Infinite City

These artists have the talent, perserverence, and burning ambition it takes to succeed. 

Shortly after his parents gave him a video camera one Christmas, (Bradley) went off to UCLA, where studying with California luminaries such as Paul McCarthy and Charlie Ray led him to choose his present profession. 

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a gallerist and independent curator, decided to include Female Gargoyle in a show at Ghent's Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, a museum in a former convent, also known as SMAK, in October. "Of the 60 artists in the show, he's the only one showing in the chapel," says Rohatyn. "He's making art that is completely on the edge." 

By titling his exhibition Charlatan, Bradley has cast an ambivalent shadow over his entire enterprise. "What more pitiable sight is there than life led astray by art?" Mann's narrator asks in a passage open to a variety of interpretations. Who is to be pitied? Artists, for allowing their lives to be consumed by a search for art? Or audiences, manipulated by charlatan artists? In broad daylight, observers of awkward emotions may prefer to remain detached. But in dark rooms, accompanied by passionate soundtracks, feelings become very real. Bradley exploits our nostalgic suseceptibility to familiar high cultural forms, using it to cast a dramatic spell over contemporary distress that might otherwise be embarrassing to witness. Does it matter that his subject's emotions are as real as as an opera singer's feeling are contrived?

With its three separate elements – contemporary events, sixties film score, and turn-of-the-century text – each presented in their original purity, Bradley's installation achieved its haunting juxtaposition of three different slices of finite time. Bradley's continuously occurring narratives are tied to the immediate present, yet they have a never-ending quality of eternity. 

Slater Bradley's approach to video has been described as "mock verité," a style that melds factuality with artful manipulation. The awkward, caught-on-the-fly appearance of Bradley's video reflect his fascination with the fictional strategies of "documentary" media, such as local news stations' use of amateur video footage and the "crisis structure" of breaking news stories (car chases, the death of a celebrity, a sensational murder). In a world where "truth" is increasingly judged on surface appearance, is it still possible to believe in the authentic – or to even conceive of it?

"I see the girl as a Sisyphian type of hero," Bradley recently observed. "The look back, the pause, the hour of consciousness – this the where the inherent structure of video art interest me. She is condemned to repeat the act, she is looped, she will always return with a flower in hand mourning a god she does not know. Is this tragic, or in this repetition, does she control her fate, is she happy?"

I had no idea how plain Chloe Sevigny is until I saw her standing alone on a windswept beach in Slater Bradley's mournful DVD projection The Laurel Tree (Beach) (all work 2000.) Her blunt features, wavy blond bob, and slumping shoulders seem the perfect androgynous accessories for her quietly unassuming uniform of white t-shirt, black skirt, and black knee-high boots. Bradley's choice of a casual urban shorthand for his protagonist heightens the surreal nature of Sevigny's deadpan address, even as the murmuring waves crest, foam and evaporate just feet away. But make no mistake, her modish simplicity is a uniform. 

Also clocking in at just under three minutes is the DVD projection titles Female Gargoyle. A tattooed young woman sits on the ledge of a tall building, one leg dangling over the side. She smokes and contemplates suicide, with equal deliberateness. Bradley has edited out all traces of the firemen and concerned passers-by who attempt to talk her down, but added a thin grey band at the top with the words "Amateur Video", confirming what we already suspected. What are we left with? The cornice of her confusion? A pediment of grief, blithely indifferent to architectural ornamentation? Human suffering as ready-made? All of the above, leavened with Bradley's compassion, plus heart; about as rare as stumbling upon a female gargoyle in the first place. 

In his second solo show, Slater Bradley investigates the spatial and emotional possiblities of video, concocting moments of filmlike artifice, real-life documentary and 6-o'clock-news intrusiveness with unusual concision and impact. Different as they are, the four projected videos in this show, each about three minutes long, have a consistent sense of finality, specificity, and revelation. 

Most elaborate is "The Laurel Tree (Beach)," which features the actress Chloe Sevigny standing on a beach reciting a brief excerpt from Thomas Mann's 1903 short story "Tonio Kroger." The passage, which swiftly and eloquently contrasts the sacrifice of being an artist with the touching yet irritating presumptions of the dilettante, is written in an unmistakeable 19th century male voice. To hear it commandingly spoken by a woman against a lowering sky drained of color and accompanied by the romantic strains of Georges Delerue's score for Godard's "Contempt" is deeply affecting. It is a declaration of artistic intent that makes one eager to see what Mr. Bradley will do next. 

Slater Bradley shows a real flair for capturing emotional moments in three short videos now at Team Gallery. For example, in Female Gargoyle, a startling real-life view of a suicidal woman perched on the cornice of a building, his camera moves adeptly from dramatic distant show to painful close-ups that reveal the woman's true state of crisis. In JFK Jr., Bradley spies on a teenage mourner in front of the Tribeca loft of the deceased Kennedy, peeking over her shoulder, reading her card and appraising the roses she wishes to leave. When the girl notices his camera, she stares back, hurt and maybe even embarrassed. Both videos are effective as Bradley pull viewers in, then makes them realize how easily curiosity turns into voyeurism. 

The video documents a Burger King that Bradley discovered in Times Square, where the piped-in music is playing in reverse– a fact to which both customers and employees appear oddly oblivious. But instead of grappling with the issues raised by his own project– the rift between reality and representation, the underlying strangeness of our mass-produced environs– he seems content merely to evoke an adolescent uncanny familiar to anyone who has ever visited a twenty-four hour fast-food joint after taking too many drugs.

In his guise as a self-conscious artiste, Bradley shares a greater affinity with Mann's would-be-poet lieutenant than with his successful author. As does Sevigny– a punkish, twenty-something girl ventriloquizing the persona of a literary Great White Male. From this vantage point, Laurel Tree appears as an ironic indictment of creative elitism, a rallying cry of "Anyone can be an artist." But the fact remains that Bradley is showing his work in a Chelsea gallery and at P.S.1, and Sevigny, no matter how cool and jolie-laide, is still a movie star.