In his second solo show, Slater Bradley investigates the spatial and emotional possiblities of video, concocting moments of filmlike artifice, real-life documentary and 6-o'clock-news intrusiveness with unusual concision and impact. Different as they are, the four projected videos in this show, each about three minutes long, have a consistent sense of finality, specificity, and revelation. 

Most elaborate is "The Laurel Tree (Beach)," which features the actress Chloe Sevigny standing on a beach reciting a brief excerpt from Thomas Mann's 1903 short story "Tonio Kroger." The passage, which swiftly and eloquently contrasts the sacrifice of being an artist with the touching yet irritating presumptions of the dilettante, is written in an unmistakeable 19th century male voice. To hear it commandingly spoken by a woman against a lowering sky drained of color and accompanied by the romantic strains of Georges Delerue's score for Godard's "Contempt" is deeply affecting. It is a declaration of artistic intent that makes one eager to see what Mr. Bradley will do next. 

Slater Bradley shows a real flair for capturing emotional moments in three short videos now at Team Gallery. For example, in Female Gargoyle, a startling real-life view of a suicidal woman perched on the cornice of a building, his camera moves adeptly from dramatic distant show to painful close-ups that reveal the woman's true state of crisis. In JFK Jr., Bradley spies on a teenage mourner in front of the Tribeca loft of the deceased Kennedy, peeking over her shoulder, reading her card and appraising the roses she wishes to leave. When the girl notices his camera, she stares back, hurt and maybe even embarrassed. Both videos are effective as Bradley pull viewers in, then makes them realize how easily curiosity turns into voyeurism. 

"What more pitiable sight is there than life led astray by art?" This condemation of dilettantes, from the story "Tonio Kröger," by Thomas Mann, is the opening line in the best of four video projections, all of which rouch on the theme of amateurs and charlatans. The excerpted text is read by ubiquitous hipster Chloë Sevigny (on a windswept beach), which lends an air of irony to the proceedings (before she was an actress, she was an It Girl, famous just for being herself). But Mann's words resonate, and throughout Bradley sounds the right note of compassion and contempt.

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. 

I had no idea how plain Chloe Sevigny is until I saw her standing alone on a windswept beach in Slater Bradley's mournful DVD projection The Laurel Tree (Beach) (all work 2000.) Her blunt features, wavy blond bob, and slumping shoulders seem the perfect androgynous accessories for her quietly unassuming uniform of white t-shirt, black skirt, and black knee-high boots. Bradley's choice of a casual urban shorthand for his protagonist heightens the surreal nature of Sevigny's deadpan address, even as the murmuring waves crest, foam and evaporate just feet away. But make no mistake, her modish simplicity is a uniform. 

Also clocking in at just under three minutes is the DVD projection titles Female Gargoyle. A tattooed young woman sits on the ledge of a tall building, one leg dangling over the side. She smokes and contemplates suicide, with equal deliberateness. Bradley has edited out all traces of the firemen and concerned passers-by who attempt to talk her down, but added a thin grey band at the top with the words "Amateur Video", confirming what we already suspected. What are we left with? The cornice of her confusion? A pediment of grief, blithely indifferent to architectural ornamentation? Human suffering as ready-made? All of the above, leavened with Bradley's compassion, plus heart; about as rare as stumbling upon a female gargoyle in the first place. 

Slater Bradley's approach to video has been described as "mock verité," a style that melds factuality with artful manipulation. The awkward, caught-on-the-fly appearance of Bradley's video reflect his fascination with the fictional strategies of "documentary" media, such as local news stations' use of amateur video footage and the "crisis structure" of breaking news stories (car chases, the death of a celebrity, a sensational murder). In a world where "truth" is increasingly judged on surface appearance, is it still possible to believe in the authentic – or to even conceive of it?

"I see the girl as a Sisyphian type of hero," Bradley recently observed. "The look back, the pause, the hour of consciousness – this the where the inherent structure of video art interest me. She is condemned to repeat the act, she is looped, she will always return with a flower in hand mourning a god she does not know. Is this tragic, or in this repetition, does she control her fate, is she happy?"

