Portraits

An in depth analysis of Slater Bradley's videos Jfk Jr. (1999) and The Land of Artistic Expression (2002) are featured in Chapter 7, "On the Desire for the Political" of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism.

...Bradley's deflationary aesthetic stretches out the space between cause and effect, and stimulus and response. He thereby splits off loop from feedback, throwing the spectator into a space that does not exist yet as genre. (p.250)

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. 

These (faux?) vérité videos have been smartly edited to around three minutes each. They last long enough to draw you in, then fade out before you lose interest. Their success lies in the tension they create between a sense of reality and artifice (something they share with the craftily edited fare of "reality-based" TV).  In "Charlatan," Bradley examines our widespread acceptance of mass-media manipulation with a compelling combination of cynicism and sensitivity. 

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?"

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.