A Day Late and A Dollar Short Part VII:
Reading Ossie Clark and conclusion


Reading Ossie Clark (2003) is "a study of “Swinging London’s” preeminent fashion designer of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as seen through the pages of his wild and colorful stream-of-consciousness diaries," as the Corcoran literature explained. The image is via Kinz, Tillou + Feigen.

I recall from my absorption of the Duncan-Blake effect during the past summer how comparison was made between David Hockney's portrait of married designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, and the Yo! Venice images of Duncan and Blake that got plastered all over web sites (this one included). Even I, the philistine, thought the Venice images resembled a Hockney painting. That California light and the wide beach spaces.

Mr. and Mrs. Clark Percy (1970), David Hockney, via artchive.




[Below] Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, Venice Beach, by Bret of Yo! Venice, May 2005. Looking David Hockney by way of Edward Hopper...



[Below] "The Hockney That Never Was." A digital painting from Idyllopus Press, J.M Kearns, presiding and posted this image, August 23, 2007. Based on an image from the Yo! Venice series.


So, my notes for Reading Ossie Clark don't amount to much. Clarissa Darymple's narration was compelling, the accent something an actor might need to invent.

At one point the words appear, "Yak, yak, yak...lies, lies, lies," and I chuckled to myself, thinking of, well, the rushing torrents of language that have poured forth about this artist and his fate...and to which I've contributed. The wonderful visuals were based in designs and elements within Clark's oeuvre. The loop runs nine minutes but seemed longer--maybe because I was experiencing "moving painting" fatigue.

I profess to a profound lack of knowledge about the history of contemporary fashion and Ossie Clark and Swinging London. Blake's fascination didn't spark me, though many of the images he generated under its inspiration are quite splendid.


Image via creative time.org

I left the gallery of Wild Choir with a sense that I understood better the critical praise bestowed upon Blake's work but also aware of the limited nature of new media and how we here in the present can't predict how these multimedia pieces will make their ultimate contribution to art history. I also wondered about longevity. Digital media may last how long? How does one preserve it? Of course, all art is rotting and deteriorating, no matter how careful the efforts at conservation. Artists seize upon new technologies and methods because they want to see what they can make them do; theirs is not to know how to make it last.

Blake's pieces exists only when projected. His drawings and paintings remain in three-dimensional space. In the end, those may survive the videos.

Earlier, I'd viewed rooms full of Edward Hopper and J.M.W. Turner. Hopper, cool, distant, refined, simple yet complicated, a Hemingway of painting whom De Chirico referred to as the U.S.'s only Surrealist. De Chirico fell out of his avant-garde and struggled to reconnect with representational realism. Hopper didn't fall out of anything; he built his own niche.

Hopper's own countenance, in the show's photographs and portrayed in his paintings, seems a blend of Dwight Eisenhower and Fred Thompson. His is a big solid U.S. face; the son of a dry goods salesman father and a housewife who liked to draw.

Hopper was influenced by cinema and theater, and he in turn influenced cinema. The 15-minute film that went with the exhibit, narrated by Steve Martin, pointed out several examples--some outright, others more subtle--like Hitchcock's Gothic home of the Bates family in Psycho.

Perhaps my favorite painting of his is New York Movie (1939).

He conveys the hushed darkness of a film house but that he's interested in the usherette, lost in her own reverie, having seen this picture in bits and parts maybe a dozen times. I'm gazing at her from my seat, noticing how the the lamplight shines in her strawberry blond hair.
Image via artchive.com.


Another picture that I don't recall seeing before was one made quite late in Hopper's career and the portrayal of silent spareness is disturbing--and brings to mind DeChirico's empty streetscapes. Except this is a motel room. I remarked to Amie that it looks like somebody from a foreign country trying to paint like Hopper and making it even more weird. Or a still from a n early David Lynch film. This image is via the Yale University Gallery of Art.




J.M.W Turner astonished me. I've certainly seen examples of his work in various museums throughout my assorted travels, but never gathered in one place, and how given the benefit of walking along the line of his artistic development one sees an artist who made the mold then broke the mold.