These (faux?) vérité videos have been smartly edited to around three minutes each. They last long enough to draw you in, then fade out before you lose interest. Their success lies in the tension they create between a sense of reality and artifice (something they share with the craftily edited fare of "reality-based" TV).  In "Charlatan," Bradley examines our widespread acceptance of mass-media manipulation with a compelling combination of cynicism and sensitivity. 

By titling his exhibition Charlatan, Bradley has cast an ambivalent shadow over his entire enterprise. "What more pitiable sight is there than life led astray by art?" Mann's narrator asks in a passage open to a variety of interpretations. Who is to be pitied? Artists, for allowing their lives to be consumed by a search for art? Or audiences, manipulated by charlatan artists? In broad daylight, observers of awkward emotions may prefer to remain detached. But in dark rooms, accompanied by passionate soundtracks, feelings become very real. Bradley exploits our nostalgic suseceptibility to familiar high cultural forms, using it to cast a dramatic spell over contemporary distress that might otherwise be embarrassing to witness. Does it matter that his subject's emotions are as real as as an opera singer's feeling are contrived?

With its three separate elements – contemporary events, sixties film score, and turn-of-the-century text – each presented in their original purity, Bradley's installation achieved its haunting juxtaposition of three different slices of finite time. Bradley's continuously occurring narratives are tied to the immediate present, yet they have a never-ending quality of eternity. 

These artists have the talent, perserverence, and burning ambition it takes to succeed. 

Shortly after his parents gave him a video camera one Christmas, (Bradley) went off to UCLA, where studying with California luminaries such as Paul McCarthy and Charlie Ray led him to choose his present profession. 

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a gallerist and independent curator, decided to include Female Gargoyle in a show at Ghent's Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, a museum in a former convent, also known as SMAK, in October. "Of the 60 artists in the show, he's the only one showing in the chapel," says Rohatyn. "He's making art that is completely on the edge." 

Slater Bradley's Ghost – involving rough video surveillance footage of his double – is an oblique tale of processes gone wrong. 

L'image du corps réside au cœur du travail de Carol Bove, Américaine née en 1971 à Genève, découverte outre-Atlantique par Pierre Huber qui présente sa première exposition personnelle. Très pâles, ses peintures sur papier semblent apparaître peu à peu, à mesure que le regard s'aiguise, sur un papier sensible et participent d'une installation qui inclut des étagères, porteuses d'ouvrages défraîchis aux titres significatifs: Magie du corps et autres Singe nu. Les images, très belles, peintes à partir de projections photographiques d'images de magazines, mettent en scène des jeunes filles aux longs cheveux souples, à la mode hippie, et aux traits exagérément doux. Un petit poème, façon clin d'œil, tapé à la machine à écrire, accentue ce sentiment d'un espace intime et confortable, animé de créatures diaphanes et belles, simplement belles, qui semblent ressusciter un âge révolu et un monde perdu. Dans les autres salles, les grandes photos et installations vidéo de Slater Bradley s'attachent aussi à l'image de la femme et à notre perception du réel. Les Castings décomposent le langage, en l'amenant à changer de «figure» selon la personne qui récite une phrase donnée, elle-même ambiguë («I'm not sad, I'm sure I will be»). Enfin, une Home Video, plan fixe qui met en scène un personnage filmant depuis un toit le déploiement d'un large spectre de fumée, sème le trouble chez le spectateur: l'événement reste hors champ, mais on devine, sans pouvoir vérifier cette intuition, qu'il s'agit de l'événement ô combien médiatisé du 11 septembre. Celui-ci trouve ici non pas une explication, mais il est perçu d'une façon différente, avec un certain recul.

On the surface, Slater Bradley's atmospheric, multilayered show is about a morbid, downer goth world of death wishes and apparitions. The ostensible protagonists are the artist – 27 and based in New York – and a spiritual double. They appear as life-size sculptural chess figures, and in an updated version of Victorian "ghost photography" set in a Queens cemetery. 

