I know this is PTA message board, and if somebody ask this before punch me in the face... BUT does anybody know if there is a place to get a poster/print of Jeremy Blake artwork? If I can find a snap shot from PDL, all the better.
I didn't know if anybody has stumbled across something??
Jeremy Blake is primarily repped by the Feigen Gallery in NY.
He prints are thousands of dollars.
http://www.feigencontemporary.com/index.php?mode=artists&object_id=28&show=home
So much for that. I was hoping a company like Art.com sold his work.
You'd think after PDL, there would be a HUGE demand. :grin:
Oh well. I'm a dreamer. :violin:
Is this a PTA painting? (on the left)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.feigencontemporary.com%2Ffiles%2Fbc862a8f.jpg&hash=a75f8f9de34a0a6eda15644044c9e1c7d72d24f6)
haha more importantly, why the fuck is he dressed up like a pirate?
Quote from: Jay Tee Emhaha more importantly, why the fuck is he dressed up like a pirate?
http://xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=4811
Well, does anybody know of any websites that Blake artwork in 300dpi?
Maybe I can take something to the local print shop and have them blow it up.
It's worth a shot.
Jeremy Blake apparently drowns self
Source: Los Angeles Times
Artist Jeremy Blake is missing, according to New York City investigators, and he apparently drowned himself Tuesday night, said Lance Kinz, co-owner of the Manhattan art gallery that represents Blake. Police said a man "tentatively identified" as Blake was seen stripping to his shorts and disappearing into the surf at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., where no body had been found by Friday. Kinz said Blake's friends are convinced it was him because his wallet and clothes were found in the sand. Blake's apparent suicide comes a week after he found his longtime girlfriend, writer-filmmaker Theresa Duncan, dead on the bed in their Manhattan apartment, where she had left a suicide note.
Duncan, 40, was to be buried today in her hometown of Lapeer, Mich. The New York City medical examiner's office said toxicology tests were being done to determine the cause of her death.
Blake, 36, whose work has been included in the Whitney Biennial in New York and was scheduled for a fall solo show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., is known especially for short films that also function like paintings, and for creating abstract art sequences for the movie "Punch-Drunk Love."
After Duncan's death, Kinz said, Blake "seemed shocked and shaken, but definitely in control and stable and coherent," and was planning to attend her funeral. The couple recently had moved back to New York City after several years in Los Angeles. Duncan had a blog called the Wit of the Staircase.
bumped and title changed cos WOAH.
That's so sad.
A body wasn't found though. Maybe he just wanted to get away and not be bothered by anyone.
WHOA is right. Man, suicides are the worst.
Very sad.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2007-07%2F31400998.jpg&hash=ec43f34dae11de71d51f86970ec2ff3f179afdb7)
The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan
Friends cite strange behavior in the final days of a golden couple in the art world.
Source: Los Angeles Times
It's been just eight days since rising art star Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off New York's Rockaway Beach -- presumably to his death -- a week after he discovered that his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had taken her life in their East Village apartment.
But the apparent double suicide of this glamorous, intellectual couple has confounded and disturbed the art world in New York, London and Los Angeles, where they lived together for several years. Many were shocked by the turn of events while others noted that the couple had acted strangely in their final months together.
According to several friends and art world peers, the two believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists, an abiding fear that soured old friendships and made some of their respective working relationships difficult.
Christine Nichols, a colleague and friend of Blake's since 1998, produced two art exhibitions, two books and a record in conjunction with the artist through the New York art gallery she co-founded, Works on Paper Inc. Nichols dates the couple's rising sense of "paranoia" to around 2004, two years after Blake created an album cover for alternative-rock star Beck, who is a practicing Scientologist.
"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols said. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that.
"But it got to be something that was huge to them -- a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."
Two other art world sources corroborated Nichols' characterization but declined to speak on the record out of concern that Blake may still be alive.
Beck was unavailable for comment, but his manager, through a publicist, let it be known that things were "extremely cordial" between the singer and the artist the last time they talked three years ago.A spokesman said the New York Police Department was not investigating any involvement by the Church of Scientology. Karin Pouw, a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, denied the allegations, saying, "Never heard of these people. This is completely untrue."
Puzzling turn of events
Duncan and Blake, who were together for 12 years, are recalled as an impossibly good-looking, intellectually vigorous and socially popular pair of soul mates who moved gracefully among a set of likewise brainy, moneyed people who occupy the intersection of art and technology on both coasts.