His massive paintings of horrendous sea battles and ancient temples and pagan rituals remind me of meticulous matte paintings, except Turner's pictures present the drama instead of providing background. Then he ended up becoming what amounted to being the first Impressionist. Trying to gauge Turner's power from muddy images online or even good ones in books is like describing the quality of sunshine in a summer rain. You just have to see this yourself.



The Perfect Storm ca.1810, via Wikipedia, The Wreck of the Minotaur.

The vivid, hyper-real landscapes and tableaux give way to swirling colors and objects in name only.

The so-called Sunrise With Seamonsters of 1845, was given that name by curators
who first exhibited the piece in 1906 (!) This is probably two flounder in the surf, but, the perspective is so unusual one perhaps can forgive gallerists who'd perhaps never been to the sea. Imag via artchives.


In the biographies of the two artists, living centuries apart, there's interesting differences and connections. Hopper, now considered as much part of U.S. culture as Coke, didn't sell his first painting until 1913 when he was 31, and his second, at 41. After that, things began looking up; he married artist Jo Nevison, she 40, he 42, and they remained together until his death in 1964 at the age of 87. Jo followed him nine months later.

Hopper was part of no school, no movement, and worked in figurative or narrative idiom while the rest of the world went its merry Abstract Expressionist/Pop/Op way. Maybe in his own manner, Hopper was putting back together the shattered pieces before they were already all the way broken. But once anything is busted, the pieces never constitute what existed prior to the destruction.

Hopper, for all this ability to convey a sense of quiet desolation--he stopped putting people in his street scenes because they gave them an energy he didn't want--couldn't paint reflections in glass or water. His Nighthawks depicts the denizens of an all-night diner in the precise manner worthy of a film or stage director. We almost don't see the huge window through which we're observing the hunched diners. The only give-away that it is there is the pale beam of the curve by the sidewalk. But as the critic Clement Greenberg described Hopper's lack of virtuoso painting flourishes, "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist." Image via artchive.com.


J.M.W Turner could paint reflections, all kinds of them, in different perspectives, and in watercolor. Turner enjoyed success and praise from the outset of his art life. As he matured, and his world became more dominated by the Industrial Revolution, the fanciful landscapes and historical tableaux may have seemed to Turner as ostentatious. Romantic realism couldn't convey what he was sensing in the wind. The artist began expressing his experience of a world that itself was waning and receding while mysterious machines and violent war clashed in flickering lights, mists and steam, and myth and old ways faded.

"In his later life he began sending to the Academy exhibitions unfinished canvases which one contemporary described as being 'without form and void, like chaos before the creation'," says the Tate Gallery's online biography. "He would then complete them in the exhibition room on Varnishing Days, virtuoso performances which soon became legendary."

Turner's housewife mother died insane when he was at the outset of his career and his barber and wigmaker father lived with him for more than 30 years and even served as his studio assistant, until his death. Turner thereafter experienced bouts of depression and his behavior became more erratic. He never married, but sired two children.

He left behind a fortune that he intended to be held in trust for "decayed artists" and his entire collection bequeathed to the English nation for the purpose of keeping his work together in one place, though that didn't happen. The current "Turner Prize," awarded to artists of distinction, was founded in 1984 but has no connection to the artist, except for the use of his name.

Now, upstairs at the Corcoran, away from Jeremy Blake's noisy introspection, is a big Annie Leibovitz exhibition. Unlike paintings, in many cases, photographs look just fine in books. There's no glass to negotiate.

I didn't expect much out of this show and was overwhelmed. and this was far more affecting than either of us had reason to expect, as her images of people whose fame she's helped to propagate were intermixed with her personal shots and of her relationship with writer Susan Sontag, who dies during the course of the exhibit, as does Leibovitz's father. These are tough pictures. Sontag is depicted in death laid out like an effigy upon an ancient sarcophagus. Her father, compared to earlier images of him, is a husk wasted by disease and age.

Near these images of her personal losses were the violent deaths from the siege of Sarajevo and massacres in Rwanda. I'd seen these in magazines and didn't know, or forgotten, that Leibovitz on these journeys eschewed all studio trappings and took herself and a camera. Their is world of hurt out there, and nations bathed in the blood of innocents, and at once removed from the rarefied spaces of her New York City studios--and yet not that distant at all.

