Posted on 07/22/2007 8:14:31 PM PDT by LdSentinal
In a case that is reverberating in the art world, the New York Police Department said yesterday that a video-game designer and budding filmmaker committed suicide last week and that her companion, a rising art star, has been missing since Tuesday.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Her anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Bush, anti-Cheney, etc. blog.
Bleach in the gene pool.
No doubt overheard in some wannabe-chi-chi art bar tonight:
“So sad, they had so much promise...
“Yes, I wonder when their gallery will start looking for replacements for the fall season...maybe I should call their curator Tuesday?
Hey waiter, I have been waiting 3 minutes for my Grey Goose Negroni!”
Wages of sin are death.... dittos for stupidity
Mixed up confusion childless artistes. The other white meat. Muslims are laughing
Statement? There’s no statement. Maybe a weather report
I don’t think it was anti-American ... but the rest is right.
She left a very lengthy note to him and her family. He left a note talkiing about not being able to live without her.
“Budding” filmmaker? She’s 40.
Apparently it’s quite a common practice among suicides. I’ve seen it reported and commented upon. It’s a way of shedding your identity, they say. One might hope never to reach the point where this seems like the logical thing to do.
Perhaps now her art will be worth something.
Are you kidding?
Now that they’re dead, their registrations can be ‘voted’ as many times as necessary to win!
My, my, aren’t we naive??!?!?!?!?!!
Reagan80
This sounds like a Law and Order episode!
Beats me.
But people somehow just seem to do that when they do that sort of thing.
Like the others, I bet he folded them neatly, too.
I would love to know what demons were lurking for her to take her own life. This is a very sad story, and soon to be a movie of the week.
he is/was an exhibitionist?
May God have mercy on their souls.
The article, the blog,...it all just seems like a vacuous waste. How sad for them and for the state of art in the world today. It probably would have been better for these folks if they had gotten jobs like everybody else.
Maybe I missed something? I read the article twice, but do they mention how she killed herself? I thought it odd that they didn’t.
I was kinda thinking some fatal illness like a brain tumor that was not treatable.
He took it hard and decided to join her?
The article is kinda confusing.
I was not sure if 2 were dead and one missing then had to read it a few times.
I don’t go to NYTimes to long to load and I hate signing in.
Excuse me, but he is an artist.. - pfftt... like you would ever understand.
[What kind of statement was that making?]
He wanted to avoid that clammy feeling of wearing wet clothes?
A couple of suicide artists?
“Context, its all context... “
/ s
This reminds me of an episode of Kojak I once saw with James Keach (aka Mr. Jane Seymour). Or was it Law and Order?
You know.. in case the suicide thingy didn't work out ....and he didn't want to look ridiculous.../s
Legal drugs (antidepressants) or illegal drugs must be apart of this story.
Nothing like death as a career move.
Last I checked expressing ideas was 100% American.
Guess I’m only preaching to the choir.
Thanks for the explanation. From what was in the original story, the conclusions seemed a reach.
Sad.
Since when do democrats lose votes due to death? The dead keep right on voting democrat.
WOW, that is one whacked out woman........ from the limited bits that I perused in the blog, she alternated between paranoid rants about secret government COINTELPRO campaigns against her and tedious drivel about her latest mindless musings. Anyone living in such a paranoid, delusional world could easily go over the edge — seems like she already had. How sad......
Good point - do they have firm reasons to believe he committed suicide, or could the clothes and note be part of a cover-up to disappear??
fwiw, her blog (in which she refers to the two of them as “The Wits”) discusses some really weird supposed harassment and stalking of the two of them — either she/he/both turned really paranoid or else they got themselves entwined with some really strange ####. I don’t have the patience to read through all of her bizarre yet dull blog to figure out what was going on with her/them, but if anyone else does so I’d be curious to learn of your impressions.
[passage below from her blog linked above in #1]:
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Trouble With Anna Gaskell
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/05/the_trouble_wit.html
[first few tedious paragraphs omitted]
......
