text: Whitney Museum press release

NEW YORK, August 6, 2010. An artist who defies classification, Paul Thek (1933–1988), the sculptor, painter, and creator of radical installations who was hailed for his work in the 1960s and early 70s, then nearly eclipsed within his own short lifetime, is the subject of an upcoming retrospective co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art. Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the work of the legendary American artist, debuts in the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 21, 2010 to January 9, 2011; it travels to Carnegie Museum of Art, from February 5 to May 1, 2011, and then to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from May 22 to September 4, 2011.

On the evening of June 20, 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition "Dead Flowers," a group show based on the work of actor/director Timothy Carey, a selection of performance pieces were presented at Participant Inc. "Veil" by Johanna Constantine is a mysteriously disturbing yet poetic "dance" alluding to flight and perhaps the rebirth of the soul. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is well known for his/her work with the proto Punk band Throbbing Gristle. In the 1990s, with his second wife, Lady Jaye, P-Orridge began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge". In this performance P-Orridge is accompanied by the recorded voice of the late Lady Jaye. Marti Domination & Beaut riff on classic burlesque, using the novelty item known as a whoopee cushion to great effect.

[Earlier this year I saw a great show by Paul Thek, a deceased New York artist who worked most spectacularly in Europe. The show will never come here, of course, since they loved him there. I wrote it up, and an editor sat on it until it was dead. I’ve been urged to post the notice here, so here you go. The catalogue is due out or is out from MIT Press.]

Madrid’s Reina Sophia is the last leg of a touring retrospective of Paul Thek. Notorious for his 1968 “Dead Hippie” sculpture, Thek, a New Yorker who died in 1988, is underknown. This show is tremendous, revelatory. Much of what has happened in the last 20 years he may be said to have anticipated. (While I cannot easily read the catalogues in Spanish and German – it’s coming out in English in May, I gather from the illustrations that the authors are saying that.) Most of this work is in European collections, so this most singular and syncretic of American artists may not soon be well seen in the United States.