Here, too, is Leibovitz at--I think age 52--her belly swollen with twins. The young children are shown growing up and the images get a little Sallie Mann-esque. Amie says to me, "What are you going to do? The most precious things to you in life are right there in front of you, and they will be this way for that moment, and never again the same way. So you're an artist and you want to record that."

In front of Leibovitz's portrait of Bill Clinton, Amie said aloud, "This makes me sad and wistful." Then then a woman standing next to her said,"Me, too." He was so young and vital in 1998, his hair not yet gone white, and he looked like The Natural-era Robert Redford playing Bill Clinton, and I said so, and the ladies agreed. His hands are huge--mitts-- and a thumb that looks the length of most people's index fingers. Ahead of him was a political tempest and heart surgery.

Chuck Close told Amie a little while ago that he met Clinton and that after being in Clinton's presence for a few minutes, even he wanted to go to bed with him, so magnetic is his personality.

Then around the corner from this was a big color portrait of Bush's first term team, with Rumsfeld and the rest, and they looked like the cast for some Fox Network night-time soap opera about the rich and venal. Perhaps there is something in that these portraits of recent U.S. leaders in their natural habitats they seem more like the actors Leibovitz is famous for dressing up and putting in contrived tableaux.

In the end, I cared less about her celebrities, and more about all our humanity.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short Part V:
Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake


From Jeremy Blake's Sodium Fox (2005), showing some of its cast of recurring images; a chaise lounge lolling stripper; Abraham Lincoln; a Pabst Blue Ribbon-dousing skeleton; a floating eyeball, Star Wars fighters blasting Los Angeles hillside houses, and an owl, among others, via Kinz, Tillou + Feigen.

"It feels like channel-surfing through your dreams." -- Chris Richards, The Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2007.

Washington Post slide show of Blake's life and work.

From critic Deven Golden, December 2004, emphasis mine:

"Blake has referred to this kind of work as "moving paintings", and we are entering a period when a confluence of readily available consumer technologies will enable this vision to fully manifest. DVD players are everywhere. Plasma screen flat monitors, if not ubiquitous, are at least becoming common. Displaying Reading Ossie Clark as one would a painting in a home setting - over the couch, in the hallway, at the top of the stairs - is now within the realm of possibilities. Watching a video this way ceases to be a scheduled event. Instead, one has the opportunity, the luxury, of absorbing the artwork over time, in different moods, in a variety of circumstances, even in that odd moment out of the corner of your eye. You can enter the work at any point and leave at any point. In short, Blake's "Reading Ossie Clark" has little to do with the linear nature of film, and everything to do with the circular reading of painting."

Moving paintings in the dark...

Three bright and active screens, two rigged for ear phones and the other with the sound going. In other situations, tromping through the great halls of the world's museums and contemporary galleries, exhibits like this most often afford me a place to sit and ease my throbbing feet from unforgiving concrete floors.

This is different.

"Blake’s cinematic video portraits are the final development in a career that consistently challenged distinctions between painting, photography, and computer and video art," states the Corcoran's description. And that much is true. One could, as I did, sit and watch them straight through or, as I pointed out in the previous section, graze and on occasion dip into their experience while conducting a conversation.

Glitterbest



Still from Jeremy Blake's uncompleted Glitterbest. That 's Sid Vicious
at right "mean mugging in a Naval uniform." Via Kunstschau.

I started with Glitterbest, the "work-in-progress" that the Corcoran was careful to point out wasn't anywhere near finished and that some of the images were retrieved per instruction from Blake's computer. The portions in their varying stages "demonstrate how Blake constructed his 'moving paintings' layer upon layer, frame by frame..."

I come to these pieces with my linear-cinema biases; I don't mind how crazy films get, long as they try to resolve the weirdness according to the laws of the film's own universe. Blake's work isn't cinema, but video on a loop, and I must meet the work half-way on terms with which I'm unfamiliar. Like literature, or good music, these pieces hold meanings, repeated imagery and sounds that could reward repeated viewings. Sitting in a museum setting, though, they can also blur into one amorphous cloud of color and light and sound.

