Exhibition of the week

Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake

Corcoran Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C.

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Through March 2

One day this past July, Jeremy Blake walked into the Atlantic Ocean and drowned, said Dan Levin in The New York Times. The innovative video’s artist’s suicide was undoubtedly motivated by the suicide, a week earlier, of his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, with whom he had shared “a growing paranoia and conspiracy theories” of a bizarre stripe. Blake’s disappearance created a brief mystery, but even after his body was found off Sea Girt, New Jersey, “many wondered what would become of his unfinished work and whether it would shed any light on his life, and his death at 35.” This exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Blake’s hometown of Washington, D.C., was in the works before the tragedy. Two of the videos are complete, but the third had to be partially completed by a fellow artist.

How tragic that this “emerging art star” should achieve his greatest fame by taking his own life, said Chris Richards in The Washington Post. Media coverage “speculated on what drove the couple to their decision—all of it left readers wondering who Jeremy Blake really was.” He was a significant talent, in fact, an innovator in the still-young field of video art whose “moving paintings” have helped define the form. Sodium Fox (2005) “feels like channel-surfing through your dreams.” Stars shoot from the sky and land on pieces of toast, as actress Pam Grier drifts across the screen. Reading Ossie Clark (2003) is “the most ephemeral piece in the show, with playful wisps of rainbow smoke billowing over hard-edged Kenneth Noland geometry. Glitterbest (2007) takes Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren as its subject. “Unfinished, it still captures Blake’s keen handle on the visual and the musical.”

Let’s keep the artist’s achievements in perspective, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. “Digital imagery is making inroads into the rarified world of the fine arts,” and Blake played a role in that. But the images of fast food, soap operas, and cartoons that flit through the screens are merely variations on the now-tired language of pop art. While Blake’s creations are visually stimulating and often lush, “he tries so hard to blend media that his dense verbal and visual montages lack artistic clarity.” The only moment in these three works that made me catch my breath was an unintentional one when, toward the end of Sodium Fox, “a blaze of color over the sea suggests the artist’s recent demise.”