The tension between the fact and the fiction, the quick and the dead, is most striking in two piece that refer to Joy Division, the 1970's band that achieved cult immortality after its leader, Ian Curtis, hanged himself. A wall painting exactingly reproduces the cover graphics for the band's only live video, but a video of a singer performing a Joy Division song has no connection to the band itself; it was digitally created by Mr. Bradley. Its ghostly image makes a perfect conclusion to a show about the recycled illusions that are the reality of pop culture. 

To catch additional Joy Division vibes, head to the group show "Unknown Pleasures" at Daniel Reich. It includes a painting of Curtis by Amy Gartrell, and extends Mr. Bradley's dark-side aesthetic with a video game prototype titled "I Shot Andy Warhol," designed by Cory Archangel, and intense, lively neoretro work by Paperrad.org, the Boston-based comic book collective.

When it formed in 1976, Joy Division became a touchstone of post-punk, young-adult, (mostly male) angst. Named after the women in the Nazi concentration camps who were set aside for sexual slavery, the band created some of the most dirgelike music since 18th-century Puritan hymns. The death by hanging lead singer Ian Curtis on May 18,1980, only magnified the band's gloomy aura. 

In tandem with the current mania for all things late- 70's and early-80's, there's been a resurgence of interest in Joy Division among musicians and artsy young dudes like Slater Bradley. His currect show takes its title for a video of Joy Division shows at the Apollo Theater in Manchester, England. Among the works here that address the band directly is a wall painting replication the cover design of "Here are the Young Men," as well as a murky video in a rear gallery that apparenctly feature the doomed Crutis at the microphone. 

Most of the show, however, is dominated by another motif: the doppelganger. Bradley includes a series of phootgraphs of a friend who, in a manner that evokes the notion of a ghostly alter ego, looks like the artist. Each image features this person in a different pose: leaning, bereft, against a tree wound with Christmas lights; dosing alone on a train; and stading in a graveyard on a headstone with BRADLEY spelled out in low relief. 

The double and Bradley seem involved in a delicate dance, a chess game so to speak. As in Fassbinder's film Despair, Bradley seems seduced by the mirror, but frightened that his rival might be more potent or ready to replace him; that why Dirk Bogarde must kill his duplicate in Despair. The scratchy video of suicide-victim Ian Curtis betrays the displaced romantic wish fulfillment for Bradley, or the double, to die like Curtis and finish the game. 

In the end, we gain insight into the construction of the bogeymen and phantoms who roam the interior of the young white  male psyche. The current fashion for synth-bands in New York like Spandau Ballet may be tired, but Bradley's combination of Joy Division and his own occult-influenced streak of identity politics makes on interested to see his next move.

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.

Mr. Bradley, 28, has been slowly building a fan club for his casual, curbside snapshots. Purposely shorn of aesthetic concerns, they portray friends, family, lovers, his travels and day-to-day details of life as an artist in a messy modern metropolis. Together, they amount to a kind of Generation X "Remembrance of Things Past."

Assembled by Amada Cruz, Mr. Bradley's exhibition contains an extended photographic essay and a video installation. The essay includes many tender and surprising images, among which are a number of pictures of whales decomposing on the shores of Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Seeing their endless, beached ranks is heartbreaking. 

Many of the photographs contain a kind of primordial vitality. Partly it's the subject matter, with numerous shots of people sleeping, showering and eating, and partly the artist's carefree technique. Mr. Bradley belongs to the point-and-shoot school of photography, but he has a better eye than most. His photographs possess a rare, radiant humanity. 

The closer you at the photographs, the greater your appreciation grows. The same goes for Mr. Bradley's video installation, "Theory and Observation" (2002). It was shot from the back of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with a hand-held camera, the artist zooming in on the faces of choirboys rehearsing on stage. The images are set to the sound of the physicist Stephen Hawking talking about the origins of the universe and some other music. Religion collides with science in this piece, although it's done so gently neither gets hurt. 

