Here are the Young Men

Epilogue

While there is not a specific order to view the works in the exhibition, Slater Bradley's fabricated Kurt Cobain portrait can be regarded as the exhibition's discourse's conclusive point. This portrait has the potential to transport the Gen Y audience back to the 1990s because it reminds on of the collective or personal memories linked to the popular culture of that era. Nonetheless, this portrait can be a deceptive indexical reference to reality with its complicated multi-layered performativity. Indicated by its original 2003 title, it creates the illusion of history repeating itself even though the narrative is entirely fictional, which stirs our distant yet intimate cultural memories. Twenty years later, the artist produces a new edition for this exhibition and alters the title, seemingly affirming the cinematic immortality of the rock singer who tragically took their own life at a young age.⁶  This transition from the evidential to the textual indicates that images are not only resurrected, but also granted immortality within fictional histories.  

Notes

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. 

Legendary curator Chrissie Iles' sixteen 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. 

"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.

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.