Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
From girl-games to glamour: By Matthew DeBord. Silicon Alley star Theresa Duncan moves nimbly between worlds.
Sep 24, 1998 | Theresa Duncan's widely praised CD-ROM games for girls have sported whimsical, fulsomely cute titles -- Chop Suey, Smarty, Zero Zero -- and have struggled to offset the splatterfest tit-show that governs much of the current gaming scene. But Duncan is no soft-focus cornflower scourge to the platoons of polygon-wielding code boys. Nor is she the pigtailed digital minx -- Silicon Alley's dream girl -- who coolly winks from the dozens of photos that have graced reviews heralding her narrative-intensive projects as the kinderfeminist's answer to Maximum Barbie.
She is instead a thoroughly savvy and, by her own admission, predatory businesswoman who just happens to possess a spunky narrative sense and an affection for old-school children's books, as well as chutzpah by the gallon. Spending an hour with her in the Manhattan offices of her stakehorse, Nicholson NY, you can almost hear the pitter-pat of the business-magazine profile writers in the distance. With her streaky blond hair, braided in signature twin tails across her strap-halter-encased collarbones, thick stripes of black eye shadow and Paper magazine wardrobe, she could be a Condi Nast scout or a stylist for Marc Jacobs. Duncan's image is just that, however; beneath lurks the spirit of a true player.
I'm immediately taken aback. I'm wearing a suit -- a cotton summerweight Brooks Brothers suit that isn't doing its job on a muggy and overcast August afternoon -- so as to better confront the diva-ish Duncan. But I've completely overdressed for the meeting at Nicholson's Puck Building suite -- the kind of place where molded plastic chairs in very retro burnt avocado await the arrival of the first iMac. Plus, I'm in no mood to come off as a prototypical Alley scrivener, swaddled in St|ssy, Gap khaki and treads by somebody with point guards on the payroll.
Duncan's latest undertaking is an hour-long, digitally animated mockumentary film called "The History of Glamour." It's a merciless satire of New York's incestuous '90s cultural moment: fashion, art, celebrity and various downtown style tribes converge and are shredded for our delectation. Clearly, Duncan is growing up, and I want her to think she's being interviewed by an adult.
That didn't work. Duncan, at 29, is engaged in a sort of preemptive maturation driven at least partially by market forces, and all my delusions of simpatico -- not to mention the theory that I might snag a few pointers about exiting my current Peter Pan mode -- quickly vanish. Duncan is making it up as she goes along, counterbalancing her Liz Phairish tomkitten chic with fabulous press and a slightly ballsy manner that at times can be patronizing.
I cringe a little, for instance, when an e-mail response from her describes Manhattan's mopey gallery circuit as "the rarefied world of the New York art scene," from which was drawn a "Glamour" collaborator, artist Karen Kilimnik. Duncan says that if she used live actors in her work, rather than just voices, she'd want to follow the ensemble model of Woody Allen, Hal Hartley and ... Werner Herzog! She is not a woman who levels her cross hairs on the middlebrow, but the naked aspiration strikes me as more than a little overwrought.
Nothing to get all that ruffled over, of course, since her bootstrapping enthusiasm and indefatigable confidence in her ability to get noticed have resulted in a crucial whammy to the core assumptions of the interactive gaming cabal. "I've been thinking of us in terms of something like the Warhol factory," she says when asked about the composition of her creative team, which includes illustrator/boyfriend/partner Jeremy Blake and Washington, D.C., punk stalwart Brendan Canty of Fugazi, plus former Bikini Kill bassist Karhi Wilcox and a pair of Mac-jockey animators. It's a telling comparison: Like Warhol, Duncan's business is her art, and even if she hasn't completely abandoned her childish ways, she knows exactly what she wants.
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