Dec 25, 2019
SILENCE IS POWER (MOTIVATION) Music by: Jeremy Blake [VIDEO] #Motivation...
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SILENCE IS POWER (MOTIVATION) Music by: Jeremy Blake [VIDEO] #Motivation...
Glittering Beasts: Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Video Portraits and the Archive
Jeremy Blake achieved initial art world success in the late 1990's with a series of works that blended his background training in painting with digital technologies in which he combined digitally scanned, abstractly painted shapes with more realistic imagery to create large audio-visual, screen-based video projections. His achievement in this realm has been hailed as something of a major turning point for painting because of this unique hybridization (JBW, 9), but the more interesting aspect of his work may be his highly abstract, poetic approach to narrative and story telling.
Though there is little question that Blake created a new way in which to combine painting and technology, this fact probably would hold more interest for those who would wish to find art historical precedents of a traditional "painterly" nature (AMC, 4), at the expense of the narratological experimentation he produces in his pieces. Also, within these narratological explorations, there is a distinct shift from his early work, which dealt with abstract architectural spaces and fictional characters of the artist's creation, to a set of later works which take as their subject actual persons of historical and pop-cultural note.
Early Work
In a series of short tripartite video works between three and seven and a half minutes–Bungalow 8, Guccinam, and Mod Lang–Blake deals with themes of urban space and architecture, real and imagined (Teine, 144), which all obliquely engage issues of urbanization, Hollywood superficiality, and environmental concern. In these pieces, Blake utilizes the software platform After Effects (or, more precisely, worked with an animator friend at the LA-based motion graphics design shop, We Are Royale, using After Effects †) to create video panels of color and vague geometric shape, combined with colorations and "texture mapping" (to borrow a term from 3D modeling) derived from his own painted textures to render cool, almost lifeless architectural spaces (Teine, ibid).
What these early works also do is to abstractly and critically illuminate the hedonistic social structures of image-obsessed Hollywood and their materialistic movers and shakers, especially in Bungalow 8, a notorious pool-side cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Guccinam (Teine, 145), and anticipates the direction Blake was to take towards more concrete narrative issues in his work.
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Mod Lang is the start of Blake's more narrative phase and "stars" a fictional character of the artist's devising that is a hybrid of a 60's rock and roll star (a slight referencing of Keith Moon of The Who) and a famous architect, with no particular connection to a historical person but which symbolizes that era's plethora of famous designers of various stripe. In Mod Lang, Blake uses his painterly skills to create a work that doesn't actively show a character per se, but instead subsumes traditional filmic characterization into a complicated set of shifting, quasi-architectural spaces, thus trading a "physical" character for a set of subjective referents which turn physical space into a kind of psychological construct.
It should be noted that this is very different from, say, "first-person perspective" films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which project the main character's gaze out of his own eyes in order to interface with the “real world”. Instead, Blake’s first-person perspectival gaze in Mod Lang is one that actively creates the world in which the character exists through the artist's use of abstract shapes of an architectural nature, as well as almost psychedelic painterly colorations.
In short, Blake achieves an unacknowledged shift in first-person, filmic characterization through his various painterly-techno-filmic techniques in Mod Lang. The closest film-historical approximation that one can conceive of is perhaps Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, but even here this particular film is closer to the works we will discuss in Blake's later phase because of its combination of filmed reality and abstract painterliness executed on the film negative's surface.
Later Work (the Winchester and Wild Choir Trilogies)
The later portion of Blake's oeuvre, consisting of the Winchester Trilogy (2002-2004) and Wild Choir (2003-2007) that he mostly finished before his untimely death by suicide in 2007, are works that engage actual historical figures of varying fame. Also, these works throughly intertwine Blake's earlier interest in architectural space with the psychological being of each of their characters through the use of historical research, in the case of Sarah Winchester, to more physical archival/material research in Wild Choir.
Winchester Trilogy
The Winchester Trilogy is Blake's move into more structured narrative concerns and in this set of films, the artist takes on the (in)famous history of Sarah Winchester and her "Mystery House", as it is currently called.
Situated on the outskirts of San Jose, California, the Winchester House exists at the complex nodal point of a number of geographic and historical convergences; being in the same general vicinity of not only the birth of cinema (near the famous “Farm” of Stanford University, where Muybridge created his proto-cinematic oeuvre), but also a mere few miles from the birth of the personal computer via Apple Computer in Cupertino--All of this adds to the subject matter of Sarah Winchester and her labyrinthian house filled with ghosts, and combines into a fascinating nexus of forces and information.