Named after the late 18th- century essay by J. and A.L. Aikins that inspired it, Slater Bradley and Banks Violett's exhibition explores our uneasy attraction to images that provoke both dread and sorrow. 

In a suite of six color photographs, Bradley documents the slow decay of whales beached along the Pacific coast, and the people who gather helplessly to watch them. Under the diffuse, golden light of sunset, these giant creatures assume a sublime ugliness. 

Human skulls appear regularly in Violette's exquisitely rendered graphite drawings. They are frequently set alongside American flags, horses, and empty bottle of Jack Daniels, juxtapositions that suggest both the decadence and demise of a mythic America.

While visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris last year, New York artist Slater Bradley chanced upon a children's choir. First he spied on them, then he decided to film them. "I knew it would become something." says Bradley, 28, who grew up in San Francisco and studied art at UCLA. "My work doesn't start out as art. It's about collecting, like cooking. Or chemistry. Or poetry. It's about combining things to make something new and beautiful." His footage is now a short video called Theory and Observation, on view in Bradley's first museum scale show, at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies. The soundtrack layers the children's voices with tunes by the Olympia, Washington based "suitcase muzik" group the Replikants and a recording of the Stephen Hawking talking about the universe. "Science versus religion," explains Bradley. 

"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.

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. 

After Owens and Peyton, the most ravishing works in this show are Yayoi Kusama's walk-in room of colored lights and Slater Bradley's video love song to the cosmos. 

The art world is dying to like the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The opening was a love-fest. Previews in magazines and newspapers essentially implored, "Can't we all just get along and love the biennial?" Nearly all trotted out the cliché "the show everyone loves to hate." Disliking exhibitions is seen by some to be disloyal or obstructionist. This is traceable to the fact that in America today criticism and even civil disagreement are implicitly discouraged; people love ot hate or even demonize those whose views differ from their own. But, criticizing flawed exhibitions isn't hating them. It's a way of treating them with respect. Mostly, the good wishes for this show stem from the fact that everyone wants the Whitney to be great again. This OK Biennial is an excellent step.

The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better–more serious, more pleasureable–than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essay in the show's catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals in their brains. The operative work is "plainly."

Video installation is now a fully mature and independent art form that synthesizes aspects of narrative and documentary film, painting, sculpture, and decoration in real space and time. Craigie Horsfield enchants with a four-walled projection of a misty forest in the Canary Islands. Watching it, you have an experience that would be more transporting only if it included getting chilled and wet. (Also spiritually touristic is Roni Horn's distribution, throughout the museum of sumptuous photographs of a beautiful boy, hieratic birds, and gloomy icebergs, all from Iceland.) Slater Bradley's closeups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids who singing channels divinity.

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.

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.

And for a wry, level-headed image of the 60's-style counterculture as a leftover artifact, there's Slater Bradley's video "The Year of the Doppelganger." Just a few minutes long, it reduces the stadium rock concert – to a single skinny dummer banging out Led Zeppelin riffs as quarterbacks-in-training work out behind him.

VH: Your works often seems based on, or influence by, literature. Is there a particular excerpt or quotation that we could reproduce in this leaflet in connection with Intermission? From Frankenstein, maybe? You indeed treat Michael Jackson like Frankenstein in this work, like a solitary creature in the woods, trying to escape his fate in a frozen landscape: the only way is to climb into a tree. He is trying to find his place and this place is a tree. Didn't you think about Frankenstein?

SB: No, I didn't. 

