THE ART NEWSPAPER — Disappearing from view by Anthony Haden-Guest

February 1, 2012

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?

“Real good!” Bradley said. “You work on something for so long, it was time to move on.” Bradley started shooting the project, which references Salinger’s Holden Caulfield wandering Fifth Avenue, 12 years ago, but couldn’t make it work. “You shoot stuff. And you don’t like what you get,” he says. Now it’s a reverie on alienation and filled with what he calls “fortuitous touches”. “I’ll say. Early on, we see a dark-suited figure with a ski-slope of white hair in a black limousine. That, I told Bradley, is one of Manhattan’s less conflicted figures, the club owner and art collector, Steven Greenberg.