In brief, Sarah Winchester was a wealthy widow of the son, William Wirt Winchester, of the famous gun maker, Oliver Winchester, who invented the repeating rifle--the "Gun that Won the West". Sarah was thoroughly and continually haunted by what she thought were the ghosts of those that perished at the receiving end of her family's creation, became despondent with guilt over these deaths, and eventually decided to build an incredibly complex house with such things as stairs that lead to nowhere, floors without covering, thus exposing only beams, and other such “neurotically”-driven architectural fancies.
In the Winchester Trilogy, the techniques used by Blake vary from hand-held 8mm film of the house, hand-drawn tracings of the exterior, to the overlaying of a variety of scanned-in, painted shapes in order to render "physical" the ghosts and specters that haunted Sarah (JBW, 12). Within this disparate matrix of materials, Blake importantly links her visions and paranoia to issues of Western expansionism in the United States while culling fragments of pop imagery taken from Western genre films to incorporate into his work, thus borrowing heavily from filmic conventions of narrative and suspense (JBW, 14). Also, the artist devotes a whole part of the trilogy to filming the three Century Theatre movie domes built in the 1960's that are on land only a few dozen feet from the Winchester House, thus bringing the story of one woman's house and history into the larger context of violence as portrayed in the mass media (BOW, 46).
The end result is a work that skillfully intermixes, interleaves, and overlays the psycho-physical reality of Sarah Winchester/House (they are, finally, one and the same), media culture in general, and also the greater historical forces at work during this period in history in the country as a whole, thereby erasing not only the distinctions of the imaginative/personal/physical, but of the imaginative/personal/historical--There is no difference between Sarah Winchester, her house, or US history concerning the American West in Blake's work, and all of these elements are visually integrated into a singular quasi-narrative, poetic presentation that is neither literature, nor film, nor (history/portrait) painting, but instead a fascinating genre-leveling combination of all.
Wild Choir
The three parts that constitute Wild Choir ("Reading Ossie Clark", "Sodium Fox", and the unfinished "Glitterbest") are, respectively, about a 1960's-era fashion designer (Ossie Clark), a contemporary "Generation X" singer (David Bermen), and a 1970's punk-rock figure (Malcom McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols–Teine, 163).
In this trilogy, Blake utilizes a variety of archival materials including journal entries, poetry, interviews, photographs, music, and other relational materials (commercial and otherwise) in order to create what could be termed "psychological portraits" of the subjects at hand. In his work, the layering of Blake's usual painterly techniques and archival materials are used in a more literal/referential way than was done in the Winchester Trilogy and this allows for what would seem to be an even more "truthful" narrative to emerge.
What is arguable is whether this later attempt does justice, through its use of so much archival material, to Blake's earlier explorations of poetic narrative. Does the inclusion of the archive create a fuller portrait of the "sitters"? Or, to paraphrase Derrida from his Archive Fever, does the archive cover up more than it exposes or illuminates? And if so, is this in a sense a step backward for Blake in regards to creating a new kind of psychological portrait?
Even if the house of the Winchester Trilogy and the journals and other archival materials in Wild Choir are conceptually readable as similar kinds of texts, the more subjective rendering in the Winchester Trilogy (partially through an absence of archival material) creates a more enticing atmosphere in which to construct a sense of the portrait's sitter, as the sea of sign-and-signifier baggage that comes with dealing with so much archival material arguably ends up painting a mental portrait too similar to that which we could create ourselves by going to the library, or researching on the internet, the lives of the people in which the artist has an interest. ††
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In Sonja Teine's PhD thesis on Blake, the only book-length publication on the full body of his work at this time, the author believes the Winchester Trilogy did not actually portray an individual (Teine, 160) and therefore is significantly different than Blake's later "psychological portraits" of fashion and music stars in Wild Choir. But, within the Winchester Trilogy, it is the intertwining of the psychological and architectural spaces of a historical person that dislocates Teine's position which would place this trilogy more on the side of Blake's earlier architectural interests rather than the later, psychological portrait phase of his work.
Indeed, this all begs the question: should there be a difference between the psychic/psychological forces at play within Mrs. Winchester and her house, and the similar forces at work in the diaries and writings of the three persons that were used in the trilogy that followed Winchester? Is writing more descriptive of what it means to be "human" than architecture? Especially in relation to the very personal, psychological architecture constructed by Sarah Winchester?
Teine's seemingly strongest argument, in which voice-over narration of the journal entries and poems of the three subjects in Wild Choir take conceptual primacy in illustrating a portrait over the music which accompanies Winchester (Teine, 161), falls apart because there is no convincing rationale for stating that a literal voice speaking from a written text makes for a portrait (in Blake’s multimedia artworks), whereas the lack of one does not.