An energetic jump-cut sequence in the opening frames of a work in Slater Bradley’s exhibition of six new, contemplative videos lingers briefly over headstones at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, among them the one marking the grave of the pioneer French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Perhaps it is coincidence, but several of the videos on display at Team Gallery refer to cinema. In “The Abandonments” (2005-6) a young man dressed as a dandy tap dances in the rain with an umbrella, an imitation of Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” In “Uncharted Settlements II” (2006), shot at a “Star Wars” convention at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, the camera follows someone dressed as a storm trooper mingling with devoted fans, also dressed as their favorite “Star Wars” characters. But the most adventurous cinematic reference is to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the inspiration behind “Dark Night of the Soul” (2005-6). The video tracks a figure in a space suit, above, wandering through the exotic scenery of the American Museum of Natural History after hours, to the poetic sound of a flute. The chic, odd camera angles suggest detachment, making the suited figure seem as if he were visiting some strange, remote world.

 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.

For Intermission, Brock transformed himself into Michael Jackson by means of a surgical mask and climbed a snow-covered tree overlooking a deserted lake. Silent-movie-style intertitles spell out lyrics from Jackson’s song “Childhood,” accompanied by a soundtrack combining Berlioz’s “Dies Irae” with snippets of parents and children talking about nature (given the video’s subject, their mention of vultures inevitably conjures pedophilia). Summoning up both innocence and loss, the video is like a Joseph Cornell box tinged with contemporary bile. In The Abandonments, Brock tap-dances with an umbrella under a digitally rendered thunderstorm to “Singin’ in the Rain,” a cross between Gene Kelly and a renegade from an insane asylum, dressed in top hat, goggles, and tails.

Balladic videos by the medium's vertiginously hip Peter Pan cast him or his collaborator, Benjamin Brock, as Michael Jackson being pathetically boyish in the snow; and old-school British dandy channelling Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain" (soaked by a digitally animated little cloud) on Rossevelt Island; a "2001" astronaut prowling the deserted Museum of Natural History; and one among many "Star Wars" Stormtroopers marching and milling at a desultory fan convention. Stylistic virtuosity (wittily referential cinematography, sonorously layered sound) and tasty allusion (Oscar Wilde here, F. W Murnau there) subilize without imperilling a determination not even to think about growing up.

SLATER BRADLEY ROSE TO PROMINENCE seven years ago as part of Team Gallery’s stable of New York-based twenty-somethings who collectively gave Pop art a dark twenty-first-century makeover. Alongside Banks Violette’s black-metal-inspired minimalism, Cory Arcangel’s vintage electronics and Ryan McGinley’s scenester snaps, Bradley’s referentiality-adroit work felt, at least superficially, at home. There was his video The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000), in which Chloë Sevigny delivers a screed on dilettanism from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903) over the soundtrack of Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), and then The Doppelganger Trilogy (2002–4), Bradley’s suite of constructed ‘lost’ performance footage of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, all played by Benjamin Brock, who equally resembles Bradley. After befriending the artist in the late 1990s, Brock went on to become his perennial onscreen alter ego, dramatising Bradley’s negotiations with the cultural field in a way that felt dead-on to anyone who ever experienced the pull of fandom, or yearned to be someone else. When the trilogy was purchased by the Guggenheim and exhibited in its New York museum in 2005, Bradley became the artworld equivalent of his musical icons.

"Doppelganger Trilogy," his 2004 lo-fi video series, showed his "veritable double," Benjamin Brock, dressed as cultural icon from Bradley's youth like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. "I think the 'Doppelganger' piece was practically begging for YouTube to exist," Bradley says. 

Slater Bradley's show stopper is a funny short video called The Abandonments, which recreates Gene Kelly's performance of Singin' in the Rain — including tap dancing — at an abandoned insane asylum on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan. 

Throughout the piece an animated rain cloud shadow our protagonist like a cartoon thought bubble with its own mind. The darkening force is a comic mirror of the dandy's sunny disposition — feinting right, feinting left, 'pissing down rain' when the Kelly-double emerges from a port-a-potty. 

When he entered the art world years later, he realized that fashion plays a huge part in it. "Everywhere I went, whether to a gallery opening or an art fair, people wanted to know what and who you were wearing. Sometimes it served simply as an ice-breaker, but often I was judged by my appearance." But, there is much more beyond this superficiality for Bradley. Fashion became a part of his bildungsroman, as he went from wearing Helmut Lang to Cloak to Carol Christian Poell. With each step of his development, fashion became more and more personal. 

