Pain, death and not being able to make art again. Have you ever stumbled across a medical television station in the middle of invasive surgery? Clamps hold open a stomach, a surgeons' hands extend deep into the body, and blood and guts are revealed like a cross-section of a sedimentary rock. At first glance the impulse is to shy away and zap to a new channel, then morbid curiosity takes hold and repulsion fades to seduction. We can't help but look on. What is put into question is our smug sense of well being, which is normally taken for granted, as opposed to thoughts of the ravages of disease and decay.
Such is the territory of but a fragment of the varied work of Paul Thek, an American born artist that lived from 1933-1988. What is referred to above specifically relates to the "Technological Reliquaries" series of Thek, from 1964-67, and "The Tomb" from 1967. The "Technological Reliquaries" are sculptural replications of meat, or flesh in all of its disturbing rawness, flawlessly crafted out of wax and pigment. These slabs of beef (human or otherwise) are encased in minimalist glass vitrines sometimes printed with yellow lines, which can be seen as either forever holding the viewer outside, or drawing them closer to the object that lies within, imprisoned.
We are a global society big on denial, bent on immediate gratification, and skilled at tweaking appearances at the expense of just about everything else. Mortality is not something we relish contemplating, especially in relation to habits such as drinking, smoking, drugs and over-indulgence with food. It is hard to continually keep in mind what lies beneath the surface and how precarious health and wellness are in light of disease, preventable or not. Constantly undergoing oxidation, aging and drawing closer to death, our actual state of existence is not highly revered by a society fixated on youth or just looking youthful. Thek's meat pieces invoke human rot, tumors, cancer--just about every person's worst fears and vulnerabilities. Yet, simultaneously, these works manage to be about life and beauty and preservation of the human condition. Thek's meat sculptures, created in the mid-60's, presage most end of the century movements in post-modern, conceptual art practice, from institutional critique to spirituality.
The title of the series "Technological Reliquaries" referenced Thek's notion that increasing reliance on technology was encroaching upon our capacity to live humanely, compassionately, and with passion. Thek foresaw so clearly and early the steamrollering obsolescence of humans by clinical systems of knowledge, and evidenced this foreboding by encasing reproductions of human flesh in glass showcases akin to museum relics. Like the investigations of an archaeologist, Thek's reliquaries preserved what appeared to be animal or human tissue as an emblem of something that once was.
Thek was a devout Catholic, more or less, and seamlessly wove his religious beliefs into every facet of his work. Sins of the flesh, an allusion to breaking the ban on fornication, is recalled viewing Thek's meat works, suggesting a religious device used in order to scare people from inappropriately getting a piece of... In addition, carnal knowledge is implied as it relates to messy, fleshy sex, and how hot bodies are compared to scraps of beef. Like Duchamp, Thek was a master punster, and was never above playing wag to the art world, which has always taken itself too seriously.
When Thek chose to adhere three images of Ringo Star to a small meat sculpture in 1967, it was not as a gesture of cynical commentary on minor celebrity, but rather, an identification with those relegated to be perennially on the peripheral: in effect, inside outsiders. A similar nod was made when Thek included a photographic reproduction of Harpo Marx in an installation, which he referred to as "Harpo Marxism", his version of comic communism for the disenfranchised (Quoted by Susanne Delahanty in her catalogue "Paul Thek/Processions", Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1977).
In all the enigma that is the work of Matthew Barney, through all the Hollywood-style prosthetics that allegedly obscure the identity of the artist; the chiseled body, and fashion model good looks of Barney always manage to shine. In contrast, the meat pieces of Thek, sometimes adorned with clumps of the artist's own hair, stand in as anti-portraits, against the natural inclination to present one's self in the best, most appealing possible light. Versus the ancient Greek ideal of the male form as body-beautiful, Thek has turned this notion (and his body) inside-out, making the private public in a highly diffident manner.
The ready-made, salacious look of a Thek meat sculpture belied the puritanical, Judeo-Christian work ethic invested in the adherence to academic, old world art making skills. Thek was a master draftsman and craftsman and equally adept at concealing this fact. It was never fathomable that in all the reams of press and heaps of accolades on Damien Hirst and his scandalous cow pieces that nary a connection was made to Thek and his "Technological Reliquaries" that preceded Hirst by almost thirty years. However, this was made understandable by the fact that until the end of 1999, Thek never had an exhibit in the UK (despite a rare inclusion in a group show). Unlike the entrepreneurial Hirst, who in endlessly repeating himself has shown to be more proficient at making money than making art, Thek consciously halted the meat pieces after receiving a measure of success and notoriety early on in his career. In fact, having lived a large portion of his life abroad, mostly in Europe, scarcely any US institutions owned Thek's work at the time of his death.
"The Tomb" was a prescient installation created in 1967 which consisted of a pink wooden form in the shape of a ziggurat, and within, a laid out wax cast of a dead Thek, with outstretched tongue and mangled, fingerless hand. The artist was rendered a grotesque impotent symbol of the maceration of mankind. Again, rather than create an heroic version of the self, Thek instead chose to depict himself as a crippled soul that suffered some kind of ritualistic sacrifice. Perhaps Thek was signifying the consecration of the artist by offering himself to the deity as propitiation, in light of the alienating onslaught of pop and minimalism, signaled by the color and form of the tomb. Characteristic of Thek and how he viewed himself and his work; that this sculpture got tagged "The Death of a Hippie" due to the long hair and ragged appearance of the figure, which Thek considered a misreading, caused him to abandon the piece by way of unpaid storage fees.
Robert Gober placed a hairy leg fragment against a wall, sometimes with a burning candle situated on top, commenting upon the fragility of mankind in the face of rampant disease. Yet, in view of Thek, such gesture seems overly aestheticized even in its passing nod to things undeserved and inequitable such as AIDS. Unlike Gober, Thek never matched his initial early art world success after the "Technological Reliquaries" which tormented him, left him bitter, penniless and unsure of himself at the time of his death. Sometimes, being too good is too bad.