......Once the harassment of The Wits began, these disparate old Anna Gaskell anecdotes, which up to the late summer of 2006 had been completely unknown to me, began to suddenly bob up in Mr. Wit’s memory. Mr. Wit’s recollection was further jarred after we repeatedly witnessed Ms. Gaskell’s brother Zach mysteriously pacing in front of our Venice California home. Then there were the many cars with Iowa license plates following us around Los Angeles at the time. (We took photos of these, naturally.) Mr. Wit during this time also suddenly remembered that busy Cownie often travelled to South Dakota to attend some of the Midwest’s more unsavory biker rallies. But I guess being friends with ex-con bikers and Vegas mobsters doesn’t necessarily point to somebody who would, like, hire thugs to harass, threaten or—wow—maybe even kill people.
Much of the harassment of me and Mr. Wit was also conducted by the Church Of Scientology in L. A., who Cownie also no doubt also “does business with.” U.S. Intelligence “black ops” and “psy ops” have long relied on (or just outright invented) religious cults (including the Manson Family—Charles Manson received 150 hours of in-prison Scientology “auditing”), biker gangs, and the like in Federal Counterintelligence prorgrams in order to disrupt the counterculture since the 1960s. Read more about the CIA and cults here and couch jumping, Katie kidnapping mind controlled movie star Tom Crusie’s meeting with Scooter Libby and State Department head Richard Armitage here.
While this ongoing illegal harassment of Wit using Federal employees (or their “cut-out” counterparts) and Federal funding (your Homeland Security tax dollars at work!) is meant to deprive us of work and our livelihoods and even sanity, the harassment also has a curious sexual focus on Wit that mirrors this J. Edgar Hoover campaign against Black Panther organizer and actress Jean Seberg.
Like the Federal “Cointelpro” campaign that deliberately drove Seberg to suicide, the smear campaign against Wit and Mr. Wit uses as its basis pre-existing, completely invented smears started by married art professor Ralph Rugoff and his student girlfriend Hilary Chartrand in order to cover up their 2000 affair while both worked at the California College of Arts And Crafts. This is something that sharp-eyed Wit accidentally discovered during one particularly dreary art dinner in November of that year. Hilary Chartrand is friends with Anna Gaskell, who is also known for carrying on affairs with her married professors in order to have access to ethics-challenged art world log rollers like NY Times critic Roberta Smith and her husband Jerry Saltz. (See article below.)
To add the final dessert topping to this apocalyptic art world sundae, Mr. Wit says that normally dour Cownie frequently made jokes about child molestation as a “training” tool. This wouldn’t be so fucking spooky, friends of the Staircase, if Des Moines wasn’t the land of the Project Monarch/U.S. Intelligence rumored disappearance of Johnny Gosch and the odd resemblance of poor little Johnny to Bush White House gay hooker-psychological operative Jeff Gannon.
Anyway, Ms. Gaskell and I don’t seem to have much in common besides her very brief intersection with the life of Jeremy Blake, a period about which Mr. Wit says “She was so dumb, so arrogant and so mysteriously smug. She really thought she had some sort of advantage in every situation. I could never, ever figure out where that came from, because it sure wasn’t coming from anything she did. But I guess now I know.”)
This is a pretty ugly set of circumstances, and a weirder true tale than even Wit usually presents. But, as usual from what I hear, Ms. Gaskell has gotten somebody else to do the work of articulating and then cleaning up her mental messes for her. If you’re reading this, Anna, here’s some free advice: Stop accepting payoffs from Cownie immediately, get your younger brothers away from him, get a lawyer using only your own money, and have the lawyer get Cownie to answer a few questions about your mother and father.
If I were you, I’d even take a job in a factory in order to do it.
Bush’s fault.
LOL!
Just perfect.
,( : >)
Yeah, the sand-in-the-crotch thing is so annoying, right in the middle of your "statement."
I know a lot of people just like these too. They never know a moment of joy or peace in life. That is the price of the left’s century long attack on the foundations of western civilization.
The world in which the modern leftists live is so empty, so cynical, so devoid of meaning. I thank God every day that I was never sucked into the vortex of nihilism in which these pathetic people are trapped.
These two poor lost souls are in my prayers.
too true
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