“Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing”
Pace Gallery | 540 West 25th Street
Through August 14
“Paul Thek”
Galerie Buchholz | 31 West 54th Street
Through July 25
Paul Thek is having a moment. It’s too bad he probably can’t appreciate it. He had to die of AIDS in 1988, at the age of 55. But then again, maybe—mordantly, spitefully, and tasting acrid ashes—he can enjoy it, because in his life he’d seen so many of them, these moments, some sparkling and whispering, maybe taunting, snarling, history. And what does it mean for an artist to “have a moment” 40 or more years after the work was made and 35 years after his passing? Is this justice, or is it the art world metabolizing its own guilt into cultural capital? Also real capital: Now that the artist is safely dead, those fugitive, genre-defying, and too often literally uncared for and destroyed artworks might make bank.
In some respects, Thek’s way of being in the (art) world was the problem. He made for a rather elusive character. He left New York for a decade in 1967 to live on a remote Italian island; indeed, he left and returned repeatedly, a residential program pretty much guaranteed to obfuscate his living, “practicable” presence in the real, social, political New York art world. Perhaps his doing-it-my-way approach is admirable, less corrupt, less conniving, “good.” It’s still almost objectively a bad plan. To this day, do we not hear of certain artists’ quixotic, or maybe just spoiled, geographical wanderjahre? “They love me in Berlin, baby!”
Thek’s meat pieces from the ’60s, lumps of raw flesh rendered in colored wax and resin, are by far his most recognizable, signature in art-historical retrospect. (They came to be known as “technological reliquaries” after a similar phrase in a review by Robert Pincus-Witten in Artforum, one of the few critical pieces the artist acknowledged had any grasp of what he was doing.) Andy Warhol even sent Thek one of his Brillo boxes for the “Meat Joy à la Thek” treatment. This collaboration of sorts is perhaps the artist’s most familiar work. A gruesome calling card.
When, in 1964, Thek was looking for a gallery, he was daring and aimed high: Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, where Warhol had enjoyed a most auspicious New York debut. Thek showed several gory reliquaries. “I remember clearly that I thought I could smell the meat,” Arne Glimcher from Pace Gallery said of one visit, as Andrew Durbin recounts in The Wonderful World That Almost Was, his dual biography of Thek and his sometime boyfriend Peter Hujar, which was just published in April. (I know 95 percent more about Thek having read it than I did before. Well written, too.) Two years later, Thek’s show “Recent Work” opened at Pace on 57th Street. Sixty years later, he’s having his second Pace outing.
I must say, for all the bad things people are lately saying about this indubitably historic gallery, whatever its demerits, even disgraces, Pace’s second Thek show is more than creditable, assembling many different types of art that span the entirety of this career-wise disaster-prone artist. “Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing,” at the gallery’s flagship Chelsea location, is a survey of works from the early ’60s through the mid-’70s, and it’s quite fine, albeit a tad chaotic, with almost 60 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs on view. There are seven of his “picture light paintings,” from 1979-80, small, strange compositions, sometimes religious, in found gilt frames, each illuminated and installed low, at eye level, for a viewer seated in an accompanying child’s chair. (Thek was raised Roman Catholic, and while he may have lapsed, he never renounced, and these crypto- or outright Catholic ideas and images grew only stronger.) There are a few of the macabre meat pieces, as well as later paintings and drawings.
Regarding the outlandishly tacky, hopelessly memorable feathered cross here, that Thek and Susan Sontag were exceedingly tight comes to mind: She dedicated her 1966 collection Against Interpretation to her friend, who possibly suggested the rudiments of the anti-hermeneutical program she would take up at some length, and, by her biographer’s account, gave her the title directly by way of an admonishment, when she was going on about art (“Susan, I’m against interpretation”). One of the book’s landmark essays looms large, viz., “Notes on Camp,” and behind it, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” by the old scold Clement Greenberg. “The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance,” she writes. “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”
Thek’s fluffy cross, however, seems to belong to another dimension of failed or niche or unwritten taste. Maybe it’s really forward-looking, to the sensibility of John Waters—trash, and trash without apology, unembarrassed, dare I say it: proud. A nascent sensibility, one as yet unthematized, raw, pure, filthy. Sontag maintained that the Camp sensibility was untouched by real, sincere politics. This trash on the horizon that Thek anticipates seems very political though, in the way, maybe, that a possible heir, like punk, is.
Meanwhile, the show at Buchholz looks splendid in the recently relocated gallery’s bright, commodious rooms: smart and elegant, like the brilliant show Thek might’ve had as a living artist. It’s very strong on paintings on paper—specifically, newspapers. For reasons of economy, Thek favored this support, but it reads symbolically, too. Yellowed, crumpled newsprint suggests mortality and deliquescence. Such an elegant, exquisite deliquescence! Dinosaurs and dragons figure repeatedly, creatures of the nursery no less than paleontology, various emissaries of the distant past. A diorama from 1971, depicting a scene from the Mesozoic Age, features a backdrop of painted volcanoes and is portable, folding shut into a shipping crate. The palette is pink and blue, boys and girls.
Thek may have exuded a quiet yet intense cumulus of influence among his peers, but that makes him quintessentially a best-kept secret, not a tryout for Janson. In his own time and still, now, frequently, Thek is referred to as an artist’s artist. As a deep cut of the downtown gay canon, he has flickered into focus a few times in the years since his death—such as for the occasion of his Whitney Museum retrospective in 2010—but seems to have lately settled into an enduring visible importance via the acute interest of younger generations. Last year, Alex Da Corte, in his 2025 Matthew Marks exhibition, recreated (in shocking pink) Thek’s legendary—mysteriously missing, somehow misplaced, destroyed—1967 installation The Tomb, often referred to as Death of a Hippie, which featured a large-scale ziggurat and a wax-cast effigy of the artist himself.
Da Corte, the antithesis of Thek in a career way, and in his production values, possesses Thek, body and spirit, maybe; it’s a likeness of the younger, still living artist, however, that is laid to rest. What then carries through them? Maybe it’s just gayness, or, pardon me, fagginess? Something about the gay male artist in two incompatible periods of recent art history. Perhaps this unprecious treatment of Thek’s legacy—by an artist who also uses the Pink Panther and Popeye as self-surrogates—is the antidote to more vulturous approaches to the material, and would leave a not-acrid taste in the dead artist’s mouth. (Regarding the original, mythic piece, Durbin relates, “The chairman of a well-known museum told Pace that Paul had finally gone too far.”)
Thek died, essentially abandoned—his work largely destroyed or dispersed, his reputation in free fall. A cult figure, really. The institutions now showing him are of the same world that failed him. Dead artists are so much easier to work with. They won’t start bitching that you’ve robbed them, as Thek repeatedly did, sometimes with reason but always electric with paranoia. That he died of AIDS is appallingly the way things go.
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