Slater Bradley
by Cynthia Henthorn

Time moves arthritically at the bar in Manet’s 1882 rendition of the Folies Bergère. Especially for the serving maid. The ennui she exudes is undeniable, even in textbook illustrations. Her relationship with the viewer is meant to simulate a banal, commercial transaction—though exactly what she’s "selling" is hotly debated among scholars.

According to New York artist and curator Nicole Demerin (ABC No Rio: "No More Nice Girls" 1994, "Abortion a priori" 1992), when viewed face to face, another layer of the painting becomes disturbingly clear. Manet’s barmaid stands about eye-level with the viewer. As Demerin has observed, the counter in the foreground hits the viewer at the waistline—not unlike the standard counter height at fast-food joints today. Manet’s acclaimed mass-culture codes, signifying Modernism’s happy rupture with academic tradition, seem to fade in significance before a picture of the exhausting indignities wage-slaves suffer "just to get by."

"The Bar at the Folies Bergère" presaged the oppressive fallout from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s "scientific management" techniques, launched later in the nineteenth century. Taylor, an American engineer, wedded science and industry by "rationalizing" the factory. His goal was to cut wasted manpower, squandered time and frivolous costs by subdividing tasks in the production process. This meant streamlining, or minimizing, each assembly procedure down to its bare essentials, reducing workers to micro cogs within a greater corporate machine. According to Taylor, such reforms would ultimately maximize profits, allowing corporations to replace expensive (and demanding) industrial "artisans" with unskilled laborers who could be quickly trained—and thus also easily replaced. Corporations, like Ford, loved it, and embraced similar controls with religious zeal. Low-income workers dreaded the enervating monotony, the frenetic pace and their subsequent expendability which "Taylorism" facilitated for the sake of modern progress.

The paradox of mass-production continues to feed (and offend) various imaginations, despite the apathy today’s assembly-line lifestyle tends to breed. Slater Bradley’s video, "Inside a Times Square Burger King Where the Soundtrack is Being Played Backward" is a case in point.

Bradley’s piece is both an installation and cinematic experience. Situated in a windowless studio sits a plain bench, placed several feet from a free-standing screen on which a video, with soundtrack, perpetually replays.

There is no discernable narrative to Bradley’s video—the loop starts abruptly as it ends, similar to the arbitrary switching in "channel surfing." Many details in the piece recall the merry-go-round of trademarks and subliminal messages found in television commercials, including oblique views of a patron lustfully consuming a whopper and "cameo" shots of fast-food paraphernalia.

In the piece, the camera fixes our gaze on a close-up of a loudspeaker imbedded in a drop ceiling. (A clue to pay attention to the audio track.) Partial views of a fast-food clerk’s head move mechanically in and out of the camera’s frame. (Though we’re not shown his hands, he’s obviously assembling an order.) The angle of the clerk’s face is disconcerting—not inviting like a commercial—because it’s shot from below. Equally uncommercial is the way Bradley augments the mechanical movements of the Burger King worker, as well as the customers, queuing up for lunch. Clerks and patrons appear natural, but also robotic. As if to underscore their mindless, mechanical activity, Bradley at times renders the figures in a kinetic "stop-action" mode, a technique which creates a rectangular blur, not unlike the angled shards representing the moving body in Marcel Duchamp’s "Nude Descending" (1912).

Editorial license aside, Bradley’s audio is what makes his film a veritable readymade. Today, readymades and postmodern "Bars at the Folies Bergère" are in regular attendance at art schools and galleries, but what makes Bradley’s film different is how he chanced upon a flaw in Burger King’s automated sound system and subtly capitalized on it. As Bradley sat in the restaurant, his camera rolling, the piped-in music ("scientifically" chosen for facilitating satisfied customers) began to play in reverse. Discernable lyrics suddenly turned into audio garbage. Ironically, the other patrons and workers seemed unaffected by the sudden assault of annoying feedback.