The Hot Ying of Paul Thek

Back in the 1960's, a thirty-something Paul Thek made a big splash in the New York art world.  Inspired by a visit to the Catacombs of the Capuchins in Palermo, where he encountered fully dressed corpses on display, he fabricated human body parts and meat in wax and paint before encasing them in plastic vitrines. Andy Warhol included Thek and his boyfriend, photographer Peter Hujar in his early "Screen Tests," adding them to a reel he called "The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys." Thek was hot, and definitely enjoying his 15 minutes.

"Finger of Audrey Flack" (1959-62)

(1960s)

PACE included several of Thek's "Technological Reliquaries," mostly untitled, in a show this summer. When I first encountered one at MoMA in 2020,  it reminded me of Damien Hirst.  I got that backward although Hirst has never acknowledged the obvious influence. 

(1964)

Fred McDarrah shot this photograph of the boyish Thek--whose Catholicism stamped him hard--at the Stable Gallery, his first show, with a reliquary he called "Birthday Cake," a symbol of living decay.

Birthday Cake (1964)

Around the same time, Warhol, whose reputation was also in its early stages, gave Thek one of his Brillo boxes but Thek, five years younger, pranked him by inserting one of his reliquaries.  He showed the composite work, again at Stable, the following year.  I wonder if there was bad blood between them afterward. Thek was the hot ying to Warhol's cool yang. 

(1965)

Thek struck a pose for his boyfriend, too.

Paul Thek on Zebra by Peter Hujar (1965)

A Fulbright scholarship took Thek (and Hujar) to Rome after a third exhibit of his reliquaries cemented his iconoclastic reputation.  He left behind a sometime lover, Susan Sontag, who credited him, despite his unschooled intellect, with titling one of her most famous books, Against Interpretation.  Sontag even considered having a child with Thek.  Neither had any use for Warhol, whom they accused of commodifying art.

(1965)

Unlike Hirst--reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist--Thek never made much money from his meticulously constructed reliquaries which required a lot more labor than factory filmmaking or silkscreening.  In fact, "The Tomb" (sometimes referred to as "Death of a Hippie" by critics who considered it both his masterwork and a protest against the war in Viet Nam) never sold at all.  A life-size wax effigy of Thek's own body dressed in a pink suit minus a finger and surrounded by drug paraphernalia, "The Tomb" did, however,  eerily foreshadow his own premature passing, six years after the work was lost, possibly due to the artist's own ambivalence about its commercial failure or his inability to pay for its retrieval.  

"The Tomb" (1967, photo by Peter Hujar)

I couldn't help but think of the way Brian de Palma ended Carrie (one of my all-time favorite films) when I saw this fashionably macabre reliquary which resembles the missing body part from "The Tomb."  Those Catholic boys do have a thing for blood.  It must be the eucharist.

(1967)

With a bio as intriguing as his, is it any wonder I was eager to see not one but two concurrent gallery shows of Thek's work? Alas, his artistic resurrection has taken a back seat to commercial considerations or, to put it more cynically, grave robbery, at both. His untitled newspaper collages at Galerie Bucholz seemed particularly thin, as if they were archive leftovers.

 (1971)

(1971)

At least "The Flag (from Processions)" had some heft.

(1977)

There was certainly more "meat" to "Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing," at PACE which had exhibited some of his reliquaries during his heyday. Again, he didn't bother to title most of the work.

 (1974)

Self-Portrait in Studio (ca 1980s)

Thek's departure for Europe--which included several isolated years on an Italian island--crippled his career in the United States where art for art's sake had become passé due to the rise of market forces. After returning to New York in 1976, he briefly took a teaching position at Cooper Union, his alma mater, but turning his ideas into art became increasingly unaffordable for a drug-user who was eventually forced to earn his keep as a grocery bagger and janitor, particularly during an era characterized by unrestrained hedonism. 

For example: did school chairs left on the street inspire this installation? The size of the canvases may reflect his relative impoverishment in comparison to a new generation of artists--including Julian Schnabel and David Salle--who played the gallery game much better than he.

"Where It's At" (1979-80)

Larger works like these were produced on the kind of cheap paper used by aspiring set designers for high school theatrical productions.

(undated)

A collection of previously unseen scrolls--each more than ten feet long--suggests artistic mania, drug-fueled or not.

(ca 1973)

(detail, 1973)

Only "Pumpkin Pyramid" 

(1975)

. . . and another reliquary recall his earlier work, if half-heartedly.  

(1975)

Bizarre accusations about their sexual relationship alienated even Sontag although they reconciled before his death. Up-and-coming artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thek's neighbors on the Lower East Side, seemed unaware of him despite their connection to Warhol.  Thek doesn't rate a mention in his Diaries; nor does Blake Gopnik reference him in his exhaustively researched Warhol bio. His reputation has remained mostly in eclipse since the late Sixties.  Benjamin Moser, Sontag's Pulitzer Prize biographer, explained why in 2020:

Today, the works of [Joseph] Cornell, Warhol and [Jasper] Johns sell for tens of millions. Thek's do not.  His sculptures of raw meat and severed body parts, reeking of chthonic sacrifice, destined him to minority status.  But if connoisseurs like Sontag admired him fanatically, this was precisely because, like Artaud, he was never assimilable.  Indeed, many of his most remarkable works no longer exist:  they were temporary constructions that, like dances, survive only in photographs.  To describe them, he coined the word "installation."

(1978)

His work brightened, uncharacteristically, in his final years.  Thek died in 1988,  at the age of 54, a year after he was diagnosed with AIDS.  It killed Hujar nine months earlier.  The Wonderful World That Almost Was by Andrew Durbin chronicles their life together.  I can't wait to read it.

(1984)

Sontag dedicated AIDS and Its Metaphors to Thek.  It's truly a shame the Andy Warhol Museum doesn't make his "Screen Test" accessible on the internet, although you can find Hujar's.

(1984)