According to Lance Kinz, director of Kinz, Tillou and Feigen gallery in New York, which shows Blake's digital paintings and films, Duncan's suicide and Blake's disappearance have confounded many people.
"They were both highly ambitious and successful and had achieved a lot. They were energetic in their creative pursuits," Kinz said. "The biggest surprise is that Jeremy would sacrifice what he had worked so hard to achieve and had been so excited about.
"On the other hand, for those who did know Jeremy and Theresa, they were very close, seemingly very much in love and extremely close. One could assume the loss was too much to handle."
The couple had moved in February from Los Angeles back to New York, where Blake had accepted a job as an in-house graphic designer forvideo game manufacturer Rockstar Games. A source at Rockstar, who declined to be identified for fear of violating company policy, recalled the artist as someone who "looked like a rock star. He wore sunglasses indoors. Sometimes he sipped whiskey at work."
On July 10, the day she was found dead, Duncan, 40, posted a final blog entry, a two-sentence quotation from author Reynolds Price: "A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens -- second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter."
Blake, 35, was well on his way to bona fide star status with museums including Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collecting his work. Blake took part in three consecutive Whitney Biennial exhibitions from 2000 to 2004.
"He was a pioneer in so many ways," Kinz said. "His works weren't film and they weren't paintings. It wasn't computer art; it wasn't animation. And though it was painterly fine art, it was a hybrid of many things. In the future, I think he'll be considered a first explorer in a new territory of art making."
A Washington, D.C., native, Blake had turned recently to an abstract form of portraiture, doing a piece on Ossie Clarke, a fashion designer from 1960s "swinging London" who is never seen, but readings from his diaries form the soundtrack. Another piece, "Sodium Fox," interprets Nashville poet and rocker David Berman of the band Silver Jews. They had been chosen for an upcoming exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, along with a new piece, "Glitterbest," about London punk rock mogul Malcolm McLaren, that remains unfinished.
Katie Brennan, who operates Sister Gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown, frequently socialized with Blake and Duncan and mounted an exhibition of Blake's work in 2004. Brennan said the couple mutually inspired one another in their creative pursuits.
"They were very happy together and extremely supportive," Brennan said. "I don't think anyone can interpret what happened. It's a great loss. It tends to happen in the art world more than other areas. It's tragic. They were brilliant, complex people. I think everyone is shocked."
CD-ROM creator
Blake and Duncan met in the mid-1990s, according to a 1998 USA Today feature about her work as one of the few writer-producers creating CD-ROM games geared toward girls. A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly described "Chop Suey," Duncan's 1994 adventure CD-ROM, as an "unsettlingly brilliant" work that was "a little like 'Alice in Wonderland' as performed by the B-52's for NPR."
Duncan, 40, the daughter of an art teacher, grew up near Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan after writing a thesis titled "Electric Fairy Tales: CD-ROMs and Literature." Romance bloomed when Blake began creating art for Duncan's independently produced discs, and the two collaborated with artist Karen Kilimnik on "A History of Glamour," a short animated "mockumentary" about a girl from the Midwest who becomes the sensation of a Warhol-like big-city art scene, then sours on the glittery life.
Blake and Duncan moved together from New York to Los Angeles for what they expected to be a brief stay while the artist worked on the abstract film sequences for "Punch-Drunk Love," director Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 giddy romantic comedy.
Duncan had sold a script called "Alice Underground" to Fox Searchlight, about two teenage girls whose kidnapping of a rock star boosts his fame, Variety reported in 2001. In 2005, she began a blog called The Wit of the Staircase that quickly became a must-read among literary-minded Angeleno web logs.
"The thing that stands out most is the depth and breadth of her interests," said Jim Ruland, a fiction writer behind the lit-blog and reading series Vermin on the Mount, in an e-mail. "I solicited her for a response to Thomas Pynchon's novel 'Against the Day' and her response was very smart yet felt extremely personal. Her blog was full of that kind of writing: oddly moving prose on a wide range of subjects."
Duncan's reputation as an intellectual firebrand sometimes belied her appearance. "I don't know how glamorous she was; she was pretty, she was sexy," said Kevin Roderick, editor of the media blog LA Observed. "She did put a lot of herself on her blog."
