July 21, 2007
Artist Presumed to Have Killed Himself After Girlfriend's Suicide
Jeremy Blake, an artist whose works have been shown at the Whitney and on Times Square's Jumbotron, is presumed to have killed himself by walking into the ocean at the Rockaways on Tuesday. On July 10, Blake discovered the body of his girlfriend, filmmaker Theresa Duncan, in their East Village apartment; he had planned to attend Duncan's memorial service, which is being held today.
According to the NY Times reports that Blake was seen "taking off his clothes and then walking into the water at Beach 102nd Street" Tuesday night and was not seen coming out. A wallet and a suicide note were found amongst his clothes, and police divers have not found Blake's body.
Duncan and Blake were both artists: Duncan, who had a blog, The Wit of the Staircase, developed video games and made films, while Blake created lush paintings, photographs, and digital animations that "mix visual narrative with abstract forms, as Modern Art Notes explains. Blake was represented by the gallery Kinz, Tillou + Feigen (more about his work here), and Lance Kinz told the Daily News, "They were extremely intelligent, talented, creative, ambitious people...As a couple, they were extremely close, very much in love. They worshiped each other, and collaborated on projects together, as if they were one."
The NY Times' art critic Roberta Smith said that Blake's work had "given the stream-of-consciousness narrative, so long a part of modern literature, a time-based visual equivalent." In 2003, Blake's work Cowboy Waltz was shown as part of Creative Time's 59th Minute series, where artists' videos were show on the big Panasonic TV in Times Square (it was recently replayed as part of Creative Time's 59th Minute retrospective). Blake's work can also be seen in Punch Drunk Love, where his animation is used to punctuate scenes (see some clips here).
Photograph of Blake and Duncan from PatrickMcMullan.com; still from one of Blake's sequences in Punch Drunk Love
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Did anyone notice that the artist who ended up dead was covering MK-ULTRA and Project Monarch (two ultra-secret CIA mind control projects) on her blog???
See http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/07/citizen-wit-and.html
She was a rising star successful writer. What the f*ck happened?
Damn, Better buy up their art quick. I'm sure the prices will skyrocket. ANd the romantic notion that he died after she died will probably appreciate their works a thousandfold. I'm gonna save up and buy some of his works.
This is horrible.
This is one one of the saddest stories I've ever heard
heartbreaking
does that mean that there is an apartment opening in the east village?
My condolences to both their families.
This is sad, but hurting yourself over a SO is ridiculously stupid. There's counseling and other people.
I want to buy this print from blake. http://www.starswelove.com/scriptsphp/showimg.php?imageid=14524
kooky hipsters. whatta way to go.
it's a long way from the east village to the far rockaways.
These 2 were "the splasher"
This is terrible news. I suspected something was up when I didn't see a new entry on Theresa's blog for a couple of days. She ALWAYS posted. Three days ago, after there was nothing on Wit for a week, I sent her an e-mail asking if she was okay. I have my answer now. I have only known about her death, and the death of Jeremy, for the last two hours.
Theresa was brilliant and gorgeous, totally fierce and uncompromising. Wit was only the latest manifestation of her wit, her particular genius, her take-no-prisoners brand of humor and investigation. Her talent was immense. She was a master stylist and effortlessly hip. While I did not share each of her various passions -- for Kate Moss, perfume, and the apocryphal LA Lunar Society -- I never hesitated to visit her blog. I knew I would always be enlightened and entertained, no matter how far out the subject. And I was in awe of Jeremy. I'm thinking of the brilliant Winchester installation at the 2005 Whitney Biennial, and also his last show at Feigen (a projected video about LA). Amazing, visionary stuff.
This is all too fucking bad. When I saw the entry on Anna Gaskell and her spook dad Jim Cownie posted on the May 13, 2007 Wit, I immediately feared that Theresa and Jeremy's lives were in danger. That they might be "disappeared". That the people they were dissing, and their assorted CIA compadres, would not allow the challenge to go unanswered. All reports indicate a double suicide, first Theresa and then Jeremy. But I wonder....
Why is this sad?
An innocent person murdered or raped is sad. Not 2 people at the pinnacle of their lives commiting suicide.
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/05/the_trouble_wit.html#comments
this post of hers is from a couple of months ago>>>
that's so crazy!
WOW, that blog of hers really shows what a paranoid nut-job she was. Perhaps if she and her little man had been more liberal in their application of tin-foil to their hats and windows they would be alive to blog more fairy tales about imagined conservative conspiracies. Crazy New Yorkers kill themselves, this is news? Or is this just an attempt to drive up the price their works command by sensationalizing their broken-brain actions?
Lance- your humble working boy
good riddance.
from the Post: "Blake Robin, a friend of the couple, said he had a hard time imagining the two committing suicide.
'Suicide would never be on their to-do list,' he said. 'The narrative of the wallet and the clothes under the boardwalk, it's like somebody writing a cliché, it's not them.