Stepping even further out, Teine’s entire thesis (ironically) revolves around the idea that the Wild Choir trilogy of famous personages is a "crypto self-portrait" of Blake himself (Teine, 54), which is an impossibility given the categorization discussed above because there is a lack of any personal writings or texts by/about Blake in his artwork. The somewhat pop-interpretive, quasi-Freudian notion that an artist (Blake) “resides in”, “occupies”, or even “haunts”, their own artwork (either of the trilogies) through their very creation by the artist’s hand also will not hold when what constitutes an artistic (multimedia) “portrait” is set in such an dichotomous fashion.
In short, whether or not there is a "literal" bringing-into-being of the portrait's sitter through vocalization of his/her own words (via journals, or recordings, or what have you), there is still the possibility of portraiture outside of archival texts like the ones used in Wild Choir.
It is the opinion of this writer that Teine's categorization of the Winchester Trilogy as an earlier work concerned more with the architectural than with psychological portraiture does a disservice to the work because it is more valuable to think of it as a piece which is the start of Blake's growing concerns with narrating the interiority of historical personages, and thus it categorically falls on the side of the later Wild Choir.
Glittering Beast in the Archive
In the end, Blake trail-blazed new narrative pathways with his video portraits, especially with his portrait of Sarah Winchester and her house, all of which moved between traditional storytelling and poetic abstraction to the point that they have little precedent within the history of either film, literature proper, or fine art portraiture.
With the growing significance of the archive within Western artistic circles at the time of Blake's suicide in 2007, it is not surprising the artist might have felt a pressing need to engage the intellectual monster of sorts lurking within all of those journals and writings he found so alluring. It is sad that he is no longer with us so that we could have seen how he would have emerged from this labyrinth, either with another ground-breaking body of work, or injury from his fight with this most 21st century of Minotaurs.
Notes:
† Subject discussed during a business email exchange (2008, while working at Dentsu America) between myself and We Are Royale, who were also responsible for the “dream sequence” inter-title animations directed by Blake for the film Punk. Drunk. Love. (2003).
†† One of the most exemplary artists who is able to consistently transcend the potentially overwhelming weight of interacting with archives is Christian Boltanski.
Bibliography:
Teine, Sonja. Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Paintings: Sodium Fox: Fragmented Crypto Self-Portrait, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbruken, Germany, 2012.
[AMC] Jeremy Blake: All Mod Cons, Blaffer Gallery publication on occasion of exhibition of the same name. Terrie Sultan, Director, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, 2002
[BOW] Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal with texts by Mark Durant and Jane Marsching. DAP Publishers, New York, NY, 2006.
[JBW] Jeremy Blake: Winchester with texts by Jeremy Blake, Benjamin Weil, and Mitchel Schwarzer. SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2005.
Today's dish is Fresh Basil Fettuccine w/Tomatoes & Sweet Corn! 🍽 #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 15-25 min ✁-------------------------------------- List of ingredients and recipe in my bio link! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Turn Up, Let's Go) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo9QGohBzYG/?igshid=1m1o8lk9cbymj
Today's dish is Vadouvan Shrimp & Sweet Chili Sauce w/Aromatic Rice & Almonds! 🍽 #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 30-40 min ✁-------------------------------------- List of ingredients and recipe in my bio link! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Smile) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/BotqYNYBD-3/?igshid=1xv9ta9lqs6jy
Today's dish is Miso Chicken Ramen w/Marinated Tomatoes & Cucumbers! 🍽 #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 25-35 min ✁-------------------------------------- List of ingredients and recipe in my bio link! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Sunspots) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/BntS5EanPfb/?igshid=482b7xtmuqzq
Today's dish is Stuffed Poblano Peppers w/Tomato-Radish Salsa & Chipotle Yogurt! 🍽 #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 30-40 min ✁-------------------------------------- List of ingredients and recipe in my bio link! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Mia) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnjAmpYH8aN/?igshid=1fkpmsfe0na0t
Today's dish is Summer Pipe Rigate Pasta w/Pesto, Corn, & Tomatoes! 🍽 #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 15-25 min ✁-------------------------------------- List of ingredients and recipe in my bio link! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Exhale) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnEHZN4HzKG/?igshid=1sg8g5dqetqx4
Today's dish is Beef and Mushroom Burgers w/ Roasted Onion and Marinated Cabbage! #NohLeftovers Cook Time: 30-40 minutes ✁-------------------------------------- Full list of ingredients and recipe in my bio link. Go check it out! 🎧: #JeremyBlake (Tiptoe) (at Washington, District of Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm3Phv2nkWS/?igshid=6de0nv3k6cnm