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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.2 (2001) 61-67



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In Search Of False Time
Slater Bradley/T. J. Wilcox/Isaac Julien

Elisabeth Kley

[Figures]

Slater Bradley, Charlatan, Team, New York, September 7-October 7, 2000; T. J. Wilcox, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, October 14-November 11, 2000; Isaac Julien, Vagabondia, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, October 11, 2000-January 7, 2001.

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At once overwhelmingly real and intensely illusive, film makes the unreal completely convincing and lends the mundane a transcendent glow. Through film, we experience the past as immediately present, and keep the present alive as a past to be experienced again and again. Shuffling past and present, truth and deception, three artists recently employed digitally edited film and video projections to toy with our notions of reality and time.

The Laurel Tree (Beach), a three-minute video projection, dominated Slater Bradley's solo exhibition at Team. Dressed in a white tee-shirt that reads, "power through joy," Chloe Sevigny stands in front of a limitless ocean under a majestic stormy sky, reciting an excerpt from Thomas Mann's 1903 novella, Tonio Kruger. The text describes a dilettante lieutenant reading his amateur poetry, "as deeply felt as it is inept," to a bourgeois audience. Backed by a throbbing selection from Georges Delerue's score for Godard's Contempt, Mann's elegant turn-of-the-century words, accusing the lieutenant of "thinking that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life" infected the entire exhibition with forebodingly cinematic passion, lending the stylish young actress's clean-cut image and girlish voice an almost incongruous transcendence.

This operatic sense of tragedy spilled over into the two other projections shown in the same room, documentary slices of real life filmed on the streets of New York. JFK Jr. features a freckled adolescent girl dressed in a clean white sleeveless shirt, somberly waiting on line to add a single red rose to the pile of flowers in front of the late celebrity's loft. Bradley lets his camera linger on her childishly written note. "Dear Carolyn and John," it says, "even tho I never met you I want you to know that you will always be remembered by me." Our distanced observation of mass obsession is punctured when she suddenly [End Page 61] [Begin Page 63] turns and glares at the camera, shaming us with the reality of her mourning. In Female Gargoyle, a tattooed young woman with a bouffant hairdo dangles her legs from the corner of an East Village roof and weeps, contemplating suicide. Was she planning to give her life for art? And if she had jumped, would Bradley have just kept filming? "Amateur Video" is written above the film, as if for the evening news. Is this a signal that the film is fact, not art?

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 susceptibility 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 an opera singer's feelings 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 impact through the grating juxtaposition of three different slices of finite time. Filling the walls of the dimly lit gallery, these brief documents of limited actions changed so little, they could almost have...

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