ARTFORUM — Slater Bradley by Margaret Sundell

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.