Paul Thek’s Eclectic Art

The art world loves a tie-in—a book or a movie that provides an occasion to “reframe” certain artists. In recent months, Andrew Durbin’s very fine biography “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” has helped to promote two artists whom younger viewers in particular may have been only tangentially aware of. Paul Thek (1933-88) is the subject of two shows up now, at the Galerie Buchholz (through July 25), and at Pace (through Aug. 14). Each offers credible displays of Thek’s eclecticism, and while he wasn’t easily categorizable, and his producing in various styles confounded the art market, which is a good thing, you really have to pick through the work. Thek used a variety of materials—in addition to painting and sculpture, he designed theatre sets, and used his own body as an object—in order to see what’s good, or merely “interesting.”

For a time, Thek, a onetime Cooper Union student, supported himself driving a cab and doing whatever else he needed to do to survive, but his first paid gig as an artist was painting and, eventually, helping to construct sets for a theatre company in Rhode Island. Following that, he designed sets for a theatre company in Coral Gables, Florida, where he lived for a time with a lover. Through his friend Susan Sontag, Thek met the theatre director Robert Wilson, in 1970; by 1972 he had created sets for Wilson’s hundred-and-sixty-eight-hour piece “Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace,” performed in Iran. Thek had a long-standing fascination with bodies, those repositories of hope and decay, but neither show focusses much on that. At Buchholz, I was particularly taken with several drawings, from 1969, of his studio in Amsterdam, which have a fantastical, Cubist-like structure, but with a lot of flow, too. Whereas the Buchholz display concentrates on Thek’s process of intellection, the show at Pace, “Dream of Vanishing,” feels not so much thrown together as confused. Instead of one curatorial vision, a group of three people organized the display, and you can feel it. Regrettably, much of the show is trained on Thek’s interest in religious iconography—a feathery cross, etc.—but it was intriguing to see his “Red Shrine,” from 1964, inspired by mummified corpses he saw in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, which must have been an influence on Andres Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ)” (1987). But Thek’s fascination with spectacle didn’t necessarily serve him well as an artist, nor did his resistance to curators and gallerists who believed in him: he could have benefitted from distillation, and from editing.—Hilton Als

Read Hilton Als on “Hujar:Contact,” a show of Peter Hujar’s photography, up at the Morgan Library & Museum, through Oct. 25.