Sam Moore examines Paul Thek’s multifaceted practice and asks how an artist so resistant to categorisation is finally being seen anew.
Depressed in Berlin, Chris Kraus first discovered the work of Paul Thek through a catalogue for The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a show that had come and gone. Writing about this discovery in her book Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Kraus quotes a letter written by Thek to Peter Hujar: “Life is getting longer. I smoke dope, I fall in love with living.” Seized By Joy, a recent exhibition of Thek’s paintings at Thomas Dane Gallery, clarifies this idea. Through a series of landscapes that are both material and spiritual, it’s difficult not to feel caught up in Thek’s spell, to feel him revealing some innate, hidden possibility of the world through a glimpse into his inner one. Seized By Joy isn’t the first time this year that Thek’s work has been shown in London. His Portrait of Peter Hujar (1964), an impressionistic view of the photographer that presents his face in fragments, broken up by gridded squares, featured in the Peter Hujar retrospective Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row at the beginning of the year. Hujar’s portrait of Thek even greets the viewer at the entrance to Thomas Dane Gallery. While the relationship between the two men has become a well-known part of art history, it seemed for a while that Thek’s practice would never return to the limelight in the way that Hujar’s did; Kraus mentions to me that she’s surprised by the notion of Thek being seen as just a move, wondering if the Hujar connection — who she describes as having been “such an interesting and ripe-to-be-rediscovered artist himself” — could have been something that brought Thek’s work back into people’s minds sooner.
Thek’s legacy, though, is complicated by loss. Paintings and sculptures, notebooks, and fragmented artefacts that capture lost or destroyed work have meant that his practice and personality have become difficult to pin down. In Aliens, Kraus describes Thek as being “ambivalently homosexual” and “ambivalently Catholic,” warning against such one-sided readings of his work, an idea shared by Kenny Schachter, one of the curators of Seized by Joy. “He wasn’t a hippie messiah or anything,” she muses to me over email — ironic given that The Tomb was the sub-heading Thek gave to his 1967 sculpture, The Death of a Hippie, a hyper-realistic wax cast of himself, dead, that summed up and buried the era. “Maybe if he’d written manifestos or something?” Kraus wonders, something that could define his practice. “But he made such a huge and varied body of work during his lifetime.” While Seized By Joy focused on Thek’s paintings, across his career he also made installations, sculptures, and the vast Procession in Honour of Aesthetic Progress: Objects to Theoretically Wear, Carry, Pull, or Wave (1968), a project born from the artist’s desire to create a show designed to function like a ritualistic procession. But many of the objects were destroyed in transit from Thek’s studio in Rome to the gallery in Essen, where they would be shown. The piece was transformed; half of the gallery became a studio, and the other half would house mended pieces of the procession, something that Thek would call a work in progress.
This idea is reflected in the paintings on display in Seized By Joy; they show Thek as an artist defined by a seemingly endless curiosity. In Window with Figure (1987), he depicts an impressionistic view inside an apartment window, the figure present but not fully formed. Untitled (Path Through the Trees) (1987) offers a view through a clearing, a promise of something yet to come, but worth travelling towards. Untitled (Cityscape) (1972), meanwhile, shows a fragment of a city, the whites of the canvas still visible; the town itself is framed through a window. Just as Window with Figure looks in on a private world, Cityscape looks out at the wider one. As Andrew Durbin — editor at Frieze and author of an upcoming book on Thek and Peter Hujar — explains, “What Paul was trying to do with his paintings was settle his mind, to place himself: Paul was constantly on the move.” A painterly practice rooted in his everyday life “tethered Paul to the world, a world which confused and enchanted him.” In contrast to this, Thek’s sculptural work seemed to be considered as something more outward-looking and political — from the title that made it seem like a kind of death knell for sixties counterculture, to the flowers left for the wax figures by Vietnam War protestors when it was on display at the Whitney in 1968 — a far cry from the vivid aliveness of the almost mystical internal landscapes that Thek explores in his paintings.
