An Artist in the Secular World Paul Thek’s Relics
Abstract
This essay reassesses Paul Thek’s best known work, the Technological Reliquaries series, commonly referred to as the Meat Pieces (1964–67), which are wax-based mixed-media sculptural works that imitate mutilated flesh in gory, viscous details. While they are generally understood as Thek’s “hot” answer to “cold” Pop and Minimal art, I read them through the lens of a religious visual culture that dislodges the hold of unique, individual authorship and suggests a model of authorship that defers to the sacred chain of meaning through contact. This framework is prompted by Thek’s own account of his struggle to “serve two masters”: religion and secular modern art. In theorizing Thek’s attempt to work through this internal conflict, exacerbated by his queer sexuality, the essay also opens up new avenues of inquiry for thinking about religious faith in modern art.
Paul Thek, Untitled (Meat Pyramid), 1964, from the series Technological Reliquaries. Plaster, glass, mirror, chrome, and wax, 18¼ × 18¼ × 12¾ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Fredric B. Mueller © Estate of George Paul Thek
This essay is the eighth winner of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize, which recognizes excellence in the field of American art history by a scholar who is a citizen of a country other than the United States. The journal is grateful for the Terra’s generous support. For more information about the recipients of this award, see
In May 1969 Paul Thek wrote to a friend, the painter Ann Wilson, “I seem to teeter on the brink of ‘enlightenment’ yet my energy is sapped at the root by my awareness of serving two masters, with its traditional result, alienation from everything.”1 At the time, Thek seemed to have had everything going for him: a distinctive body of work that had earned him solo shows at influential galleries, such as Stable (1964, 1967, and 1969) and Pace (1966); a social network in the vanguard of the artistic and queer underground that included the writer Susan Sontag and the photographer Peter Hujar; and good looks and a winning personality. The artist Neil Jenney recalled, “Thek was a happy-go-lucky guy with a positive, generous attitude about everything. He loved to laugh…. Part beatnik, part hippie, 6’1”, 175 lbs., thinning blond hair—everybody liked him.”2 Yet, he felt his energies sapped, himself alienated. To those who knew Thek, however, his statement of private anguish would have come as no surprise.
Thek wrote of his “two masters” two years after he had symbolically bid farewell to the New York art scene with The Tomb (1967, location unknown), a self-arranged funeral in which art-goers could pay a visit to his corpse, a replica of his entire body. By then he had also abandoned his signature work, the Meat Pieces (frontispiece, fig. 1): gory wax replicas of mutilated flesh that attract and repel in equal measure. (Thek noted wryly in another letter of having been referred to as the “meat man.”3) Instead, after leaving New York for Italy in September 1967, Thek was working on a new exhibition format that would reflect his desire for the arts to return to their liturgical function. He envisioned this through his Procession installations, built during residencies and site-specific bursts of art-making with his newly formed, loose collective of collaborators in Europe. Paul Thek, Untitled, 1966, from the series Techhnological Reliquaries. Wax, paint, polymer resin, nylon monofilament, wire, plaster, plywood, melamine laminate, rhodium-plated bronze, and acrylic, 14 × 15 1/16 × 7½ in. Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee, 93.14, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Estate of George Paul Thek. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, N.Y.
