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Jeremy
Blake’s "time-based painting" has been around for a while now, at the
Whitney’s Bitstreams and at 010101 in San Francisco, but he’s gained much of
his renown working with real-time artists Beck and P. T. Anderson. Both use his
fluid, morphing shapes as a visual fill, a sophisticated light show and both
know where he’s coming from.
His earlier
work took the non-representational and non-geometric shapes of High Modernism
and slipped them into the stream of time, setting them free to change as they
would. The aesthetics of the format owed a lot to Brackhage and the Canyon
Cinema abstract filmmakers, who looked for a pure visual music in nature. But
he was not bringing a temporal dimension to, say, Kandinsky’s pictorial music
or Gorky’s emotional landscapes. These were the purely aesthetic stains of the
color-field painters, constructs that might have utility in the future but were
meanwhile valued by people who thought it perfectly delightful that beauty
could be so perfectly useless.
He, in
fact, shares computer methodology with cutting edge "blob" architects
who are designing forms as yet without function that might prove habitable in
the future. In two earlier pieces, Winchester
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> and Bungalow 8
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, he moved around historically
charged but vacated edifices and morphed the shifting vistas into his abstract
light stains as though returning them to a continuum in which the historical
and human is the unreal abstraction. In a more recent work, Mod Lang
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, he creates a pop narrative about
a man who built a castle for vampires to live in and then constructed a visual
field in which all this might have taken place.
The
narrative is similar to "scripts" he’s exhibited at Works on Paper in
L.A. At a glance, they seem to be exuberant, post-modern underground comics but
on closer read they’re not particularly concerned with narrative and lurch from
one enigmatic epiphany to another as though looking to disappear into
abstraction. Two trains running on the same track, Blake has more on his agenda
than abstraction.
His new
show at Feigen �ontemporary, featuring the DVD installation Reading Ossie
Clark, is based on
that least dramatic of narratives, a diary. While anecdotal bits from the diary
of legendary fashion designer Ossie Clark are read in the background, Blake
arranges a loose collage of drawings, photographs, and film that form a dream
world of imagery, perfectly useless and perfectly utilitarian. Whereas in his
earlier work a human narrative would tug at the edges of the sublime as though
looking for shelter, here his abstract stains dance around the edges, echoing
Ossie Clark’s designs. They seem to be happy sheltering the memories of this
maker of beauty. You suspect future inhabitants of Mr. Blake’s architecture
will prove more problematic.
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