Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
D.C. Police Seek Suspect in Series of Bank Robberies
Suspect in 9-Year-Old's Murder Found Dead in D.C. Jail
Photo of the Day: November 25, 2009
Ballou HS Rocks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Hollywood, rock and roll and reality TV are all subject to artist Jeremy Blake’s critical eye in Wild Choir: Portraits by Jeremy Blake. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the show opens tomorrow, calls his work “psychological pop portraits” — trippy digital videos depicting the lives of cultural figures. Flashing images, voice overs, music and explosions of color are typical in the three videos on display — 2003’s Reading Ossie Clark, 2005’s Sodium Fox, and the unfinished work Glitterbest.
For Blake, this show was to have been a homecoming — he grew up in the D.C. area before attending the California Institute of the Arts, and subsequently living in Los Angeles and New York. He would have been artist-in-residence at the Corcoran this fall, but Blake died over the summer at age 35. His death garnered a lot of attention, and a fear about this exhibit is that the circumstances surrounding it will overshadow his innovative artwork.
Blake’s “moving paintings” combine representational and abstract imagery, and his attempts to bridge painting, photography, film and computer art. The results are pieces of astounding depth — each work is a narrative with symbolic imagery and layers of meaning. They run on a circular loop, without beginning or end, adding to the disorienting nature of the video.
The diaries of the iconic 1960’s London fashion designer inspired Reading Ossie Clark. The script is composed of his diary fragments read aloud, with references to Oscar Wilde, The Rolling Stones and Twiggy. Reading depicts the excess and hedonism inherent in Clark’s life, and the ‘60s London setting lends itself well to this sort of psychological art.
Glitterbest, about Sex Pistols band manager Malcolm McClaren, is unfinished. Some of the images were taken from Blake’s computer after his death, and the piece is a gorgeous study of an influential figure in music, fashion and art. There are riffs on Monet paintings, quotes from Walt Whitman’s poetry and images of Guy Fawkes and Jack the Ripper. Sodium Fox is about David Berman, a poet/singer/songwriter, who narrates the video himself. Berman and Blake collaborated on the project, which includes a mysterious beautiful woman and the same dreamy quality found in the other two works.
Blake made all his works by hand, pixel by pixel, on his computer, and though there are only three works in Wild Choir, they are culturally significant and exemplify the evolving definition of painting. He derived inspiration from Color Field painters, and throughout his work there’s a clear indication that he was well-versed in art history, between homage and references to various artists and schools.
The audio portions of Sodium Fox and Glitterbest are on headphones, but the sound on Reading Ossie Clark is played aloud in the room. It’s a bit difficult to hear, which is really the only complaint about the show. It’s always great to see the Corcoran showing contemporary art, and Wild Choir is nicely juxtaposed with the exhibit of Annie Leibovitz’s traditional portraits upstairs at the Corcoran.
Wild Choir opens at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St., NW, tomorrow and runs through March 2. See their web site for hours and admission prices.
Image, Jeremy Blake, still from Glitterbest, courtesy of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)