In Perfect Empathy, the series of still images of female nudes illustrated here, large metallic areas isolate young women’s candid stares and blooming flesh. These gold and silver swathes are impervious, eternal, and otherworldly, and here the contrast between Bradley’s uniform market strokes and the model’s soft bodies makes the women seem even more vulnerable. In addition, Bradley’s use of a faux metal marker to evoke an icon’s precious background is another collision between the ersatz and the spiritual. Eyemazing was delighted to talk to Bradley at his studio in Dumbo, New York about the photographs now on exhibit in the Netherlands.

The peregrinations of a vain young man. Beautiful and angry, he strides up Manhattan, frowning at his reflection in the window of a bookstore; looking aghast at a limo, sliding down the handrail outside St John the Divine. The references are filmic, musical and literary. With his collar up, pulling a cigarette packet from his coat pocket, he’s James Dean. Walking in his black boots along the cracks in New York’s pavements, he’s a young Bob Dylan. In Central Park, where he finds a lumberjack hat, he could be that most iconic of misunderstood adolescents, Holden Caulfield. The sense of shifting personae is accentuated by the fact that Bradley’s protagonist in the film Boulevard of Broken Dreams (all works 2009) is, once again, Benjamin Brock, an actor used by the artist because of their physical resemblance. Here we hear the angst-ridden Everyman recite snippets from Novot with Cocaine, M. Ageyev’s 1934 book about hedonism degenerating into oblivion in revolutionary Russia.

Lost performances hover over the melancholy British band Joy Division hover over “if we were immortal,” a haunting sixth exhibition at Team by Slater Bradley, a specialist in false reincarnation and uncanny coincidence. The band’s lead singer Ian Curtis, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23, has long been a prime inspiration for Bradley’s constant themes of youth, death, and incomplete abandonment, themes that he has also addressed via aspiring actresses, Star Wars devotees, children’s church choirs, butterfly catchers, astronauts, and Michael Jackson (among others).

Eleven years ago, Slater Bradley was introduced to his doppelgänger by Chloë Sevigny. “It was a weird series of events,” says Bradley, who’s known for the haunting, morbid imagery in his work, which includes video, film, painting, and photography. “People would be like, ‘Oh, I saw you and I said hi, but you were acting kind of weird.’” When Bradley finally met the man, a model, he decided to incorporate him into an epic video cycle, casting him first as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, then as Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. Now Bradley has decided to kill his muse. “It’s sort of inferred that he dies by my hands,” he says, “which, if you’re going to do a doppelgänger project for 10 years, you have to do.” These days, his 8mm movie camera is trained on the empty lot under the Manhattan Bridge and across from his apartment, where he’ll be filming dancing ballerinas on Kodak’s discontinued Kodachrome film. “Nothing’s ever too high-concept for me,” Bradley says, “because nobody ever gets it anyway.”

25 JUNE 2009. Evening. I’m in London’s Soho having dinner with Slater Bradley. The Brooklyn-based artist is in town for the opening of an exhibition at the Max Wigram Gallery centred around a new videowork titled Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2009). Like Bradley, a native San Franciscan, the traditional Sunset has been relocated east, to the streets of Manhattan, through which an angst-ridden or perhaps just mentally disturbed youth wanders, occasionally muttering lines from further east still—borrowed from M. Agayev’s Novel with Cocaine (1934). In London, however, we’re simply waiting for burgers. Just before they arrive, Slater’s phone begins to hum—SMS whispers that Michael Jackson has died way back west, in LA. What follows is not a mouthful of beef and relish, but rather a series of feverish attempts to confirm the reports from waiters, fellow diners, and various mobile Internet devices. Because celebrity gossip site TMZ, at that point the only outlet carrying the story, was a source neither of us was prepared to designate reliable. And while I’m not now clear as to why we thought having an anonymous waiter confirm the rumour would have, by some strange alchemy, transformed that rumour into fact, it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. In fact everything did. 

