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. 

Legendary curator Chrissie Iles' fifteen 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. 

But this of course is what any memory or memorial is. Bradley states that he was inspired to contact Lachman having seen a 2006 documentary (Final 24: River Phoenix) that traced the final day of Phoenix’s life. In it, Lachman recalls the last day of shooting on Dark Blood: “We did four takes of a soliloquy, the last day we shot with him on Dark Blood. It was in the cave on a set in Los Angeles that we had created after coming back from the desert in Utah... it was lit to feel like it was all lit by candles. That was on Saturday—just hours before he died in front of the Viper Room early Halloween morning. When we saw the dailies on Monday morning, after the last take and we heard ‘cut,’ the camera was still rolling, and I realized that I hadn’t turned the camera off. The lights on the set were dimmed down and for at least fifteen seconds, which seemed like a lifetime, River was standing in front of the camera as a perfect silhouette only lit by the candles. It was the eeriest feeling I’ve ever had with something that I had photographed. People were crying. We knew it was the last time we would ever see River.” What Lachman does—looking for signs and portents in the footage of Phoenix—is exactly what fans do when they pour over videos of their heroes and exactly what Bradley is asking his audience to do when confronted by his artworks.