DAZED AND CONFUSED FEATURE — The Importance of Being Slater Bradley by Clay Weiner
November 1, 2003
In Bradley’s edit, the distraught woman is framed to exclude the firemen and police officers who eventually coax her from the precipice. “I wanted the audience to feel the immediacy and to feel a sense of duty to stand there and watch it.”
What makes the piece arresting as an object of art, is not the suspense of the moment or the exclusionary edit but a grey band across the top of the frame that Bradley added in post. It reads: “amateur video” and unlike most of Bradley’s work it successfully de-authorises the piece to enable complex interpretations beyond the autobiographical.
“I plucked that idea from the news coverage of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Central Park when men were caught on video grabbing the asses of scantily-clad women.”
It is the Gargoyle that serves as a lasting metaphor for the artist. The attempted suicide is both a moment of great reckoning with consciousness as well as great humiliation. She is simultaneously vain and full of shame. These dueling themes of greatness and great failure are what captivate in Bradley’s work and are our assurance that he won’t disappear.