Quizzed about his favorite black-and-white cinematographers, Lachman gave props to noir master John Alton and Fellini’s genius cameraman Otello Martelli. He tries to use color the way they used black-and-white film, he said, with an eye to Ozu’s poetics that transcend realist realism. (Hence the Technicolor pastels of Far from Heaven, 2002, where he equals—or surpasses—the great Douglas Sirk.) Pressed on Shadow, which cinematographers endure in Hollywood, Lachman was gracious. He did allow that there’s only so much a great cameraman can do for a lousy director. While Bradley’s past efforts have been interesting and well received, if at times lackluster, Shadow wouldn’t have had the same impact had it not been shot by an artist of Lachman’s caliber. Near the end of dinner, someone whispered to me that the piece really was about Bradley discovering Lachman; I would agree.

An in depth analysis of Slater Bradley's videos Jfk Jr. (1999) and The Land of Artistic Expression (2002) are featured in Chapter 7, "On the Desire for the Political" of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism.

...Bradley's deflationary aesthetic stretches out the space between cause and effect, and stimulus and response. He thereby splits off loop from feedback, throwing the spectator into a space that does not exist yet as genre. (p.250)

There's a Peter Pan syndrome at play in the art world, with a number of male artists appearing, on the evidence of their work, drawn to the idea of inhabiting an eternal adolescence. Why don’t they want to grow up?

Slater Bradley’s oval shaped, palladium gilt paintings recently on view in NEVER BET AGAINST ME resembles large eggs, giant plectrums or colossal tears (Max Wigram Gallery, June 9–July 9, 2011). However, fixating on one interpretation of this irregular shape is futile. Pregnant meanings hover, as much as the images appear to visually float. Arranged as triptychs, the canvases alternately sink in the gravitational pull of a low centerline like My Racehorse, 2011,  or swim upward as does Lights Out, 2011, located high above the entrance doorway to the gallery. Idiosyncratic placement transforms the room into a spacey equilibrium tank. Bradley’s paintings also collide Gerhard Richter’s overloaded squeegee with the reductive elegance of Peter Saville’s graphics.

Don’t Let Me Disappear, Slater Bradley’s ten-minute movie at Team Gallery on Grand until 18 February, is the fifth and final episode in his decade-long doppelgänger project. This sequence, in which Bradley’s lookalike is the model/actor, Benjamin Brock, examines what he calls “formative influences on my identity, growing up in the 1990s”. The first three were short, staged videos focusing on three of pop music’s most famously doomed figures: Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Michael Jackson. Bradley finally killed off his doppelgänger by
appearing as himself with Brock in a video shown at the Aspen Art Museum last December. How did Brock feel about that?

But this of course is what any memory or memorial is. Bradley states that he was inspired to contact Lachman having seen a 2006 documentary (Final 24: River Phoenix) that traced the final day of Phoenix’s life. In it, Lachman recalls the last day of shooting on Dark Blood: “We did four takes of a soliloquy, the last day we shot with him on Dark Blood. It was in the cave on a set in Los Angeles that we had created after coming back from the desert in Utah... it was lit to feel like it was all lit by candles. That was on Saturday—just hours before he died in front of the Viper Room early Halloween morning. When we saw the dailies on Monday morning, after the last take and we heard ‘cut,’ the camera was still rolling, and I realized that I hadn’t turned the camera off. The lights on the set were dimmed down and for at least fifteen seconds, which seemed like a lifetime, River was standing in front of the camera as a perfect silhouette only lit by the candles. It was the eeriest feeling I’ve ever had with something that I had photographed. People were crying. We knew it was the last time we would ever see River.” What Lachman does—looking for signs and portents in the footage of Phoenix—is exactly what fans do when they pour over videos of their heroes and exactly what Bradley is asking his audience to do when confronted by his artworks.