The Man Who Couldn't Get Up

THERE ARE ARTISTS WHO GRIT THEIR TEETH, PLOT THEIR STRATEGY, MAKE THEIR WORK AND BECOME SUCCESSFUL. AND THERE ARE ARTISTS LIKE PAUL THEK. FUGITIVE, UNWORLDLY, THEK COLLABORATED WITH OTHERS FOR MUCH OF HIS LIFE AND DIED IN 1988, A DISILLUSIONED MAN. NOW A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION, ORIGINATING AT ROTTERDAM'S WITTE DE WITH, RE-EXAMINES HIS CAREER WITH THE HELP OF PHOTOGRAPHS, FILM, DIARIES, SCULPTURES, INSTALLATIONS AND PAINTINGS. AS A PROJECT, IT IS FRAUGHT WITH DIFFICULTIES. NOT THAT THEK'S INITIAL SUCCESS AND EVENTUAL FAILURE WERE PART OF A PERIOD WHICH IS LOST.

IT IS THE MEANING OF THAT LIFE AT THAT TIME WHICH IS LOST: A LIFE OF TRAVEL, COMMUNES AND FESTIVALS, OF DRUGS AND PROMISCUITY, BUT ABOVE ALL, PERHAPS, OF EXPECTATIONS OF THE FUTURE. NOW WE FEEL WE KNOW BETTER; THE HIGH HOPES OF THE 60S WERE UNFOUNDED. WORSE STILL, WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME, WHAT THEK CALLED 'THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS' BECAME A JOKE, A DREAM, A HIEROGLYPH WITHOUT A KEY.

The year is 1963. In the catacombs at Palermo a good-looking young man is standing, arms folded, with skeletons ranged behind him. As a portrait, the snapshot seems far from successful: the subject seems out of place because his mind is elsewhere. The second attempt by the same photographer, a head and shoulders shot taken eleven years later, shows the subject, still handsome in his way but baggy-eyed, with thinning hair and a lined forehead. Only one clue reveals that it is the same person. For by now the loss of focus that had previously seemed charming has become an inevitability; he looks straight through us because he cannot escape his own mind. Perhaps he is still in Palermo, among the catacombs. 'There are about 8,000 corpses,' he wrote, 'Not skeletons, corpses decorating the walls, and the corridors are filled with windowed coffins. I opened one and picked up what I thought was a piece of paper; it was a piece of dried thigh.' As always his reaction was unusual... 'I felt strangely relieved and free,' he wrote. 'It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.'

By the late 60s everyone knew the work of Paul Thek. Pictures of his work appeared in art magazines. Critics interviewed him. In 1966 Susan Sontag even dedicated her greatest book, Against Interpretation, to him. But then what? 'He fell wounded,' reads one of his notebook entries from 1979. 'Some tried to help him up, but he was wounded to the core, they tried - then, one by one - they left him, drifted away into their own lives, their own hoped for successes, and failures, but he had fallen, they (some of them) urged him on, urged him UP, tried even to SEDUCE him once again into living, and Life as always knew what she was doing; the Pleroma lit up in his brain, like a vaginal dentifrice.' Half farce, half pathos, the tone recalls the sick humour of the 60s: the tone of Joseph Heller or Terry Southern, with Nathanael West lurking in the distance. It is also the work of a self-dramatising figure, someone carried away by the sheer theatre of it all. Yet despite the fact that the strain and self-pity seem calculated, no amount of artifice can conceal the truth: this is a cry for help.

Signs of strangled emotion were evident from the first, with decorative paintings in bilious colours reminiscent of early, fairytale Kandinsky. They reappeared in chastened form in a series of paintings called Television Analyzations, begun in 1963. One image is of a society woman - all mouth, bosom and necklace - leading what looks like a growing procession of clones, all, like her, giving cheesy grins and making cathedrals with their long fingernails. Everything is grey except for her vivid, red necklace, only part of which is visible. In another 'analyzation', again of only part of a woman's face, her open mouth and fleshy tongue are featured, while another shows a hand cradling a fruit bat. His notebooks leave readers in no doubt of Thek's attitude to women; a mistrust so deep it verged on loathing. Regard the paintings as glimpses of the vagina, and the distancing effects - the sense of protection offered by the regressus in infinitum, the painted equivalent of interference on a television screen, the sense of flesh tightly furled or gaping, like an open mouth - all become explicable. So do the bared fangs, as if the viewer (or the painter himself) is confronting some animal force. The preliminary to eating is baring one's teeth, after all, or smiling. Thek used eating as a way of understanding consumption and society in general with an attack so audacious that it ranks as a masterstroke.

