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.

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".

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. 

With all the controversy currently swirling around Jackson, the energy felt very dark, uncomfortable, and uncontrollable. And sure enough, that energy would nearly destroy the film and the project. After a processing lab “break,” the first accident of its kind in fifteen years at the only super-8 lab in the city, I was devastated. Six out of nine rolls were partially or completely destroyed, unthinkable and unbelievable. Yet, when I viewed the remains of this accidental, spiritual heartbreak and became joyful. The destruction and subsequent transformation of surface and intent is an exacting metaphor for Jackson’s own transformation and demise. Recorded Yesterday records Jackson’s epic fight to keep dancing through time and space as he hopelessly disintegrates in front of our eyes. The piece awakens our humanity; his struggle becomes ours again in a way that the real Michael Jackson has yet to reassimilate. Jackson has gone from beloved to freak as yesterday forever stalks him, joining Curtis and Cobain as another example of a cultural assassin, assassinated by the very culture that loved him to death.

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.

"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.

Slater Bradley's video Phantom Release, 2003, is a sort of dramatization of a Nirvana concert in which Bradley's friend Benjamin Brock, playing Kurt Cobain agonizes his way through the song "Negative Creep." With his stringy platinum hair, Value Village cardigan, and vacant yet soulful gaze, Brock (who also poses in four large-format photos that are on view along with the video) perfectly captures the Cobain mien. A similar impulse toward passing informs the video's style, of lack thereof. Its unfocused zooms and randomly framed shots convincingly imitate the kind of amateur footage that is distributed among fans like celebrity samizdat. In a sense Phantom Release is a companion piece to Bradley's video Factory Archives, 2002, a counterfeit Joy Division bootleg in which the impressively protean Brock plays Ian Curtis. By putting his friend, who in turn is a proxy for the artist himself, into the personae of these much romanticized idols, Bradley enacts the dissolution of identity that is the underlying danger of celebrity worship, and, maybe its ultimate thrill.

A video and photographs celebrate the cult of Kurt Cobain, who killed himself ten years ago this April. Bradley, twenty-nine years old and something of a cult hero himself, is a seasoned channeler of adolescent despair. Here he perpetrates what might be called a true hoax: a convincing video of a performance by Nirvana–a "lost tape" with mythic status among Cobain fans–with lip-synching and air guitar by friends of Bradley. Cobain is played by Ben Brock, who also poses in character for the show's photographs. The effect is sensational, cold excitement, haunted by death in a thoroughly lively way. 

It's better to burn out than fade away. 

                                                                                                 -Kurt Cobain, 1994

And the rest is rust and stardust.

                                                                                                 -Vladimir Nabokov