Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Paintings: Sodium Fox: Fragmented Crypto Self-Portrait

This book explores the most recent media artworks of contemporary American artist Jeremy Blake (1971-2007). He entered the ocean at Rockaway Beach, New York, one week after his partner of many years, Theresa Duncan, had also committed suicide. Blake’s time-based paintings have attracted many admirers in and beyond the art world. This book provides the first academic approach to Blake’s work and examines his unfinished film trilogy Wild Choir: Psychological portraits, as the artist called them, of fashion designer Ossie Clark (1942-1996), contemporary poet and singer David Berman (born 1967), and legendary punk-band manager Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010). The author focuses on the trilogy’s middle piece, Sodium Fox, based on a prose poem by Berman, and argues that it can be read as a postmodern fragmented crypto self-portrait of the artist. This interdisciplinary study is remarkable and ground-breaking in two senses: theoretical and methodical approaches of visual culture are applied and combined with cultural history, popular culture, media art history, and portrait painting and its detailed intertextual references unfold the narration behind this never-before interpreted artwork.