A container lies on its side, bearing the same lettering as all the others. 'New', it tells us, '24 Giant Size Pkings / Brillo Soap Pads with Rust Resister / Brillo Mfg. Co. Inc. N.Y. / Made in U.S.A.' Gazing into the plexiglass bottom of the case, we are appalled. The motifs of the mouth with tongue and the television as framing device have shifted to three dimensions in order to mount a full-scale attack on consumer culture. 'No ideas but in things,' Warhol implied. 'No ideas but in flesh,' Thek countered. In the Technological Reliquaries series, to which this piece belongs, elaborate containers, often of coloured plastic, house lumps of what resemble raw meat. The choice of the Brillo box was deliberate. Yet though Thek had visited the Factory and met Warhol, there can be little doubt that he meant this as a reproach, not only on Warhol himself but also on his particular interpretation of Pop, a reading which would become Conceptual Art.

Another ritual which underlay Thek's work was that of the funeral service. ('My work is about time,' he wrote in a notebook, 'An inevitable impurity from which we all suffer.') The Tomb (1967), one of the best-known installations of the 60s, featured a ziggurat-shaped room in which a life-sized model of the artist himself was presented like a corpse lying in state, surrounded by relics of his life. The work was personal to a degree. (Thek's bedroom as a child had been ziggurat-shaped and as a grown-up he had even made cases for his work which contained transparent, upturned ziggurats to be looked through like a framing device.) Interpreted as a farewell to 60s culture, or even a monument to the Vietnam War, it was wrongly subtitled Death of a Hippie by the Whitney Museum when included in a group exhibition. To Thek's annoyance the name stuck. It marked the climax of a period of casting body parts - a wax arm and hand in armour, for example, decorated with butterfly wings. The Tomb's beeswax cast of the artist's own body, with plaited hair, gold adornments, personal letters and a bowl was succeeded by another Thek surrogate: Fishman (1968), a religious icon cast from his own body, of a flying or prone male covered with fish. ('And I shall make you fishes of men,' Jesus told his disciples on the shores of Lake Galilee.) Fishman was shown a second time face down on the underside of a table high above the viewer's head. By then Thek's supporters were beginning to realise that their interpretations and the artist's own were poles apart, or that some other, larger significance was intended. There was another problem: now that the relation between Thek and his work was becoming clearer, viewers were rejecting his insistence on the first-person singular.

But another artistic confrontation helped strengthen Thek's resolve. In 1968, he had been invited to show at the Galerie M.E. Thelen in Essen, but his work had been damaged in transit. Even so, he decided to open the gallery and sit day after day, mending the pieces. A Procession in Honour of Aesthetic Progress: Objects to Theoretically Wear, Carry, Pull or Wave marked the beginning of his interest in process and the word 'procession', which he used to describe subsequent group activities. The sheer oddness of the Essen presentation is hard to convey. Chairs were adapted to be worn so that the wearer's head protruded through the seat, and, for the first time, newspapers littered the ground. (These would enter his artistic vocabulary on a permanent basis.) Thek had recently seen Beuys' work for the first time, and, as in the case of Warhol, had reacted strongly, less with the artist's mind than with his untethered sexuality: 'It seemed to me that all it needed was glamour and worth and charm and a woman's touch,' he commented. Yet there was less separating them than he imagined. Beuys was striving to make a visual language. So was Thek, though his way of doing so seemed more like adopting a family. Removed from the Tomb, the figure of the hippie became a main protagonist. So did Fishman, and so did a giant latex dwarf called 'Assurbanipal' because of his Assyrian beard... In the same way Thek was adopting people, living and making work with them by constantly adapting and re-adapting existing elements and aiming for fullness of meaning using a Jungian approach to world myth.

