Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective May 22, 2011 - August 28, 2011
at
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles"He really just worked on the margins and in defiance,in a way, of the gallery system..."
Looking forward to seeing the Paul Thek show at the
Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles. I know very little about Paul Thek and his work. I'm spending an entirely lazy afternoon reading interviews, looking at images..... Here's an excerpt from an ARTINFO interview that resonates with me... The idea of outsiders, the idea that so much art + design is geared for commercialism, gallery shows, and magazine spreads...
Or are we just simply idealizing the past again? Does the dusty time capsule and the sailor tales lie to us? ----
"Yeah, in his way — he was sort of a back-to-the-land kind of commune person, and there are also other kinds of hippie artists. Gordon Matta-Clark is sort of a hippie person too. But it's a funny thing — I think you've hit on something, thinking of hippies in the true sense of being a person who thinks of the commune — you know, the communal good and sort of dropping out of commercial society.... In many ways he is a hippie artist — I think that's a good point. But I hate the word "hippie," you know. And he hated it too. The "Dead Hippie" — he called that piece "The Tomb," and he didn't like it being called the "Dead Hippie."He really just worked on the margins and in defiance,
in a way, of the gallery system...
He thought that art should come out of some religious deep emotional place, that it should move you in a way that was difficult in a gallery show. I just think his best efforts weren't in making art that would work in a gallery. And, we're talking about a time when Don Judd and Richard Serra were around and things were getting bigger. There was a very macho kind of sensibility....
He wasn't in that kind of scene to begin with because he did have his own particular and interesting group of friends. And in the 70s he was definitely known by top curators in Europe who asked him to do installations. But he didn't hang out, as far as we know, with Jasper Jones, or Rauschenberg, though he knew Cy Twombly. He just wasn't part of a group in the way that the Minimalists, the Post-Minimalists were. We're so provincial in New York, pushing the career, going to the right parties, and he did not. But at the same time he knew artists in Rome, he knew artists in Holland, he knew artists in France. He was kind of international. We're so provincial we don't recognize any of those other places.....
BLUE was very important to him because of the sea — it has special significance for him. So, he returns exclusively to that blue for this last group of paintings, and they have this detail and letter and symbols and words that indicate that he was thinking of the end. So, he had this group and he put them into a show with the one little cityscape and the child's chair and the tar baby. And when he took that show to Brooke Alexander they hung it incorrectly, and he came in, very ill, and said that it all has to be hung very low, at a child's height. It was very carefully installed here to be just how he installed it there.
And he died a month after that show.....
please read the complete interview here..."The Forgotten Man: A Q&A With Curator Elisabeth Sussman About Paul Thek and His Decades-Long Disappearance"
image taken from here...
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