SLATER BRADLEY @TEAMGALLERY
Jan 22, 2012 by
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Image courtesy of Team Gallery, New York
Last week Don’t Let Me Disappear by Slater Bradley, debuted at Team Gallery in Soho, for his seventh solo exhibition with the galley. Bradley has exhibited extensively in venues including The Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim. This is his first solo in New York since 2009 which I also covered here. Don’t Let Me Disappear finds the artist once again using his Doppelganger Benjamin Brock, an actor and model who is a stand-in both for the artist in his video works. Previously Brock has portrayed deceased rock stars, a body in space, a memory or a ghost in the process of haunting, specifically Kurt Cobain of Nirvana fame and Ian Curtis of Joy Division. In Don’t Let Me Disappear the Doppelganger is no longer in the pursuit of what some deem as stardom and now finds himself an embodied fictional character in direct reference to Holden Caulfield the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’sThe Catcher in the Rye. Before reading the press release, I have to admit that I didn’t catch (pun intended) the Salinger reference. It has been eons since I read The Catcher in the Rye and although once a high school favorite, I’ve never revisited the pages filled with longing, teenage angst, desperation and a desire to survive.
Image courtesy of Team Gallery, New York
It is in the reinterpretation of teenage angst (Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, now Salinger’s Caulfield) where Slater Bradley makes an indelible mark. However, Don’t Let Me Disappear feels different not only because of its relationship to fiction vs proposition, but also because the piece is set on the streets of Manhattan. While most of the camera focus is on the longing and desperate face of Benjamin Brock, there is an impeccable portrait of New York City which rather then being in the background, functions as a character. This isn’t necessarily new for New York. It has so much foreign familiarity that often the city plays a role much more then just an environment in film, video, and even literature. The city itself is desperate. It is a kingdom within its narrow boundaries and also a prison containing the possibilities that feel just out of reach. Bradley attempts to see through his Doppelganger. Even in the dramatic facial expressions by Brock, New York itself is the star of Don’t Let Me Disappear, way beyond a theatrical set or place but rather, for most, an idea, a dream, and a fantasy.
Image courtesy of Team Gallery, New York
Footsteps, the proof of movement, gravity, friction, and eventually stillness are used as a technique here to pull the viewer into the frame. The action of walking is something we all share. It is Freudian, an infantile action that with time leads to our journey into adulthood, stripped down in the purest sense, and also to disappointment. In his utilization of close-ups, the act of walking attempts to refer to Walter Benjamin’s conception of flaneur, Flaubert’s paradigm figure who walks through a modern city. In 2012, what is a modern city? Does such a place still exist? A city is a dwelling in a constant state of flux, in theory, it changes quicker than we do but rather than equal modern wouldn’t it hint to rather a place of multiple, ever-evolving histories? However, it is in an urban context where the flaneur was born and in Bradley’s Don’t Let Me Disappear Brock’s protagonist, emulates his angst and desperation in this surrounding filled with commercialism, excess and desirability which is in itself a luxury.
The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the “eternal” picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called “Once upon a time” in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history.
Image courtesy of Team Gallery, New York
As the loop comes to a close, the figure walks through one of the many tunnels in Central Park, he emerges with a hunter’s cap, similar to the Salinger description of a hat that Holden Caulfield donned in Catcher in the Rye. He pulls his jacket close and then in the quick blink of an eye, a moment that startled both myself and Chloe Sevigny who sat next to me in the darkness of the gallery at the opening, disappears.
From The Catcher in the Rye:
[Ackley] took another look at my hat . . . “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.”“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”
Slater Bradley: Don’t Let Me Disappear is on view at Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street location, until February 18th, 2012.
More soon!