In the space between oneself and society’s defining icons – a space defined by desire, adulation, and envy – Bradley inserts his real life doppelganger. Bradley casts another as himself, so that he in turn can play another. With this inflation of the double, Bradley transforms the doppelganger into a tripleganger: the interplay between oneself, one’s double, and life’s icons – a triangle of desire and displacement in which intimacy and distance share the same space.
From Inside a Times Square Burger King Where The Soundtrack Is Being Played Backward to Recorded Yesterday, Bradley maintains an equivocal presence in his videos. Even when he’s physically there, filming himself with a hidden spy camera, he doesn’t show himself at all. In Trompe le Monde, the double device allows Bradley to pretend to search for a nonexistent self. He can seem to reveal his intimate life, yet still hold on to his secrets. By replacing himself with a double, Bradley seems to be trying to disappear, experimenting with what it would be like if his consciousness no longer existed and his body just kept on going. In the Curtis, Cobain and Jackson videos, false individuality dissolves into false celebrity. Impersonating icons into which numberless fan identities have been submerged, Brock becomes a universal stand-in, a Doppelgänger for the world.
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.
