The artwork world loves a tie-in—a ebook or a film that gives an event to “reframe” sure artists. In latest months, Andrew Durbin’s very positive biography “The Great World That Virtually Was: A Lifetime of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” has helped to advertise two artists whom youthful viewers specifically could have been solely tangentially conscious of. Paul Thek (1933-88) is the topic of two exhibits up now, on the Galerie Buchholz (by means of July 25), and at Tempo (by means of Aug. 14). Every affords credible shows of Thek’s eclecticism, and whereas he wasn’t simply categorizable, and his producing in varied kinds confounded the artwork market, which is an efficient factor, you actually have to choose by means of the work. Thek used quite a lot of supplies—along with portray and sculpture, he designed theatre units, and used his personal physique as an object—with a purpose to see what’s good, or merely “fascinating.”
“Purple Shrine,” from 1964, by Paul Thek.Artwork work © the Property of Paul Thek / Courtesy Tempo Gallery / the Watermill Heart
For a time, Thek, a onetime Cooper Union scholar, supported himself driving a cab and doing no matter else he wanted to do to outlive, however his first paid gig as an artist was portray and, ultimately, serving to to assemble units for a theatre firm in Rhode Island. Following that, he designed units for a theatre firm in Coral Gables, Florida, the place he lived for a time with a lover. By means of his good friend Susan Sontag, Thek met the theatre director Robert Wilson, in 1970; by 1972 he had created units for Wilson’s hundred-and-sixty-eight-hour piece “Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace,” carried out in Iran. Thek had a long-standing fascination with our bodies, these repositories of hope and decay, however neither present focusses a lot on that. At Buchholz, I used to be significantly taken with a number of drawings, from 1969, of his studio in Amsterdam, which have a fantastical, Cubist-like construction, however with numerous stream, too. Whereas the Buchholz show concentrates on Thek’s means of intellection, the present at Tempo, “Dream of Vanishing,” feels not a lot thrown collectively as confused. As a substitute of 1 curatorial imaginative and prescient, a bunch of three folks organized the show, and you may really feel it. Regrettably, a lot of the present is skilled on Thek’s curiosity in spiritual iconography—a feathery cross, and so on.—however it was intriguing to see his “Purple Shrine,” from 1964, impressed by mummified corpses he noticed within the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, which will need to have been an affect on Andres Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ)” (1987). However Thek’s fascination with spectacle didn’t essentially serve him nicely as an artist, nor did his resistance to curators and gallerists who believed in him: he might have benefitted from distillation, and from modifying.—Hilton Als
Learn Hilton Als on “Hujar:Contact,” a present of Peter Hujar’s images, up on the Morgan Library & Museum, by means of Oct. 25.
