Jeremy Blake; Creator of 'moving paintings' (Independent)
Hyfler/Rosner
Creator of 'moving paintings'
The Independent
08 August 2007
Charles Darwent
Jeremy Blake, artist: born Fort Sill, Oklahoma 1971; died
Rockaway, New York c17 July 2007.
Jeremy Blake was best known for a genre of work he called
"moving paintings". Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago,
he crossed over into video and digital media while studying
at the California Institute of the Arts in 1993. His moving
paintings are actually classical animations, each cel an
abstract artwork which Blake manipulated digitally; one
critic dubbed his method "painting with computers". Works
like Every Hallucination on Sunset Strip are intentionally
beautiful, their organic forms and lush, saturated colours
morphing in synaesthetic time to poetry or music. As the
work's title suggests - it is a play on Ed Ruscha's Every
Building on Sunset Strip - Blake saw himself in the romantic
tradition of painters like James Rosenquist and Barnett
Newman.
Two things separate him from these, however. The first is a
post-modern restlessness that seems to find classical
painting inhibiting and dull. Blake spoke of computers as
"amping" art, a reference to the amplifiers used by rock
guitarists to pump up the decibels. (While his moving images
are masterpieces of their kind, his static canvases are
not.) Works like Bungalow 8 (1998) change quickly and
dramatically, in contrast to the more meditative pace of
fellow film-painters like Marijke van Warmerdam. You sense a
certain fidgetiness in Blake's art, a 21st-century
impatience to be on to the next thing.
This tendency was not helped by his move with his partner,
Theresa Duncan, to Los Angeles in 2003. Raised in
Washington, DC, by hippie parents, Blake took to California
in a way his partner did not. Bungalow 8's title refers to a
poolside cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel famously used for
meetings by Hollywood moguls: bound up in the work - in most
of Blake's Californian work - is a fascination with glamour
and money, with surface. Duncan found Los Angeles less
beguiling.
Blake, however, was seduced by Angelino stardust and became
increasingly preoccupied with the lives of the famous: the
DVD piece Reading Ossie Clark (2003) is a meditation on the
diaries of the Sixties British fashion designer, its images
based on Clark's floral prints. Glitterbest, Blake's last
work, is a portrait of the punk rock band manager Malcolm
McLaren. Both of these were to be shown in a one-man
exhibition, called "Wild Choir", at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art in Washington this autumn.
In 2002, Blake contributed a Dalì-esque dream sequence to
Paul Thomas Anderson's romantic comedy, Punch-Drunk Love; in
the same year, he designed an album cover and accompanying
video for the American singer-songwriter Beck. His work was
twice included in the Whitney Biennial, and he had one-man
shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Madrid's
Reina Sofia Museum.
As his career as an artist took off, though, his partner's
as a screenwriter did not. In 2006, Theresa Duncan's film
script, "Alice Underground", was turned down by Paramount
Pictures. This Duncan blamed, wildly, on a cabal of studio
Scientologists led by the actor Tom Cruise. Always loyal,
Blake took Duncan's side, even when she accused his
ex-girlfriend, the CIA and the Church of Scientology of
orchestrating a smear campaign against them. His own
directing début, a George Pelicanos film called Nick's Trip,
was spiked when Blake accused the girlfriend of its
producer, Bradford Schlei, of being a Scientologist. In
February, Blake and Duncan packed up their house in Venice
Beach and moved back to New York.
On 10 July, Blake returned to their Greenwich Village flat
to find Duncan dead of an overdose of barbiturates. A week
later, he was seen walking into the sea at Rockaway Beach in
New York. A fisherman off the New Jersey coast discovered
his body on 22 July.
Charles Darwent
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:YpGdnbMNfYZQ2CTb...@rcn.net...
> Jeremy Blake
> Creator of 'moving paintings'
> The Independent
> 08 August 2007
These two sounded nuts.
Brigid Nelson
b