Only photographs remain of the Processions. Influenced by the films of Jack Smith and the theatre of Robert Wilson, Thek pushed improvisation to its limits. The word 'procession' - a stabilisation of the term 'process' - and the journey taken through his installations referred to the liturgical and celebratory in equal measure. (Led by Assurbanipal, The Procession/ The Artist's Co-op (1969) consisted of a line of chairs, a table with bottles and serviettes and the remains of a night's drinking, while The Procession/ Easter in a Pear Tree (1969) even included a large cross.) Thek, who enjoyed the fiesta mentality and the way Italian homes were decorated for holidays, refused to recognise any dichotomy between worship and celebration, religious and secular. Another Pyramid (1971) followed, this time life-size, with trees and washing hanging out to dry; a table and chairs; more newspapers; another procession led by Assurbanipal; the Fishman hanging from the ceiling, a fountain, a pink volcano... There seemed to be no boundaries.

Biographers might argue that Thek's distressing early life led to a need for family, security, comfort, faith, above all a stable domestic environment, that he found these in the company of the changing members of his co-operative, but moreover, that the kind of stability he craved seemed almost medieval, with a calendar that was cyclical rather than linear. This approach might possibly have led to an antiquated, even static attitude to art. On the one hand, the Processions offered a permanent opportunity for the team to recycle its own works. On the other, they might have provided chances for the employment of principles of repetition akin to those of (say) Indian ragas. In addition, like pre-20th century artists, Thek and his team seem to have made decisions according to a shared theory of beauty, though, in contrast to those of pre-20th century artists, their aesthetic was their own invention.

The urge to solve the problem of vocation seems to have troubled Thek for years. 'Thicker. Deeper,' he wrote in a letter to his longtime collaborator Franz Deckwitz early in 1972. 'I want to make a real place to rest and worship in, not just art.' Indeed, at stages in his life a powerful tension existed between his career as an artist and his urge to retire from the world. By this time his faith was being buttressed by periods of meditation in a Benedictine monastery in Vermont. Despite his failure to make a living and letters from museums saying they could no longer manage to keep his installations in permanent storage, it still seemed to him that with his large scale retrospective organised by Suzanne Delahanty at the ICA in Philadelphia the tide might have turned. He was wrong. Around 1975-6, his luck gave out. By 1978 he was working in a New York supermarket, then cleaning in a hospital. After that, his hopes of entering a monastery were dashed by a doctor's confirmation of his status; he was HIV Positive.

By this time Thek had been reasserting his dedication to the naive, as a means of making art as well as leading one's life, with the series of bronze sculptures called The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, regarded as a lay saint who allowed the rats to devour his possessions. As usual, his hyper-active mind refused to settle on a single theme for very long, and the Piper became confused with Mr Bojangles (from the song by Jerry Jeff Walker) and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Somehow the Tar Baby (from Uncle Remus) also became part of the mix. By this time the newspapers which had been a permanent feature of the installations were being used as a paint surface. Sometimes religious, usually satirical, frequently apocalyptic, permanently disillusioned in its vision of a New York that featured the half-built World Trade Center towers he called Sodom and Gomorrah, Thek's approach was that of a man at the end of his tether. (Ten years later he presented his own completely unrealistic Richard Serra's Tilted Arc project, retitled Tilted Ark, with holes bored through it in the shape of stars, a small zoo and a park with flowers.) Yet the uneven standard of the paintings should not blind us to the genuineness of the vision: Uncle Tom's Cabin in Flames and Bo Jangles in Flames (1979) are premonitions of an American apocalypse; by 1980, Thek was making paintings with titles like Turquoise Potato Peelings in a Sea of Piss and Shit. (His titles are a delight. Who could forget Church of the Holy Molar, Fascist Grapes or Neolithic Porno?)

But there is no point in pretending that the last years of Thek's life gave rise to his finest art. Forget the last years of bitterness and disillusion and illness and return to his retrospective in Philadelphia in 1977. Imagine the camp and tacky raised to the point of intellectuality and far beyond: to a state of childlike belief, as viewers encountered a sea of sand - 'It's water you can walk on; it's time', Thek explained unhelpfully - a barge with kitsch forests and stuffed animals, the wooden model for Tatlin's tower, King Kong, a homage to Picasso, the Warhol Brillo Box again, a bathroom and a shanty and a stuffed bird and... If people had told him to stop, Thek would have taken no notice. For, as his paintings show, he already felt that time was running out. He was right. He never retired to a monastery as he had planned, nor did he make peace with those who had hurt or ignored him. (Like Dr Johnson, he was 'a good hater'.) Did he ever relax into the situation as it was, or did he continue to look straight through it to something else, somewhere else, as he seemed to have done for the whole of his strange, confused, cryptic, inspiring life?