s film, the Doppelgänger finds and puts on a red hunting hat, identical to the one described in the novel, and in doing so transforms into Holden. 

The film depicts the New York City of E.B. White’s famous essay Here is New York. White divides New York into three separate cities: that of the native New Yorker, that of the commuter, and, the most significant of the three, that of the transplant, for whom New York is a final destination. The inhabitant of this third New York, paradoxically, is surrounded by people but perpetually alone. Though he has long resided in New York, Bradley originates from San Francisco, and the film shows his delicate relationship with the City.  It is one of intimacy and distance, awe and terror, adoration and distrust. 

The Doppelgänger observes and touches the built environment and crowds of the city, all without actually engaging any person or thing. Bradley continually draws attention to the act of walking: the video opens with a shot of legs waiting at a crosswalk, then follows the walking feet of its subject, waiting two and half minutes before showing the rest of his person. Here, Bradley refers to to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the flâneur, Baudelaire’s archetypal figure who strolls through the modern city. Benjamin’s flâneur perceptively observes his surroundings but remains wholly uninvolved with them. Department store window displays, like the ones the Doppelgänger desparately examines, are a product of the flâneur’s prevalence in the post-industrial citiy. 

Throughout the video, the Doppelgänger’s disembodied voice mumbles brief passages from little-known Russian author Mark Levi’s mysterious 1934 Novel with Cocaine, which chronicles an adolescent male’s descent into hedonism and drug addiction during Russia’s tumultuous years 1916 through 1919. Like the novel, Don’t Let Me Disappear examines the depravity of a young man’s existance during a period of national strife. 

This is the 36 year-old’s seventh solo show at Team Gallery. He has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Institutional solos also include the Aspen Art Museum, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, The Netherlands, the Contemporary Arts Museum in St. Louis, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson. Bradley’s work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has also been included in group shows at such venues as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, the De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, the Chicago MCA, the Seattle Art Museum, and at the Jeu de Paume and the Palais de Tokyo, both in Paris.
ARTREVIEW FEATURE: ETERNAL ADOLESCENCE by Oliver Basciano
ART IN AMERICA — Don’t Let Me Disappear by Brian Boucher
  • ART IN AMERICA — Don’t Let Me Disappear by Brian Boucher
  • May 1, 2012

  • As Holden Caulfield walks the streets of New York City on his way to a nervous breakdown in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, he finds himself, each time he’s about to step off a curb, beseeching his deceased little brother, “Allie, don’t let me disappear.” In his excellent video Don’t Let Me Disappear (2009–11, 10½ minutes), the sole work in his recent show at Team, Slater Bradley employs his longtime doppelgänger, the dreamy model and actor Benjamin Brock, to represent Caulfield wandering modern-day Midtown Manhattan. Sound and image come together in ways that are funny and ominous to depict a young man on the edge.
ARTREVIEW — Slater Bradley: Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Martin Coomer
  • ARTREVIEW — Slater Bradley: Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Martin Coomer
  • September 7, 2009

  • 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.
THE ART NEWSPAPER — Disappearing from view by Anthony Haden-Guest
  • THE ART NEWSPAPER — Disappearing from view by Anthony Haden-Guest
  • February 1, 2012

  • 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?
GOLDSMITHS PRESS — Tender Ghosts: Fandom and Phantasmagoria in the Work of Slater Bradley by Kate Random Love

 

Slater Bradley Archive

ⓒ Slater B. Bradley 2025

 

Instagram Twitter
Footer

Enquiry