Just as Thek was enchanted by the world, curator Kenny Schachter was enchanted by Thek. “I revere Paul, and have for the last forty years, because of his intellectual and conceptual rigour,” he tells me, “and the sheer aesthetic and physical beauty of the art. It was purposefully inconsistent and ever-changing and transforming.” Thek’s work, says Schachter, carried with it a desire to “flout the increasingly market-driven art world, and make what he considered purposely crappy looking paintings.” Thek was keenly aware of the limits of mainstream taste and often reacted against it, famously declaring, I’m against interpretation! after which, of course, Susan Sontag’s collection of essays on aesthetics was named. According to Durbin, this opposition to interpretation meant that, at times, “people didn’t see his work as important; they didn’t know what they were looking at.”
In his essay Death and Transfiguration (1992), Mike Kelley argues that Thek’s work remained in the shadows due to its inability to align with the mainstream cultural narratives of the sixties. Rather than being “cool, reasonable, and in touch with national identity,” it was symbolic of what the Bush/Reagan administration saw as the nation’s “economic and social decline.” For Kelley, the sixties of “dirt, mysticism, drugs, and anarchy” were the sixties of Paul Thek, something that makes the artist “hard to reconcile with the official versions of art history now emerging.” Durbin expands on this; critics saw Thek as — “needed him to be,” he corrects — “a relic of the sixties, because he refused to align with the values of official art culture, which was, and is, inherently conservative.”
At first, I thought that the paintings in Seized By Joy existed in opposition to Thek’s sculptural works; the pastoral beauty of the paintings, so expansive and full of promise, seemed as if they could only exist in opposition to the stark morbidity of The Tomb. Some of this, I learn, is because of materiality — “So many of the paintings were made on newspaper,” Durbin explains, “which was a major component of the environments: his pyramid was created from newspaper” — while some is thematic. Thek’s work seems to constantly ask what comes next, be it after the death of the hippie and the counterculture that the figure represents, or what lies just over the horizon in a painting like Untitled (beach with figures)(1987). This expansiveness, the vastness of Thek’s practice, his curiosity about the world, runs counter to the art world both then and now. Schachter casts blame for Thek’s continued dismissal at the feet of a “myopic, narrow-minded art world that shows no sign of changing. The market values easily categorisable, samey-samey art.” Thek, of course, is anything but easily categorisable, not just because of the vast number of artistic forms and influences that he pulled together in his practice, but in the multitudes that it was able to contain.
With an ambivalent attitude towards aspects of his identity, Thek’s practice seems to capture his famous declaration to Sontag of being against interpretation. One of the joys and challenges of Thek’s work seems to be the fact that it doesn’t offer a singular image of the artist. Instead, through vivid paintings and morbid, darkly funny sculpture, Thek’s work presents an artist and practice alive with contradiction and possibility. While the paintings show an artist who has fallen in love with living, The Tomb and the Technological Reliquaries series from the sixties (also known as Meat Pieces, these were waxworks of severed body parts contained in plexiglass) reveal something a little darker. But even these pieces are animated by inherent tensions — between the warmth of the wax and the cold acrylic. Thek’s work, then, could be defined by its willingness to embrace contradiction; to continually challenge a viewer instead of spelling out either the art or the life of the artist himself.
After she comes across Thek’s work in Aliens, Kraus tells us: “Here begins the difficult task of trying to understand another person.” Seized by Joy didn’t go out of its way to understand Thek — if anything, the show seemed to gesture toward just how difficult that would be — but instead attempted to understand the world as Thek saw it, and how he might have wished for it to be. For Schachter, Thek remains something of an outsider artist, though an “ever-expanding audience of art appreciators that is desperate [to distinguish itself] from […] trend followers” is beginning to catch up with the artist’s greatness. Maybe this status doesn’t need to be an albatross around the neck of Thek’s practice. Durbin, meanwhile, sees a universality in Thek: “His work is so much about being alive.” One can hope that this is the legacy Thek has left us in his paintings, sculptures, and conceptual work — a way to understand being alive, and to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible.
Words by Sam Moore