Punk impresario Malcolm McLaren recites a stream-of-conscious history of his glory days in an engaging Cockney voice. I enjoyed seeing the punks posed in martial array as though setting out to conquer culture; a sagging phallic Maltese-cross marked dirigible with its roustabout crew transforming either into a lipstick or an animal's penis; masted ships at furious surreal battle, undulating colors and patterns. The work was assembled by David Sigal.

My note-taking was limited, in the dark, trying to watch the images at the same time, thus McLaren's pithy and absurd statements are, at moments, rendered even less sensible. Sorry.

At, one supposes, the beginning: "Once upon a time, in world increasingly bereft of ideas....[the punks] set off in a rented man-of-war...an [illegible] epoch ended...to a [punker?] this is a "X" on a map...Blitzkrieg...Atom Ant...unruly hair...William Blake and Jack the Ripper rolled over Beethoven...Lord Nelson discovered that America was a cracked pattern in a linoleum Times Square floor...I ain't your father, Punk, but I produced you...Beau Brummel with a boombox...The unmoved mover as opposed to the unmoved manager...History is for pissing on...Peyote Pete on a platypus."

Well, this is an example of 'You had to bet there.'

It isn't a piece of cultural history with which I have great familiarity. But Blake was a student of the period, enjoyed the music and so he sought to create a view into the time and place with what one writer termed a "nostalgic" sensibility.

Malcolm McLaren (left), Jeremy Blake (gesturing, right) from
Wednesday, November 15, 2006, post on The Wit of the Staircase.

On September 9, 2007, The Independent of London ran Charles Darwent's piece about the late Blake and Duncan, and caught up to McLaren, who had some rather curious comments, and he was there to watch the couple interact. The piece dropped some tantalizing first-hand observation into a spinning-into-butter situation, while presenting a posthumous he said-she said-he said.

"Sitting in his Manhattan office, Malcolm McLaren winces and says, "I'm only talking to you about this because I don't understand what happened." Then the man who invented punk goes uncustomarily quiet.

Actually, the silence is a relief. For an hour, McLaren has talked unstoppably about Blake and Duncan's double suicide, his voice rising in exasperation. "I met Theresa first, in the late 1990s," he says. " She was just about to venture off to Hollywood and her agent wanted me to meet her. I knew nothing about her, but I found her vivacious, full of herself. Incredibly self-confident, but also innocent about the world she was getting herself into. There was a touch of hysteria to her. If you were ever even faintly critical, she would explode. So I didn't go there."

At the time, Duncan had just finished making The History of Glamour with Kilimnik. "The title told you everything you needed to know about Theresa and Jeremy," McLaren says. "Glamour was what they were about, and Hollywood was where they were going to find it. She had an idea for a movie, a fashion-driven, coming-of-age story called Alice Underground. The unexpected thing about Theresa, though, was her mind. For all her youth-culture thing, when she spoke she had real curiosity. She was intellectually driven."

By contrast, according to McLaren, Blake was much the less confident of the two. "I liked him a lot," McLaren says, "but he always struck me as a troubled person. Everything that's been written about them since it happened has suggested that Theresa was the crazy one. But actually I don't think she was all that crazy. I think it was the other way around."

...Malcolm McLaren has a different take on the story. "It was Jeremy who was the real troubled soul in that relationship," he says. "He was much darker than Theresa. His father died of Aids, he didn't see much of his mother. And he was screwed up by not knowing where he came from culturally. His mother was Jewish, but he had his father's really Waspy surname, Blake. I think that's partly why he took to me, that I'm a Jew called McLaren. He was a damaged person, and he relied on Theresa utterly."

The golden-couple image was flawed in other ways, too.' "If we're being honest," says McLaren, "Jeremy was gay. I don't think his relationship with Theresa was all that sexual. She was a mother to him. When I saw them in Hollywood, he was always terribly concerned that people would think he was a fag – he walked around with this hip flask of whisky in his pocket and he was constantly swigging from it, like some kind of cowboy."