New York police Tuesday said there was no new information on the case. They were alerted late on July 17 by a woman who witnessed the 6-foot-2 Blake walk into the ocean. He was not seen coming out. His clothing, wallet and a suicide note were found under a nearby boardwalk, police said.
i guess he was looking for a sea change.
The world as Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan saw it
Friends sift through the clues left behind by a glittering 'It' couple who had wrapped themselves in a cocoon of paranoia.
Source: Los Angeles Times
On the evening of July 10, rising art star Jeremy Blake returned to his New York apartment, a converted rectory at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery that he shared with his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan. The couple, extremely devoted and still very much in love after 12 years, had eaten a late lunch together, and Blake invited the church's assistant pastor over for a drink.
According to Father Frank Morales, Blake was the first to discover Duncan -- a blogger, screenwriter and video-game designer -- lying prone in the bedroom. "He was crying, visibly shattered," said Morales, who entered the apartment five minutes behind Blake. "He was sobbing, kicking the walls, putting his head in his hands. But that night he got a grip fairly quickly." A suicide note, a bottle of pills and alcohol were found near the body, police said.
Friends rushed to Blake's side, including some from Los Angeles, where the couple had lived for several years, and the Washington area, where Blake was raised. "It was on the table: This guy's an extreme suicide risk," Morales said. "Six to 10 people took it in shifts looking after him. We had him blanketed."
But after a week of supervision, Blake was "pulling at the leash," Morales said, and returned to his day job as a graphic designer at the video game manufacturer Rockstar Games.
On July 17, a day before Duncan's funeral outside Detroit, Blake took the subway heading for Brooklyn, where he was meeting a friend. A short while later, a woman phoned police when she observed the 6-foot-2 artist wander into the surf off New York's Rockaway Beach, leaving behind his clothing, wallet and a short, hand-written suicide note. A fisherman discovered Blake's body off the coast of New Jersey five days later.
The double suicide of this glamorous, well-connected and attractive couple has baffled and fixated branches of the Hollywood film community, the art world and the blogosphere. In the days since their deaths, a clearer picture has emerged of a couple bound very tightly but suspicious of outsiders and increasingly losing touch with reality. Though he was selling work at top art galleries, she had suffered a big disappointment when Paramount put a screenplay of hers into turnaround. And Blake and Duncan were sure people were conspiring against them -- in particular, the Church of Scientology.
In a 27-page "chronology" written by Blake in October in preparation for a lawsuit against the church that was never filed, he alleges the couple was "methodically defamed, harassed, followed and threatened" by Scientologists. The document lists Tom Cruise, filmmaker-artist-author Miranda July, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, former Viacom Chief Executive Tom Freston, alternative rocker Beck and Art Forum Editor Tim Griffin, among others, as players in the dispute. In addition, a number of Hollywood talent agents and major league art collectors were accused of being in on the conspiracy.
In many ways, the chronology serves as a portrait of growing paranoia: It begins with struggles over making a film and ends up with mentions of implied threats to the couple's dog and sightings of "Scientology related satanic graffiti" near their Venice, Calif., home.
But also the papers flesh out a picture of Blake, 35, and Duncan, 40, as an Information Age "It" couple with an all-access pass to the hippest quadrants of popular culture -- but who failed to find their bliss in Hollywood.
Possessed of movie star good looks, remembered as "alarmingly brilliant" and at times jealously protective of each other, the couple has been posthumously dubbed "Theremy" by Artnet.com.
"They were like two parts of the same person -- very, very bonded," said New York-based writer Glenn O'Brien, who vacationed with the couple at his country house days before Duncan's death. "They were both extremely bright and knowledgeable. You could talk to them about the history of electricity or politics. Both were really scholarly in a pop sense."
'Never spent a night apart'
"They were a dynamic force, and I'm sure their brilliance circulated between them symbiotically," said Jonathan Binstock, former curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where an exhibit of Blake's final works will be mounted in October. "She told me once they had basically never spent a night apart in their relationship."
Duncan is most frequently identified with her blog the Wit of the Staircase (from the French phrase "esprit d'escalier" -- the perfect witty response one thinks up after the conversation is over), which showcased her far-ranging cultural obsessions, including supermodel Kate Moss and discontinued perfumes. It became widely bookmarked among literary-minded Angelenos. She was also a freelance essayist, screenwriter and CD-ROM game designer whose titles -- Chop Suey, Smarty and Zero Zero -- attracted a cult following among girls.
