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.
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.