Who, or what, were Thek’s “two masters”? Wilson, in a reminiscence, provides a clue: “Paul writes of his two vocations, religion and art, and of feeling that they couldn’t be reconciled.”4 Art and religion are far from strange bedfellows in the history of visual culture, but not in the art world of Thek’s time. In a notebook dated 1979, he addressed an epistle to an unnamed “Brother”: “I am OK, still trying to be ‘an artist’ in the secular world. A lot keeps happening, and as you know, the world is the world, very ‘worldly.’”5 On the one hand, in the secular climate, references to one’s religious faith—Catholicism in Thek’s case—would have been frowned upon, certainly among the 1960s underground. On the other hand, religious institutions, with their material and visual culture emerging out of liturgical practices, were unconcerned with contemporary art. Despite his secular art world milieu, religious culture pulled on Thek throughout his career. Raised in a Catholic household and having attended Catholic school, he contemplated entering a monastery as an adult.6 He made several visits to the Carthusians in Vermont toward the end of his life, but was ultimately unable to join their order due to the monastery’s inability to care for the artist after his HIV diagnosis.7
The modern art/religion dichotomy seems to have structured the critical reception of Thek as well. His 1960s work, such as the Meat Pieces—part of the Technological Reliquaries series (1964–67)—provides a formalist and affective intervention into the dominance of Minimalism and Pop. Untitled (Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box) (fig. 2), for example, is an incisive spoof of both Andy Warhol and Minimalist cubes. He is also seen in the vein of the German artist Joseph Beuys, with his peregrination through European museums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bringing with him his religiously inspired Processions installations. Often implicit in these narratives is a chronological and conceptual demarcation between the 1960s work and after. The curator Suzanne Delehanty’s 1977 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia focused on his Processions and portrayed Thek as an artist of faith. The catalog expounds on the meanings behind the objects in his installations, much as one would read iconographies in religious painting. In contrast, in the 2011 retrospective Paul Thek: Diver, curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky, he is situated within 1960s art as well as modernist art criticism in the postwar era, without reckoning with the religious belief that was at the core of his being and struggle as an artist.8 Two notable exceptions to this trend are Philipp Wittmann’s monograph on Thek’s art and life, which includes a discussion of the Technological Reliquaries as “ambiguous” objects that straddle both immanence and transcendence, much like the religious objects that inspired them.9 In her study of theological material culture, Lena Tacke takes the same body of work as a starting point for an examination of image and the body in Christianity. She uses Thek’s work to reinvigorate theological discussion around reliquaries and images of the body in contemporary times.10 Both Wittmann’s and Tacke’s framings of the Reliquaries, while illuminating for thinking about the objects beyond the art world context, do not, however, discuss Thek’s subjectivity in making and presenting the works as fine art. Paul Thek, Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, 1965. Beeswax, painted wood, and plexiglass, 14 × 17 × 17 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by the Daniel W. Dietrich Foundation, 1990, 1990-111-1 © Estate of George Paul Thek
Tying together these diverging lines, I argue that before Thek penned the 1969 “two masters” note to Wilson, he had found a remarkable way to reconcile the two forces at the root of his oeuvre. Indeed, Thek intuitively found ways to embody his belief system through the very act of art-making and thereby intervened in the art discourse of his time in a manner not previously understood. To do this, I focus on his third (and last) set of works in the Technological Reliquaries series. While most of the pieces were molded, including the Meat Pieces that simulate chunks of flesh, this group was cast from the artist’s own body. And although they might have started out as studies for The Tomb, he found something to work from in the casts of his parts, mostly hands and arms: “Right now I FEEL THAT JUST bits and pieces of the body … which are all Im able to manage now with molds … are already rewarding enough to make any number of pieces. The full figure can wait.”11 These works shed light on what I characterize as Thek’s exploration of non-authorship. This line of investigation leads me to a consideration of his writing, particularly his handwritten notes, as objects of analysis on par with the sculpture rather than as separate support or archival documents. The essay contextualizes Thek’s work within “acheiropoieta,” a category of Christian devotional images believed to be created by a higher being. The Greek word means “not made by [human] hands.”12 They gain signifying power not only by looking like the “original” image but, importantly, by indexing back to how the image itself is believed to have been created: the force of the iconic and indexical combined. Such a reframing of authorship illuminates Thek’s negotiation between his two masters and allows us to take seriously the artist’s religious bent, even as we also analyze his artistic output as modern art objects.
