The front gallery contains a row of nine 12-inch square paintings of images appropriated (and sometimes refashioned) from the covers and sleeves of live and rare studio Joy Division bootlegs. Ephemeral albums of music recorded and distributed on the sly, these mummified pop culture artifacts are holy, traded objects of desire. Bradley emphasizes their precious rarity by resurrecting their iconic cover images on gold and palladium grounds, sending the viewer to otherworldly spaces where fakery meets heartfelt devotion.
On the opposite wall is Carpe Dium (2009), a large photograph of the actor Benjamin Brock, sometimes known as Jon Curtis, impersonating Ian Curtis in Doppelganger (2002), who improvised playing a wigged Ian Curtis video, Faction (2002). Archives, playing a wigged Ian Curtis video, Faction (2002). Archives, playing a wigged Ian Curtis video, Faction (2002). James Dean and Holden Caulfield (more members of this floating troupe of ill-fated young men) he pensively poses on New York’s Fifth Avenue for a more recent Bradley film, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2009).
In Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space (2009), another photo on the right, a beautiful nude woman stands in front of a window speckled with bits of gold leaf, as though cut off from the outside by an icon’s fernals. The adjacent grisaille painting (again on gold leaf) of a tiny black disembodied hand slipping through a porthole was titled Division’s first official, Bradley theorizes that Peter Saville (who designed the covers for most of Joy Division’s albums) appropriated Enchanted Hand, an original photo by Ralph Gibson, after seeing it in an advertisement for a 1978 Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by John Szarkowski.
This typical Bradley progression thus links Brock, the all-purpose floating cipher (who has also appeared as Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain), to momentary female beauty, and then culminates in a second-generation appropriation that retains its emotional punch despite its decreased authenticity. Conjuring up spiritualist notions of ghosts that enter and leave our world through surfaces of multiple reflection, Bradley has renamed his version of Gibson’s image Mirrors and Windows (2009), after Szarkowski’s show.
The back gallery contains Aquaseafoamshame (2009), a four-channel video mounted close to the floor, as if attempting to recreate the seaside indoors. Metaphors for the materialized ineffable, seemingly solidified fragments of foam skitter across Ocean Beach, San Francisco, where Bradley also shot a 2000 series of color photographs of a decomposing California gray whale. On one of the video’s channels, a longhaired child in a white parka roots among the foam, while three other channels feature studies of moving water from different angles and under different lights, from sunset to dusk.
The quick, teeming symbol of both eternity and constant change, is thus contrasted with quickly passing youth, while references to death and loss are found within the video’s medium. Shot with Super 8 Kodachrome film stock, which was discontinued by Kodak in 2005, the footage is redolent of early color movies. Lush and soon-unavailable hues gleam seductively, but the installation’s unusual placement prevents viewers from immersing themselves in the ocean’s majesty.
Finally, a handmade black overcoat (designed by Bradley and Hans Nicholas Mott) sometimes rests on the front gallery floor, like a burial garment without a corpse. The word HATE is written in white on the back, a duplication of the painting on a jacket Curtis often wore in Manchester, to silently communicate the dark passion only let loose when he sang, seized and danced.
During the exhibition, Bradley is staging surreptitious performances (also titled HATE) featuring Brock wearing the garment. On the day before Thanksgiving, for example, Brock was photographed from the back as he faced a relaxed police battalion guarding the preparation of balloons on Central Park West. Bearing an uncanny resemblance that only the viewer can see, this solitary vulnerable figure confronting the forces of law. When the coat is dropped off in a corner of the gallery after such performances, it becomes just one more young man’s coat, casually left behind. Yet the interchangeable identity prices range from $8,000 for the 12 x 12 in. paintings to $30,000 for the video installation (edition of three) and $35,000 each for two 96 x 72 in. paintings.
