Diving out: Paul Thek

Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, 2010

Images of Thek’s work, and his name kept popping up, so intuitively I visited the exhibition at Whitney, knowing nothing about him beforehand. I actually assumed he was contemporary because his work looked so fresh in the images I had seen. Speaking of fresh…let’s start with the meat.

The exhibition begins with meat. A room of sculptures are rendered in highly skilled replication of juicy pieces of flesh, mostly encased in glass. Immediately David Cronenberg’s, Videodrome, screamed reference in my head. They are same in plastic, B-movie, sci-fi aesthetic with the outcome of gross, funny, cheesy and ridiculous. A great way to start off an exhibition, with a B-movie banger! So, let’s bang on.

The exhibition continued with a couple rooms of installation pieces. The gory, horror, flesh theme was surviving in various ad-hoc forms. The work was hokey, but unsettling. The arrangement of fake visceral compositions, piled in the exhibition setting was irreverent, either to the artwork or to the museum space I am not sure. Perhaps because the blood and gore was so obviously fake, it brought to mind mortality and the futility of perfection. The contrast of flesh and blood and decay in the pristine white wall space exposed this even more. Just as the installations dealt with the concept of decay, so they were decaying themselves, not meant to stand the test of time.

Following room after room of this maze presentation of a life felt uncomfortably intimate. The rooms of Thek’s paintings on newspaper and wood sculptures, where baby blue and pink reigned, were my favorites. They were smooth, graceful and genuine. These rooms made the work at the beginning look like it was trying too hard, the technical time and skill put into the work clunked like an old car. The blue and pink room purred. Simplicity in material and technique and color proved to elevate the same themes in his earlier work, except here he added a new element: beauty.

The exhibition carried on from here with ever more intimacy, with journals and pieces revealing doubts and questions of a spiritual and personal nature. The final room with paintings hung low to the ground made me cry, it makes me cry to think of it now, but in a fresh way, not a sad way. The way you cry when you say something true, something you didn’t know you knew. It sneaks up on you. (Of course, reliably, the wall text over-explained and over-sentimentalized the work.) An exhibition hung low is humbling to view. Meant for children, adults must bow or crouch down to look. This is modesty in visual eloquence. This humble, child-like work as Thek’s finale numbed the bravado of the exhibition’s beginning. The meat works are hearty showstoppers, but the true meat is found in the most simple, most humble, most honest heart openers.