Duncan and Blake fell in love when he began creating art for her discs. An animated mockumentary they collaborated on with artist Karen Kilimnik, "The History of Glamour," was accepted into the prestigious 2000 Whitney Biennial. And in Hollywood, some agents and producers referred to Duncan, attempting to mount her first feature film, "Alice Underground," as "the female Michel Gondry" for her intricate visual style.
"It's disappointing the film didn't happen," said producer Anthony Bregman, who tried to get Duncan's movie made, "because it would have revealed the real depth of her talent."
Blake was a pioneering art star whose lush digital paintings blurred boundaries between animation, film and computer art. His work is in the permanent collections of museums including Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was in three Whitney Biennials.
The artist created a hallucinogenic dream sequence for writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 romantic comedy "Punch-Drunk Love" and collaborated with Nashville poet-rocker Dave Berman of the band Silver Jews on a 2005 film, "Sodium Fox." Binstock recalls the artist as a "visionary" whose art connected digital media to painterly tradition. "You could experience a video as you would a painting. It's poetic, abstract, very rich work," he said.
But several former friends and colleagues also describe a darker side of Blake and Duncan.
Bradford Schlei, head of production for Muse Productions, optioned the rights to George Pelicanos' "Nick's Trip" that was to have been Blake's feature film directing debut. The project stalled just before a deal with Paramount Vantage was being negotiated, however, when Blake accused Schlei's then girlfriend and the project's screenwriter of being Scientologists. (Schlei says neither he nor the other two are affiliated with the church.)
"It was complete and utter craziness," Schlei said. "Theresa sent around e-mails, delusional things. They'd say, 'You're a Scientologist, your girlfriend's a Scientologist, we don't want to be involved with you.'
"The thing that ended our relationship was when Jeremy said [my girlfriend] was trying to ruin Theresa's reputation. None of this ever had to do with Jeremy. It was always about Theresa and her film career." Several other sources confirmed Schlei's account, recalling that Duncan's e-mails grew wilder toward the end of her life.
"There was a paranoia thing going on there," he continued. "If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell."
On her blog in May, Duncan wrote a rambling 17-paragraph entry that accuses Blake's ex-girlfriend, the art photographer Anna Gaskell, and her family of conducting a "smear campaign" against the couple while also supporting an ultraconservative political effort. In the legal document, Blake suspects Gaskell and her family of colluding with Scientologists, bikers and ex-CIA operatives as part of a "covert harassment campaign" against the couple.
Gaskell said she had not seen Blake in 12 years and never met Duncan. "Jeremy was an incredibly loyal friend. It's a sad situation," Gaskell said. "My family isn't part of any right-wing conspiracy. My brother's a Democrat."
Downhill years
Despite being aligned with a who's who of creative pacesetters and enjoying prestige in their respective fields, Duncan and Blake tried and failed to get separate movie projects into production in 2005 and 2006, then left Los Angeles.
The chronology presents a revealing glimpse of their last five years together: attending rock star birthday parties and taking power meetings with movie executives, hobnobbing with boldfaced names, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi and Emily Watson, while living in a state of semi-constant dread -- even if, as friends say, the couple's apprehension about being victimized was not reason enough for them to commit suicide.
Singer-songwriter Beck, a practicing Scientologist for whom Blake designed an album cover in 2002, is singled out in the legal document as the person responsible for bringing the couple into conflict with the church. Made aware of how he is characterized, Beck recalled a productive but brief working relationship that was amicable. "I hadn't heard from him in years, so the news of his suicide was heartbreaking," Beck said in an e-mail. "The controversy surrounding it was completely out of left field for me."
Duncan's efforts to make "Alice Underground," a screenplay she wrote about two girls who accidentally kidnap a rock star, that she hoped to direct as her debut feature, lay at the heart of the perceived Scientology conspiracy.
In 2001, Duncan began developing the project with Fox Searchlight, but it never got off the ground. In 2005, "Alice" was brought by producers Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman to Paramount, where they hoped the project would be greenlighted by its Nickelodeon Films division.
Several sources say Duncan prepared scrapbooks filled with visual cues for the film -- Kate Moss, to name one, was the basis for the movie's lead role -- and met with Lindsay Lohan and Kevin Federline, among others, to cast it. The script received serious consideration at a table reading on the studio lot in February 2006.
