Jeremy Blake is missing, following suicide of gf/wife Options

[Miss Candy Darling]

Most of you know Jeremy Blake's work from Sea Change and Punch-Drunk Love. I hadn't heard this till just now, but his girlfriend or wife committed suicide recently, and it seems he may have, too. (She's reported to be his girlfriend in this article, but I have read her blog before and she referred to him as her husband.)

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2007/07/jer...ke_missing.html

July 20, 2007
Jeremy Blake: Missing

Jeremy Blake is missing off New York's Rockaway Beach. The news initially comes via this unconfirmed report on LA Observed. The NYPD confirmed to me that as of this morning, they consider Blake to be missing.

The details at LAO are correct: This past Tuesday, a week after Theresa Duncan, Blake's longtime girlfriend, committed suicide, a man called 911 to report that he saw someone swimming out to sea. Blake's clothes and wallet were found nearby on Rockaway Beach. Blake has not been heard from since. Duncan's funeral will be held in Detroit tomorrow.

Blake is known for photographs and DVDs that mix visual narrative with abstract forms. He had a 2005 solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, created an abstract sequence for the film Punch Drunk Love, and he worked with Beck on the CD Sea Change. This fall Blake is scheduled to have shows at his New York City gallery Kinz, Tillou and Feigen, and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

I read Theresa Duncan's blog sometimes. She posted things that were so involved...about the CIA and Scientology and all kinds of interconnected plots....I really couldn't focus on it enough to follow it all. I thought she might be nuts but also as far as I knew maybe it was all true. I feel stunned by this.

Theresa Duncan's blog is here.

She also seemed to have a strange thing about Kate Moss.

[little-one]

I don't know who that is but wow... it's sad when people's lives crumble apart

[Miss Candy Darling]

He did the art on Sea Change...also Punch-Drunk Love, if you've seen that.

http://damienfree.fr.free.fr/punch_drunk_l...rt_gallery1.htm

http://damienfree.fr.free.fr/punch_drunk_l...my_blake_fr.htm

[Park]

a man called 911 to report that he saw someone swimming out to sea. Blake's clothes and wallet were found nearby on Rockaway Beach. Blake has not been heard from since.

Wow. That's ... wow. (That's a way out I don't think I could ever entertain. It doesn't seem all that fast.)

Poor guy. He didn't leave behind any kids or anything, did he?

[lefty]

that's a real bummer. i was a fan of his work. at the same time i don't know if i should be sad yet, because it doesn't sound definitive? so, i'm in a state of mournful bewilderment

[john smith]

strange/sad story.

I like the photos she used on her blog. In fact Ithink I might use one as a sig...

[Miss Candy Darling]

that's a real bummer.  i was a fan of his work.  at the same time i don't know if i should be sad yet, because it doesn't sound definitive?  so, i'm in a state of mournful bewilderment

I read as much as I could find last night (not much), and a witness saw a man walk into the water, then police found his clothes and wallet under the boardwalk. In one place I read that he left a note, too. So it sounds like a reasonable assumption that he's dead, but there's no proof.

Park: I haven't seen any mention of children for either of them.

This was in the New York Times today:

One Suicide, the Other Missing

The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.

Found with the clothes was a note that made reference to Ms. Duncan, the police said.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police department, said that Mr. Blake was last seen taking off his clothes and then walking into the water at Beach 102nd Street on Tuesday. Police scuba teams have searched the waters off the beach since then, Mr. Browne added, but have not found a body.

Lance Kinz, a director of the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery, which represented Mr. Blake, said that Mr. Blake and Ms. Duncan had been together for 12 years and were very close. The two collaborated, along with another artist, Karen Kilimnik, on “The History of Glamour,” a 1999 animated film that spoofed the fashion world. The short movie, which Ms. Duncan wrote and directed, was called “gentle” and “very funny” by Stephen Holden of The New York Times in 2001.

Mr. Kinz said that Mr. Blake told him he had discovered Ms. Duncan’s body after she committed suicide. He said he had spoken with Mr. Blake after her death and that, while devastated and grieving, “he seemed to be very much in control and to be coping with it.”

Mr. Blake, whose work has been shown at three Whitney biennials and at a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, is scheduled to have an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in late October, partly in collaboration with Malcolm McLaren, the musician and designer.

Mr. Kinz said it is unclear whether that show, or another coming up at his gallery, in Chelsea, would open. “There’s some hope that maybe that wasn’t Jeremy going into the water,” he said, “but it’s presumed that he’s gone.”

Ms. Duncan, who was raised in Detroit, became a prominent video-game designer in the late 1990s, making sophisticated story-based CD-ROM games for young girls — an underserved population in a business largely aimed at adolescent boys. She and Mr. Blake had moved to Los Angeles but recently returned to New York, Mr. Kinz said, where she was working on writing and movie projects.

She also maintained a blog called “The Wit of the Staircase,” where she wrote energetically and at length on topics ranging from books to politics to Kate Moss. Her last entry, dated July 10, the day she died, includes a blurry photograph of a woman putting on a mask and quotes the novelist 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.”

She listed her interests at the site, theresalduncan.typepad.com, as “film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, book collecting, philately, card and coin tricks, futurism, Napoleon Bonaparte, the history of electricity.”

Mr. Blake, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and several other prominent institutions, began to make a name for himself in the late 1990s with dissolving photographic projections used to create the equivalent of geometric abstract paintings. He called his work “time-based painting.”

The 2005 exhibition in San Francisco was based around the San Jose mansion of Sarah Winchester, the widowed heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, who built a mazelike house with 160 rooms to confuse or ward off the ghosts of shooting victims she believed would haunt her.