In the title of the series, the word “reliquaries” places the objects in conversation with a Catholic tradition of collecting, enshrining, displaying, and worshiping relics. Thek’s way of exhibiting them, on individual pedestals, separated from the viewer by plexiglass, adds to the feeling of auratic inaccessibility, much like objects imbued with mythic power in a religious context. Yet, the above exceptions notwithstanding, the critical literature on Thek has not explored this aspect of the work in depth. Rather than taking them at face value as Thek’s relics, however, I also want to think about how such objects could be put in dialogue with 1960s art discourse. For all his religious references, Thek was, it bears emphasizing, well aware of the advanced (and secular) art of his day. As I will discuss below, other artists in his orbit had already been gravitating toward the possibility of alternative forms of agency in art-making, experimenting with relegating artistic decisions to chance, for example. By juxtaposing Thek with this discourse, I position his “non-authorship” (acheiropoieta) as another pathway for a new form of artistic subjectivity in modern art-making. Doing so keeps both his spiritual and artistic subjectivities in play.
The feminist artist Carolee Schneemann recalled commiserating with Thek over the issue presented by “the ‘religiosity’ of our sources,” which marked them as different from other artists in the same 1960s milieu. “We both had a lonely, isolated sense of what I called visceral plasticity,” she wrote, which her iconic Dionysian, ritual-like performance pieces such as Meat Joy (1964) could exemplify.13 Thinking about Thek’s visceral, religious resonances requires acknowledging that, for him, religion took center stage in a manner that his contemporaries would have seen as rather anachronistic, that is, without much ironic distance. At the same time, no one would classify or has classified Thek as an exclusively religious artist, working outside the contemporary art world. Rather, religious elements in his art contribute to Thek’s peculiar place in history, not quite “in,” not quite “out,” as Margit Brehm puts it.14 The “two masters” that underlie Thek’s practice, I argue, contribute to his ambiguous status in post-1960 American art. In such a context, Thek’s “literalism,” in this case through self-casting, does not quite augur Postmodernism in the way the Minimalists’ “literalist art” does, to echo Michael Fried. (Literalist art, for Fried, describes work that carries no symbolic meaning beyond the actual object: a cube, a stack of rectangular slabs, presented just so. In his influential theory of Minimalism, such a way of showing art shifts the site of interpretation to the work’s viewing context, a postmodern move.)15 Neither, however, are Thek’s self-casts relics made to be used in religious practices with no exchange value in the art world system.
Even as studies of art and visual culture have, since the 1970s, moved away from formalist concerns toward social, cultural, and political analysis, the religious context from which some modern artists’ practices emerged, whether explicit or latent, remains largely untouched, as Sally Promey, a historian of religious visual culture in the United States, has observed. She writes, “According to the reigning modernist paradigm of secularization assumed by twentieth-century art historical scholarship and criticism, ‘modern religion’ was an oxymoron.” Furthermore, the idea of modern art with religious content in and of itself invited negative judgments from critics due to the “widespread modernist intellectual assumptions concerning religion’s restriction of creative individuality, its responsibility for an inferior aesthetic or taste culture, and its presumably universal captivity to sectarian and ideological obsessions.”16 While the broad stroke of such assumptions (or their characterization by Promey) may be up for debate, it is not within the scope of this essay, nor is it my intention, to argue otherwise. What I would like to bring attention to, via Thek, are the ways in which an artist’s gravitation toward religiosity may also be a breeding ground for a serious aesthetic proposition. This lens may provide one small step toward approaching religion in modern and contemporary art with fresh eyes. In fact, in Thek’s artistic and religious subjectivity, as I will argue below, there is a model of art-making and authorship that concretizes an alternative to the “creative individuality” framework. The latter has underpinned much of the market-based circulation and valuation of secular artworks in modernity, a situation about which Thek, enmeshed in it despite his reservations, also had something to say.
