ArtSeen
Slater Bradley: The Abandonments
TEAM GALLERY | NOVEMBER 9 – DECEMBER 23, 2006

How many home movies do we need of some wide-eyed wannabe’s pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s Pére Lachaise grave? In The Abandonments, six new, regrettable, fortunately forgettable, video shorts looking like unclaimed footage flooding a tourists’ fast photo developer’s bin, Slater Bradley brings his butter knife to a gunfight.
Less wunderkind than gutless wonder, with past shows clocked at MoMA, the Whitney, Guggenheim, and Palais de Tokyo, at 31, these days, Bradley is nearly a mid-career artist. Time to pony up and deliver, not barely show promise.
“I watched the worst one all the way through. I thought that that one at least might be interesting.” (Overheard at the opening.)
What is it about the young, who always think that their “first time” is the first time that ever was? The title piece “The Abandonments,” Bradley’s facile, fatuous “projection from a video source,” too easily pleased with amateurishly maneuvering one turd-shaped cloud to “Singing in the Rain” across a louring Roosevelt Island sky—ejaculates prematurely, as if the first ever CGI! Flaubert, in 19th century Paris, was kind enough to consider this merely une sottise. A century later, Deleuze plain called it stupid.
In 2001, Slater Bradley photographed Chloe Sevigny, the Velveeta underground’s vacant signifier. Big whoop. Now Bradley knocks off tap dance skits from Kubrick, and Harmony Korine. In “Protector of the Kennel,” a vaguely Victorian forest dandy without smarts or spark enough to ever light my fire, mimics farmhand Paris Hilton’s pop TV hit The Simple Life, accompanied by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Fluff. Kid stuff. Taking low to no risks, this chicken shit’s so equivocal it can’t be evaluated. Success does not mean we didn’t fail because we never tried.
Anemic cinema. Current concerns over cultural turns from language to image disturb me far less than the anemia of that image. (After all, we still have Text Messaging.) Given the glut of weak-kneed geeks tweaking screens, perhaps we should revamp the Stoic philosophers’ famous first question and now ask: Why do these puerile pictures exist, instead of nothing? The whole scope of The Abandonments’ reason to be brings to mind only the postscript to Alias, each episode of that primetime spy vs. spy series, which signs off with a smug blip-quip, “Boink! I made this!”
Laboriousness too is an objection. “For The Dark Night of The Soul” (whoo!) Bradley shoots a moon man blundering around in his bubblegum bonnet after-hours through New York’s Museum of Natural History, lost not so much in zero gravity as he is in that flat affect common to post-partum moms on prescription mood stabilizers. Is there no end to these relentless, unrepentant throwback acne‘n’Boys’ Life motifs? Star Wars; field trips; fan club posters of The Doors?
Poser. Hoser. Although the single salient motive for promoting young artists of such dubious merit to star status is financial speculation on their future output, most are one-trick ponies. This dog can’t even hunt.
Sadly Bradley, launched on his own cumbersome mission, plays out his losing hand while lacking the discernment just to fold his cards and scrap the works.
Contributors
Geoffrey Cruickshank-HagenbuckleGeoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle is an American poet and art critic. He lives in Paris and New York City.
Miyuki TsushimaMiyuki Tsushima is a Japanese artist living in New York City.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest
By Simon WuSEPT 2020 | ArtSeen
The musculature of Jiménezs figures is exaggerated but also flattened, and their genders are ambiguous. Most of them are closely-cropped figure studies, but a portion of them appear to be drawn from memory-scenes or TV broadcasts.

John Elderfield and Terry Winters on Cézanne’s Rock and Quarry Paintings
JUNE 2020 | Art
A conversation between art historian John Elderfield and painter Terry Winters on the occasion of Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Hélio Oiticica: Dance in My Experience
By Bruna ShapiraSEPT 2020 | ArtSeen
New Yorkers who had an opportunity to see the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium at the Whitney Museum in 2017 may have tried on his “Parangolésmultilayered garments and capes made of fabric, plastic, or paper often bearing political slogans.

Renée Cox: Returned
By Jan AvgikosOCT 2019 | ArtSeen
Sometimes it takes years to fully appreciate the importance of a work of art, to evaluate what impact it might induce, and to see it in the context of a legacy that has yet to be realized. So it is with Renée Coxs monumental black and white photo diptych, Origin, created in 1993. Initially only the left half, a towering nude full-length self-portrait entitled Yo Mama, was exhibited.