'It would be embarrassing to them. It seems too calculated for the most uncalculated people. I can see some teenager in Idaho who listens to Marilyn Manson doing this, but not them.'"
what a sad and cowardly little creature you are, lance.
So maybe T & J are not dead. J left the clothes, wallet and note under the boardwalk as a ruse and then split, undoubtedly to rendezvous with T at some prearranged secret locale. And T never actually died. The coroner's report, the police report, the suicide note, the funeral outside Detroit -- all this was staged, with the collusion of dozens, just so T & J could stage this massive deception. Is it a major piece of performance art? Are they on the lam, one step ahead of the Iowa CIA Scientologist biker mafia? Will they ever resurface, or are they underground forever?
Yesterday morning I learned about losing 2 of my best friends in the world. I walked across town to Feigen hoping that it was, as comment #19 suggests, all a ruse.
I hoped that upon presenting the gallerists there with a wink and a secret password I would find T+J (and T) tucked away in the corner, safe from further damage (from which tormentors I'm not quite sure, though I'd been hearing an earful about a handful for some time).
But they weren't.
I really really can't believe they are gone. Theresa did not deserve the harrassment that drove her to the edge and over. Jeremy did not deserve to lose his best friend. I wish he hadn't walked into the water as a result but I can't imagine the anguish he must have felt. I still believe he will be back soon.
In the meantime a dearly felt RIP to my darling sister-manquée Theresa L. Duncan.
And I'm still hoping i just had the wrong password.
- Blake (yes, that was me quoted in the Post)
hipsters just never let up, do they?
[9][15][16][21]: You are unfeeling brutes. Or are you all the abusive sockpuppets of Jim Cownie? It's not enough to drive T & J to their deaths. Now you need to defame their memories. What do they call it at Langley? Disinformation?
I agree with both [11] and [19]. Which is not difficult, since I am both [11] and [19].
Like [19], I want to believe T & J are still with us, and that whatever necessitated this great artifice of disappearance has actually left them alive and well, just in the safety of another dimension. That whatever harpies besieged them have not actually harmed them beyond repair.
Like [11], I celebrate their lives and their achievement, rue their premature deaths, and cry out for justice. They were both strong, creative people. Suicidal tendencies were not part of their usual mindset. Even if their deaths are fully investigated by the authorities and deemed to be self inflicted, they did not choose suicide without a lot of help from their tormentors. Those people -- some of whom were named in the Wit entries of May 13 et. al. -- must be brought to justice.
T presented the evidence. It remains for justice to be done.
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/05/the_trouble_wit.html
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/07/citizen-wit-and.html
Terribly sad, would bet on drinking and/or drugs before CIA hit job. Walk into any NA or AA meeting on any given day in NYC and listen to at least a few artists and writers talk about having resigned to ending it all in days of drinking/drugging and usually trying/"failing" at least once.
Personally, my beach of choice was always Long Beach. Vicodin, Stoli, swim. Always in that order, but always wound up waking up on the beach, thank God.
Thoughts are with those parents. That's the call you hope to Christ you never get as a parent.
please respect them both as they are today.this is a loss. like them or not. they each had something to say that contributed to our culture.
Please--stop the conspiracy theories now.
The only thing that Theresa's May 13, 2007 blog entry shows is that her mental state had gotten so bad that she couldn't even put together a coherent narrative about why she was being harassed.
The tragedy here, apart from the loss of two young lives, is that her mental illness was never recognized as such and she evidently never got help with it. And her world was so intertwined with Jeremy's that he was not only unable to help her, but couldn't even help himself.
Brilliant and beautiful? Sure. Troubled? Almost definitely. An avoidable loss? Without a doubt.
Wow. There are some sick, callous, worthless scumbags posting to this thread. "good riddance?" Burn in hell, scum.
There is a lot more to this story. I just hope
that the police continue to dig into Theresa's
background and certain people she knew.
Anna Gaskell would be a good place to start.
Theresa was beautiful, witty and had a keen eye for other people's talent. She was perhaps the most accomplished self promoter of the 90s. She was not however, kind to most people. Insecure, arrogant and fixated on vanity, she was a flavor best enjoyed from a distance.
I do give her credit for going out with a literary flair. How she would delight in Jeremy's walk into the sea. She would see it as a tribute worthy of her bloated ego. Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
http://ronrosenbaum.pajamasmedia.com/2007/07/24/bulletin_theresa_duncan_not_ye.php
Many people may remember Jeremy as the MC and roadie for the Washington, DC punk band the Nation of Ulysses. But that was 18 years ago.
Scientology is a red herring. She had an active imagination and was not adverse to mischievous flights of fancy. When Andre Breton confessed to leaving the door to his hotel room ajar before he went to bed in the hope he would wake up the next morning to find a marvelous woman next to him, it might have been Tracy he was thinking of. Much of her bluster and subterfuge--like Andre Breton's--was not a result of malicious deceit, but disatisfaction with day-in-day-out reality. But there is more than a little truth to comment #28. There I did it--I have spoken ill of the dead. Now I'm going to hell forever.