Ultimately, "Alice" never went into production because the studio and the producers could not agree on a budget and executives remained unconvinced of the film's appeal to its target audience, preteen girls. "We couldn't make the budget work," said Bregman. "It was a very complicated film visually, a very ambitious film for a first-time director. That's why it didn't happen."
In the chronology, Tom Cruise is accused of having used his clout at Paramount, where his production company was then based, to personally derail "Alice" because it offended "his profound loyalty to Scientology." Several sources close to the project said the allegation is baseless. Cruise's spokeswoman said: "The Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan suicides were a terrible tragedy. However, Tom did not know them and had absolutely no connection to their project or Paramount's disposition of it."
An agent at United Talent Agency is named as the "main villain in ruining the film's progress" at Paramount. A spokesman for UTA said, "We spent considerable time and energy trying to get the film financed. We are saddened by this tragedy."
Also in the chronology, Miranda July is accused of spreading unspecified defamation about Duncan in New York and is identified as a "Scientologist filmmaker" even though she is not affiliated with the church. July declined to comment. And a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, Karin Pouw, called the conspiracy allegations "bizarre."
Around this time, friends and associates recall receiving accusatory group e-mails from Duncan. In one of them, she denied a rumor of having had an affair with a famous artist -- a rumor no one contacted seemed to have heard about, let alone believe.
In the spring of 2006, according to the chronology, Blake and Duncan began documenting cars with Florida license plates and graffiti (some allegedly resembling Duncan's signature) in their neighborhood as more evidence of the conspiracy. Around this time, Blake tossed urine onto the barbecue of neighbors who the couple suspected were Scientologists. He and Duncan were living in an office complex adjacent to Muse Productions' Venice offices after having been evicted from their apartment when Schlei encountered Blake shortly before the couple moved to New York in early 2007.
"He got a job at Rockstar," Schlei said. "He said, 'I like New York better. It's going to be awesome. I'm going into a new phase.' "
After the couple moved into the church apartment, Father Morales recalls them rapidly integrating into the church community. The two attended service every Sunday, a new thing for them, and kept a Bible on their coffee table. On July 3, Duncan helped orchestrate a benefit for restoration of the church.
Asked if he thought Blake and Duncan were running away from something, Morales said: "They felt they were being harassed by certain individuals. I have no way of knowing if it's true. I'd say, 'You're here now. We'll protect you.' I did sense they felt this was a sanctuary for them. They felt they had gotten away."
Schlei, who had tried to persuade Blake to direct a film for him even after the artist accused him of being in on the conspiracy, has a theory about what compelled them to take their lives.
"I think Theresa, in one of her rare moments of self-reflection, recognized she had burned all of these bridges in Jeremy's career with the paranoia," Schlei said. "Jeremy was her creation. And she was killing the thing she created, this great, terrific artist. She realized what she had done. To let him live, she had to go. But in a symbiotic relationship, one couldn't last without the other."
Schlei also pointed out that one of Blake's favorite movies was Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye," in which a character played by Sterling Hayden takes his own life by walking into the sea.
"Life imitates art," Schlei said.
Not sure how much of all this I believe considering the Los Angeles Times is a puppet paper for the Church of Scientology...
Quote
In a 27-page "chronology" written by Blake in October in preparation for a lawsuit against the church that was never filed, he alleges the couple was "methodically defamed, harassed, followed and threatened" by Scientologists. The document lists...writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, as [involved] in the dispute. .
Oh wait now I know that they were crazy.
this reminds me of "bug."
i know this is old, but i listened to Sea Change today and wondered what Blake was up to.
i either totally forgot about this or never read about it.
quite tragic and extremely odd.
has anyone ever run across the screenplay of Alice Underground?
it sounds very interesting.
i checked IMDB first and it just brings up a short film which seems unrelated.
also, this is probably posted by Mac somewhere else - a Van Sant thread I would guess - (which he will now redirect to...)
On November 30, 2008 the New York Post's Page Six reported that Bret Easton Ellis is writing a screenplay about Duncan and Blake. Director Gus Van Sant has signed on as a consultant for the movie, which is being produced by Braxton Pope and Andrew Weiner of Ithaka films along with Lionsgate.
The Scientology Conspiracy Theory About Two Artists' "Golden Suicides" (http://blackbag.gawker.com/the-scientology-conspiracy-theory-about-two-artists-go-1691694049/+cushac)