Deborah Fisher: Not Getting It At The Whitney

A Paul Thek installation detail that is so not currently on view at the Whitney

I have this new role as Art Ambassador. Yesterday wandered Paul Thek: Diver at the Whitney defending the museum-ey elevation of quick sketches on sheets of newspaper and sketchbooks and garbagey pink and blue paintings that don't move me either.

I don't disagree with my guests' point of view, which was basically that the show was inscrutable and looked like shit. Thek was an early hit and has one profound innovation under his belt

(the meat sculptures still amaze and installation art is all Thek's fault)

but he left very little behind and so became a set of ideas: his love affair with Peter Hujar; how he acted as connective tissue between distinct contemporary art narratives and the particularly pathetic quality of his career's death as well as his own propelled others to do creative work using him as material--the best example of this that I can think of is Chris Kraus' Aliens and Anorexia. The only other artist I can think of who more neatly fits this You Mean More To Us Dead Than Alive profile is Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea while committing an act of performance art in 1975.

It's a lot of wearing another person's pain like a suit of clothes, but there is something legitimately interesting and beautiful about what Thek became--a kind of ghost who infected multiple consciousnesses by so nastily and slavishly representing his own. His installations were material manifestations of consciousness at its finest and most effusive--baroque Jungian feasts that explored and shared what it felt like to be Paul Thek so intensely that they are both a literal and figurative invitation to climb inside the artist's skin.

The conceit of the Whitney show is that those installations were as ephemeral as the consciousness they represented. There is poetry to this point, and to make it, they wound up with a show of physical artifacts. The early meat sculptures hold up, but the rest of Thek's career is reduced to dilapidated latex bodycasts and other skeletal remains of installations, and a lot of sketches and fast paintings that stuck around because they aren't very interesting.

It is as poignant as it is lame that most of the show is uninteresting because it has nothing to do with that intensely visceral, archetypal experience of self that Thek gave us. What physically survived is reams of representations of all the boring internal dialogue that fills most of our consciousness on most days:

Fragment of a sinking ship, fragment of a banner, fragment of a moon pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink this still sucks, it needs something, put dots on it!!!! A number of pithy phrases that all basically say that life is unfair Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself!

It's as if the point of Diver is the fact that we have martyred this person who is just like us. Thek momentarily overcame his consciousness from time to time, but he didn't master it. When left to his own devices he mostly filled the page with anxiety about what other people think and atavistic repetition of the stupidest formal cues. He was casting about. Most of the fragments don't gel into anything.

I love this point. I think it's a brilliant show. But I was with someone who wants art to elevate, to transcend. To be viscerally interesting. And the funny thing is that I brought her to see Paul Thek because he does that. But he doesn't do it here. If I had understood the show the first time I went through, I would have chosen something else. But when I walked through Diver the first time, my eyes were so full of what I wanted to see that I didn't even see how shitty and dead it all was. Or how lame seventy five percent of the subject matter was. I don't know how to make this show anything but an insider-only affair. I can't straightforwardly explain that the show actually did made sense without telling hours and hours of stories.

Comments

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I appreciate you writing about this show. I just saw it on Sunday and it was the first time I had seen Thek's artwork in person.

I appreciated the unpolished show at the Whitney. Thek choose to work on materials that age, just as we do. Barriers such as lack of inspiration, self doubt, and melancholy where evident but he still made it into physical articulation, which is a triumph. To me, the point of his artwork is not to transcend, but to connect what it mean to be human. His work is more artifact of human life than art object.

Posted by: SDonnelly | January 04, 2011 at 12:14 PM