Burning Bright: Jeremy Blake's 'Moving Paintings'

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"PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE" is some kind of cinematic milestone, marking both Adam Sandler's acting debut and the 10th time Emily Watson outperformed her material.

In addition, Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 feature employed, as title cards and transitions, a handful of "moving paintings" by Jeremy Blake, computer-animated dissolves of color fields into star fields — sort of Morris Louis meets Ross Bleckner, Flickr meets the Lava Lite.

The same year, Blake worked equally dreamy turf for Beck's "Round the Bend" video, giving a unique visual identity to the erstwhile boy wonder's downer disc "Sea Change."

An entrancing new Corcoran show, "Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake," finds the artist augmenting his abstract grammar with a wide range of representational imagery, the better to conjure the imaginative and cultural ferment engulfing Swinging London frock designer Ossie Clark, punk impresario Malcolm McLaren and lo-fi poet David Berman.

"Sodium Fox" plays hardest with visual puns, turning a blivet into a blowout comb and an "Asteroids" boulder into a crumple of paper. Likewise with verbal references: Berman's voice-over namechecks Julian Jaynes' theory of "the breakdown of the bicameral mind." On the soundtrack, Ernest Tubb is voicechecked; on the screen, Barry Hannah is facechecked. Synthetic crackling underpinning the looping scenery suggests a hipster Yule Log, its flames endlessly renewed.

"Reading Ossie Clark" draws on the faded fashionista's scattered diaries, a jet-setting nightclubber's journal much like Andy Warhol's. Blissed-out and bleary-eyed, it recalls the days when the children of the Blitz were puttin' on the Ritz. Not confined to headphones, Clarissa Dalrymple's narration washes over the gallery as studio echo and room reverb combine in a sonic haze.

Left unfinished is "Glitterbest," a parade of Day-Glo Rorschachs named for McLaren's management company. If there's one thing the maestro understood, it was how to con people into perceiving evolution as revolution.

Punk was nothing more than glam turned inside out and left to rot, entrails and sequins on the sidewalk. Or as McLaren's seductively superior voice intones: "To a pirate, style is just an ‘X' on a tattered map ..."

Underlying the slick, clever manipulation of word and image is Blake's obsession with artists' stories, particularly those of the drug-fueled, doomstruck variety.

It seems more than coincidental that Clark was an early flameout who descended into poverty and obscurity before being murdered by an ex-lover. Or that McLaren manipulated the self-destructive tendencies of Sid Vicious into violent spectacle. Or that, a couple of years before teaming with Blake, Berman survived a suicide attempt.

Blake didn't survive his; he took his own life in July. It's more than just the obvious shame, though, because unlike the artists he idolized, he left no suspicion that his best work was behind him.

» Corcoran, 500 17th St. NW; through March 2; 202-639-1700. (Farragut North/Farragut West)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon

Images courtesy Corcoran Gallery