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.