The Blind Date project is about five confrontations of five pairs of artists. During a short period prior to the World Wide Video Festival they react to each other's work and thinking. This will result in five combined presentations.
Is it so obvious why the sea-cliffs inspire both gravity and weightlessness? A title like 'Dead Man's Point' appears on a warning sign which doubly reveals the work's deepest existential questions through a semantic play on the word 'point'. Bradley manages to deftly explore questions which if put rhetorically (what's the point of practicing piano... getting your wisdom teeth pulled... taking communion?) would sound sophomoric. For reasons which at first seem indiscernable, the opposite is true. In fact the piece has a mysterious coherence which only appears enigmatic, for behind the seeming eclecticism is a patient selectiveness for those moments which, questioning the purpose of one thing, question everything. This work is vigilant as it easserts an authentic relation to death as something definite, imminent, but always not-yet. 'Dead Man's Point' is concerned with finding gestures of heroism in this mean-time, and its characters seem like impromptu crUSAders, falling out of their everydayness into some semblance of quest. The still video portraits begin with a barely perceptible instant of motion. The images stutter into being, reminding that we are always already thrown into this body, this world to die without our permission. We move and are moved in spite of ourselves. It is the simultaneous fact of bearing life as a load, and being borne along by forces beyond is also characteristic of the rest of Bradley's oeuvre.
Bradley's blind date is Dutch artist Erik Wesselo.
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Production: W139, World Wide Video Festival
Slater Bradley ° 1976, San Francisco (USA)
Lives and works in Los Angeles (USA)
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