PAUL THEK

Paul Thek (1933-1988)


On (Not) Being Forgotten


I knew who Paul Thek was—in a glamorous, nebulous sense—long before I met him, and before I saw any of his art. He was the dedicatee of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, which introduced so many in my generation to a world of postwar European thought and art-¬making of all kinds that had been ignored or overlooked by the American cultural establishment. For those of us experiencing intense alienation from our society in the 1960s, Against Interpretation opened a door into a far more interesting, philosophically and morally complex world, and if Sontag ¬didn’t write about Paul Thek (like Sontag, Thek was an American of unusually European sensibility) in that pivotal book, just the fact that it was dedicated to him certified his serious significance.

Only after I moved to New York, more or less permanently, in 1978, did Paul Thek come somewhat into focus: by then, “The Tomb—Death of a Hippie,” and the body of sculptural works known as the “meat pieces” had become imprints akin to those of Fluxus and other manifestations of process art (Ray Johnson’s Correspondance School was another very genial, instantly sympathetic one). In the fashion of the time, one greeted each of Thek’s indefinable installations and provocations as lively swipes at the stuffy and sclerotic realm of the art commodity while, at least in my case, interpreting its deeply embedded, metaphysical aims as prankish barbs at Thek’s Catholic childhood.

That isn’t at all what they are, of course, any more than the Catholic imagery of Warhol and Mapplethorpe constitutes a simple rejection of spirituality. But when I got to know Paul, after Peter Hujar introduced us on Second Avenue (where most everyone met everyone else in those years), I persisted in imagining that this otherworldly person shared my own sardonic contempt for anything that smelled of “belief.”

Paul’s mysticism was apparent enough, not only in his art but in the warp of his conversation. And mysticism, somehow, had a more palatable aura than any concrete ideas about “the world inside this one.” What we had in common skirted around that large, unknowable area: a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.

And of everyone around us, it turned out, when the epidemic that ultimately carried him away depopulated the sidewalks of Second Avenue and so many friends vanished one by one into thin air—often several in the span of a few days.

After Paul died, his name and his work seemed to vanish with him—not right away, but as the pompous majesty of the Eighties’ art world segued into the unembellished commodities market of the Nineties, and much of Paul Thek’s work was reincarnated, without any critical acknowledgement, in the fabulously profitable ouevres of artists like Damien Hirst and Robert Gober, those of us who still had his vast, quixotic pentimento vibrating in our eyes got another painful reminder of the cavernous separation that can exist between artistic success and material reward.

Like Jack Smith, Paul Thek was a protean, original artist whose stubborn fidelity to his inward concerns canceled quotidian reality. He was not as spaced-¬out as Smith, nor as imperious, but he had the same obduracy and defiance in the face of the dull and ordinary. And like Smith, Thek had no eye for the main chance in the materialist sense. (On his deathbed, he shrewdly joked that naming Robert Wilson as an executor of his estate was “the best career move” he ever made.)

Thek knew we were here today, gone tomorrow, and that he was here to do the particular thing he did, whether the world valued what he was doing or not. His notebooks are astonishing records of his interiority and his aesthetic brilliance. They incarnate a whole universe of values that was dying all the time Paul Thek was alive and continues to expire around us every day. They reflect an access to the ineffable that has not only become more elusive with passing time but has also ceased to carry any meaning for all except what once upon a time could be called the happy few.





Burnt Pages


The destruction of precious things has a long and variegated history. The burning of the library at Alexandria, the Emperor Shih Huang Ti’s immolation of all books predating his reign, and Goebbels’ book-¬burning sprees of the 1930s are separated by eons and represent exactly the same incurable tendency of our species. The demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, the subsequent looting of Baghdad’s archeological treasures, and Savonarola’s pyre of vanities express the same wish to level human existence to a condition of antlike orthodoxy.

To call such events barbaric is to automatically extol the virtues of civilization. They do mirror a terrifying ugliness in human nature, but also a kind of inevitability akin to the decay of all arrangements of matter, a process that civilization itself has accelerated to a fantastic rate. Consider how quickly the human species has poisoned an enormous planet, the actual area of which dwarfs our physical presence.

John Cage often quoted the Sri Lankan philosopher Ananda Coomarawamy: “Art imitates nature in its method of operation.”

There is something immensely powerful, final, and implacably seductive about the act of burning what’s valuable: in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, for example, when Natasya Filippovna tosses the hundred thousand roubles Rogozhin has given her into the fire, or in the last scenes of the contemporary Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s novella, Burnt Money, when the certain death of its protagonists renders their fortune in stolen currency meaningless and they set fire to it as a parting act of contempt for the police.

But the artist who burns his own work is engaged in a different dialogue with mortality, and with “value:” Gogol regularly wrote deliberately “bad” novels and stories in order to burn them, and immolated what may have been some of his best works as well; whether this was, in effect, a self-¬inflicted blow to his vanity or its supreme assertion could be endlessly disputed. Another ambiguity arises when the burning of art is left to others; preservationists are usually keen to assert their loyalty to an artist’s intentions, but whether Kafka truly wanted Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts or not haunts the latter’s decision not to do so—publishing them instead was either an arrogant breach of faith or a surpassing act of devotion.

Paul Thek set fire to his notebook pages, but preserved them in the process of being carbonized, making them a collaborative work between Thek and the Dutch photographer Edwin Klein. The resulting documentary evidence of their presence arrested, for a longer span, their inevitable disappearance; their written entries, drawings, and symbology survive as shards of an ultimately fictitious wholeness. “Time destroys everything we do,” wrote Thomas Bernhard, and few artists have ever been as wittily accepting of this circumstance as Thek was.

Thek allowed his most famous object, a wax cast of his own body in a coffin, to be destroyed by a shipping company. Possibly, he ¬couldn’t afford to retrieve it, but it’s hard to imagine any cash-¬strapped eminence in the art world today letting a signature piece go without raising an international hue and cry. This difference is resonant, reflecting as it does a kind of melancholy, knowing resignation long out of fashion in contemporary culture.

To the extent that Thek was a romantic figure, his frequent use of ephemeral materials could be viewed as an essentially futile refusal to make his work easily commodified and exchanged, but it’s more likely that the failure of the culture industry to preserve it in whatever state of decay he may have presented it in bewildered him as much as the culture’s confusion of aesthetics and entrepreneurialism did. The notebooks exhibit his bemused understanding of this failure of reception, while their contents revel in the multiform pleasures of Thek’s notation, and a kind of glee in his freedom to destroy them as much as he liked.

Burning these pages completed them as works of art: a work of art, in the end, is nothing, if not the memory of a work of art. Whether the viewer/reader mentally finishes the text or fills in the drawing’s missing passages, the thing itself is enough—quite radically, exactly enough.