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In Memoriam

  • Memories of Theresa
  • Play Theresa Duncan's Video Games Free Online
    Rhizome has preserved Theresa Duncan's visionary video games and they are now available to be played for free at http://archive.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/
  • Chop Suey
    "Developed in 1994 and published the following year, Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups — smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably — as it was to the prescribed “girls 7 to 12” crowd. But it wasn’t a computer game. It was something else: a loosely-strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in “let’s-pretend”; a daydream in which the mundanity of small town Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists." Jenn Frank
  • Smarty
    Smarty was Theresa's second award winning video. This is a film version used to demonstrate the game for potential distributors. Art direction by Jeremy Blake
  • Theresa Duncan's The History of Glamour
    The History of Glamour “In the film, the main character is looking for an identity, and glamour becomes for her a potent form of self-expression. She finds it very liberating, because she’s from a small town. But by the end of the story, glamour becomes limiting, then imprisoning, so she becomes a writer, chooses grammar over glamour.” Theresa Duncan on The History of Glamour in Salon. ~ The History of Glamour, is a music-based animated film, it aired at The New York Video Festival, The Women Make Waves International Women's Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Montreal Film Festival, the Channel Hopping Festival in Austria and was selected for inclusion in The Whitney Biennial 2000. Glamour also aired on Channel 4 in the UK, on Canal + in France, and in Japan. * ~Writer and Director Theresa Duncan; Art Director Jeremy Blake; Art work by Jeremy Blake and Karen Kilimnick; animation by Eric Dyer.
  • Memorial Film
    This film was shown at a memorial for Theresa in New York, December 2007. A special thanks to Wilbur King for the use of clips from his film “Charlotte Goes Swimming” and Raymond Doherty, editor.
  • In a Land of 90's Barbieland Wreckage Chop Suey Got Everything Right
  • Memories Of Theresa Tumblr
  • The Lovely Theresa by Baron Von Luxxury
  • Eric Dyer

Worthy of Mention

  • Spoon -

    Spoon: Girls Can Tell
    This is a great, understated album that merits repeated plays. Spoon have made a literate, rocking, breakthrough record that occupies a funny place--the songs are not unconventional, per se, yet they're somehow really special. Girls Can Tell displays the emotional resonance and big rock power of, say, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople; the sonically referential, indie-rock smarts of a band like Versus; and amazing hooks that recall Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Like Jennyanykind, Moviola, and the Lilys, this Austin, Texas, trio has chosen to work on perfecting their craft without paying much heed to mainstream or trends. In spite of (but mostly because of) wrenching breakup-centered lyrical material delivered in a very real, matter-of-fact way, Girls Can Tell is one of those life-affirming pop albums you know you'll return to in years to come. --Mike McGonigal (*****)

Books

  • Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

    Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
    Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. (****)

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Witchy Atavism v. Lines Of Flight

Me_gettin
Vaguely condescending but mostly respectful review of Wit favorite Karen Kilimnik's survey show at the ICA in Philadelphia by New York Times critic Roberta Smith, below. For we of Wit all Kilimnik's artistic devices and guises are brilliant ways to get past the mystification of female sexuality and female intelligence in culture, something that high culture is still as guilty of as low culture. (High culture is in fact now perhaps more guilty of this than low, which permits more of certain liberties freed from the class restraints of the former.)

The vaguely anti-social (or undersocialized; or as Smith puts it "woman-child") Kilimnik has the nuts or stupidity to keep pointing out this mystification. Artists like Smith favorite Cindy Sherman are the adolescent ones to we of Wit, as they have childishly made a bargain with this system rather than creating a space outside it. We of Wit are not fans of Sherman's work because it participates in creating a nostalgic (or retrograde, if you wish) aura of witchy atavism around women. Kilimnik's adolescent tinge is uncomprising and bold--the stance of a Deleuzian madwoman describing new "lines of flight."

Smith herself also seems to deliberately rely on this kind of mystificiation and Hellfire-style social S & M in her career as a female art critic. That's not power to we of Wit, it's a pose. One that is designed to make other people (call them "child-men", if you please) comfortable.

"Karen Kilimnik has gotten the survey that her strange, still difficult achievement deserves. For one thing, her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is appropriately strange itself, beginning with a barren, seemingly empty, party’s-over gallery. It goes deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all-too-American sense of emptiness. It also makes her efforts in installation art, which encompass materials as various as glitter, fake snow and blood, stuffed animals, ballet shoes and piles of party drugs, feel of a piece with her painting, photography, video and drawing."

Link: Karen Kilimnik - Art - Review - Philadelphia - New York Times.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 in Art |

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