Blake was also obsessed by the rock culture of his parents' generation, another thing that drew him to McLaren. At the time of his death, he was working on Glitterbest, a cinematic portrait of the Sex Pistols' Svengali, due to be shown at Washington's Corcoran Gallery this October. A taste for the early 1970s meant a taste for things British: Blake had already done a DVD portrait of the fashion designer Ossie Clark, composed of abstract images taken from Clark's floral prints. Interviewed by the supercool art magazine, Tokion, about the work's pink-and-blue prettiness, Blake was emphatic that his admiration for Clark was strictly artistic. "This guy was a gay jet-setter," he said. "I'm a straight guy from the suburbs of DC."

A Day Late and A Dollar Short
Part I
Spooky Action

Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers, Salvador Dalí

This is "Science Friday" on NPR's Talk of the Nation and Ira Flatow is talking to author Alan Weisman whose "The World Without Us" analyzes the ultimate deterioration of human-made objects, from the Panama Canal to the New York City subway system and the Pyramids, if maintenance stopped. And what is the expected of the continuing existence of such detritus as plastic

The following guest is the cosmologist--what a job title!--Paul Davies, discussing a subject dear to my hear, that is the multiverse theory of physics, or, cosmology/metaphysics. His assessment in his The Cosmic Jackpot is that the Universe has engineered its own self-awareness. Mind an Life are fundamental particles in Creation. Life and and the Universe that brought it into being are part of a explanatory statement. The Universe is a great cosmic computer, and thought its software -- didn't we get this with The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

He also states with great emphasis that you can't travel back in time or send information through time. Humph. Near as I know, that's all still a theory. See Paul J. Nahin's Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, Second Edition.

Davies says mind and Universe will at some point in the future merge. What we do today, what human beings choose to measure, what gets measured today effects what happens in the distant past -- sounds weird but weird things happen in quantum physics.

Reality is an amalgam of histories of the past, thus, what we study today, affects the past. Mind/Universe is in a constant process self-revelation--computing itself; refining and polishing. Davies isn't partial to the idea that life was imprinted from outside. The Universe generated Mind. It's always thinking about...itself. What happens when Deep Thought reaches a conclusion?

Spooky Action

All this taken into consideration, I've now experienced Theresa Duncan's History of Glamour, and I'll be writing here about that piece and the current Corocran exhibition of Jeremy Blake's Wild Choir.

Those of the billion-eyed audience who've been following the general train of thought at the Blue Raccoon may have noticed an interest in the suicide deaths of writer/bloggist Theresa Duncan and new media artist Jeremy Blake. Or rather, the reaction to their deaths in the blogosphere.

Now that I've viewed THoG within close proximity to Blake's works, I'm girding to give my views on both. Should anyone care.

There's been a slight uptick on the Duncan-Blake interest meter due to the Corcoran exhibit and one also presented in memoriam at the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery that represented him. The negativity expressed by some trollers also remains: at Gothamist, the Nov. 16 announcement of the Blake show drew two unfeeling remarks, one from Reality Czech: "How to become a famous artist: kill yourself," and ihatellbrokers offered, "not missing you two twits at all! boo hoo hoo!"

But, and here is where the dedicated "Duncanologists" will point and laugh at me; I didn't realize until a few days ago that "The Wit" left a message from the grave. Or did she?

In February 2007, her scan of a New York Times blog by none other than Dick Cavett turned up a story about Basil Rathbone and a communication pertaining to an acquaintance killed in an automobile accident. Verifying this urban myth-esque story would require time, an expense account, and knowledge of how to track down mouldering LAPD files, hospital and morgue records, or hunting through obituaries. Finding the truth would either enhance or diminish Mr. Cavett's good story.

I love me some Dick Cavett, and, well, Theresa Duncan, too--as I Drop Names in the way only the D.C. could (because he met these people--I didn't)--but facts is fact, Basil Rathbone, or not. This accident left a paper trail--if it happened.

So, here we are with a Rigged To Explode On Halloween note from T.D.

Now. One wonders: when and under what circumstances may she have concocted leaving this message -- and the one to come on New Year's Eve?

As our great Mr. Davies might agree: the past changes as we come to greater understanding of the present.