In addition to work for galleries, Mr. Blake also created sequences of abstract art for the 2002 movie “Punch-Drunk Love,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had seen Mr. Blake’s work in an earlier show in San Francisco while working on the film.

Roberta Smith, writing in The Times about a 2005 exhibition by Mr. Blake in New York, said that his work had “given the stream-of-consciousness narrative, so long a part of modern literature, a time-based visual equivalent” and that he was moving past predecessors like Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston and Raymond Pettibon into new artistic territory.

[Little Midnite Vulture]

I don't know what to say. That's terrible.

[samora]

I haven't commented in here yet because the first thing to come to mind was a rather insensitive thought but oh well, I'll share. "That's a rather romantic way to die," was what I was thinking. Swimming out to sea to never return. I'm certainly not condoning or celebrating suicide, but I have had my musings about what I would do or such and that's actually something I've envisioned before. I think it might be an allusion to some movie or novel I can't remember.

[Miss Candy Darling]

I haven't commented in here yet because the first thing to come to mind was a rather insensitive thought but oh well, I'll share. "That's a rather romantic way to die," was what I was thinking. Swimming out to sea to never return. I'm certainly not condoning or celebrating suicide, but I have had my musings about what I would do or such and that's actually something I've envisioned before. I think it might be an allusion to some movie or novel I can't remember.

I agree it seems romantic. I bet it doesn't feel very romantic when you're drowning though. Well, who knows. Maybe it does.

[Little Midnite Vulture]

I sort of thought the same thing Samora. It's sad but at the same time sweet because he didn't want to be around if she wasn't there anymore.

[dora maar]

Very tragic for both of them and their families and friends.

[poobs]

I bet he's pulling a Krusty the Clown and will turn up in a fishing village under a new name..But it'll be up to Bart and Lisa to find him..

That's such a bummer..And I know this is lame, but I wonder what Beck thinks of the situation..

[samora]

And I know this is lame, but I wonder what Beck thinks of the situation..

:blank stare:

Emotions are for the weak.

[Miss Candy Darling]

Theresa Duncan believed that she and Jeremy Blake had been harassed by the Church of Scientology.

[Miss Candy Darling]

I was just reading on VH1 about how Theresa Duncan was a creator of "girls' video games." (Actually, that description is from elsewhere on the net.) I don't know anything about them, but just in case someone here does...

Theresa Duncan's Sad Suicide

I met Theresa Duncan way back in the day when she was working on a bright kids game called Chop Suey.  She also worked on Smarty and Zero Zero.  She was smart, thoughtful, beautiful and deep. Theresa Duncan committed suicide on July 10.  It was a staggering loss to all those who met her, even those who met her just once, like me.  It was so staggering to her animator boyfriend Jeremy Blake that he committed suicide shortly thereafter by walking into the surf at Rockaway Beach.  So sadly. It was a modern day Romeo and Juliet, one that friends and family are staggered by.  So unfortunate.

Chop Suey wasn’t just a kid’s game.  It was new and different, magical and hip, a game from Duncan’s Magnet Interactive that is now considered a classic.  And don’t tell me that kid’s games can’t be classic games unless you’ve played Chop Suey.  In this interactive storybook, you become part of the world of Lily and June Bugg and even the ancillary characters blossom with Duncan’s unique creativity.
In a World Village review, for instance, Aunt Vera’s room has “An interactive closet of clothes is yours for the clicking. Feel free to open Vera's drawers, try on hats and dresses, eachhas a fun-filled story behind it. From Vera's shoes to her ‘lipstickylips’, you can sense the girls' excitement as they explore Vera's past life as a Rockette, in the days of a "billion winking shining blinking lights of Broadway."
Eventually, Duncan left games to be a writer and filmmaker.  Who knows what went through her mind as she contemplated leaving this world?  David Foster Wallace talked brilliantly about what leads up to the deed, the awfully complex thoughts, in “Oblivion.”  But at least we have Duncan’s games to remember, along with her wondrous, witty spirit and her insightful words on her blog.

[Miss Candy Darling]

Okay, I realize no one has been paying attention to this thread, but now the Los Angeles Times has brought Beck into the story. Maybe I shoulda posted this in Beck Discussion after all.

Here's the beginning of the article (including the Beck part).

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.

July 25, 2007

By Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer


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."

Complete article here.

[samora]

...woah...

That's really strange. I wonder what is was that gave them the impression they were being stalked and such. I kind of really hope they weren't because that would be sick to reflect on what it drove them to do. Also "extremely cordial" strikes me as an extremely peculiar phrase.

[Miss Candy Darling]

...woah...

That's really strange. I wonder what is was that gave them the impression they were being stalked and such. I kind of really hope they weren't because that would be sick to reflect on what it drove them to do. Also "extremely cordial" strikes me as an extremely peculiar phrase.

Yeah, right? It sounds like the way snooty upper-class divorced parents might describe their relationship when they're talking to their kid's teacher.

Back before she died, I tried to make sense of one long post she wrote on her blog that involved the CIA and Scientology, but I couldn't. I did kind of feel like she might be paranoid. And that doesn't mean she wasn't harassed at all--maybe she was. But you know how that can happen--some person or group of people does something you find threatening, and you have reason to believe they've seriously harassed other people, so you start connecting them to every bad thing that happens to you. She didn't write much specific about it, so it was hard to evaluate whether her claims seemed founded or not.

[toadstool]

I guess if you're going to believe any groups are stalking, you neither the CIA or Scientology are strange choices.

I think "extremely cordial" would work, if they weren't really close buddies but they had been exceptionally polite in a very superficial way. googling the phrase is an interesting exercise if you haven't done it already. the first page BBC news result shows it might just be something that PR people say. There are a few more similarly newsy results on the second page. the article in question actually shows up on page three!