Authorship and the Artist’s Hand
In the 1960s, an artist making sculptures of bodily forms was not especially out of step with the avant-garde. On the West Coast, Bruce Conner’s figurative sculptures evoked desiccated corpses, and George Segal created medically inspired, textured plaster casts of human bodies. In New York, aside from the hard-edge dominance of Minimalism, “part-object” artworks—so characterized by critics drawing on psychoanalysis—evoked the ambiguous permeability between semiabstract and semifigurative forms that convey multiple readings (breast, orifice, genitals, curves and folds, all body-based), as in the work of Eva Hesse.17 Yet, something else is going on in Thek’s fragmented realism. His works of art, reminiscent of displays in anatomical museums or votive objects in churches, were unlike anything seen in contemporary art galleries. A life-like hand appears partially covered with paint (fig. 3), as if cut off mid-stroke. With its hyperreal painted surface mimicking skin, it appears remarkably preserved or timeless, beyond the effect of rot and decay. A disembodied arm hearkens to a realm beyond human art-making (fig. 4). Its leather armor may remind viewers of that worn by archangels in Renaissance paintings. Thek painted it in bright hues. The patterning on the hand covering and along the back of the hand and the wrist recalls butterfly wings, with which he, in fact, covered the upper arm gear. In Christianity a butterfly may symbolize transfiguration and resurrection. A similar pattern, in a corresponding purple and yellow color scheme, covers the top part of Thek’s face replica emerging from a ziggurat, which may read as a tomb (see fig. 12). Peter Hujar, Paul Thek Studio Shoot, Hand Sculpture 2, 1967, printed 2010. Pigmented ink print, 20 × 16 in. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Schneider / Erdman Printer’s Proof Collection, partial gift, and partial purchase through the Margaret Fisher Fund. 2011.263 © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; courtesy Pace Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Depicts detail of wax hand cast with paint, from The Tomb, an installation in Thek’s studio at 254 East Third Street, New York, 1967. © Estate of George Paul Thek Paul Thek, Untitled, 1967, from the series Technological Reliquaries. Wax, paint, fluorescent color, leather, plastic, metal, butterfly wings, feathers, cord, resin, plexiglass, 9 1/16 × 34⅝ × 9⅛ in. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany © Estate of George Paul Thek. Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv
In an extraordinary set of photographs by Hujar, who was his lover at the time, cast hands are a mysterious and elusive presence, as if possessing agency. On first glance, the images seem to be portraits of Thek’s studios in Manhattan and his summer outpost in Oakleyville, Fire Island. Some show the artist at work, as in a “behind-the-scenes” type of photographic documentation. Yet a morbid disquiet arises from the darkened corners, with shadows cast on the wall. Cut-off casts of the artist’s hand uncannily appear and reappear. In one photo (fig. 5), multiple hands are arranged on a ledge, like a line of ants walking behind the artist, who poses for the camera, his actual hands strumming a guitar. In another (fig. 6), a colorfully painted hand cast appears in the foreground, as if emerging from its base on a white mattress. The hand exerts a quiet presence, while the artist serenades it, mid-ground, with his own full-body replica, The Tomb, in the background. We are in Thek’s universe, populated by him and his hand multiples. Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, Oakleyville, Fire Island, 1967, printed 2010. Pigmented ink print, 16 × 20 in. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Schneider/Erdman Printer’s Proof Collection, Partial gift, and partial purchase through the Margaret Fisher Fund, 2011.264 © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC. Courtesy Pace Gallery, N.Y., and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Peter Hujar, Thek Playing Guitar with Tomb Figure Behind 1, 1967. Color slide © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, N.Y., and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
There is something about the hand, its connection to making, at the point of contact between the mind-body of the artist and the material being molded into shapes. In the nineteenth century, artists often kept casts of body parts in their studios as tools for study, with the hand occupying a special status among these objects. Along with replications of famous faces and death masks, casts of prominent artists’ hands were a mainstay in nineteenth-century visual culture, an emblem, a remembrance of the person whose hands had made the work that lives on. A process of condensation occurs, as if all the experience, work, and subjectivity can be channeled and held in place in a tangible object. To achieve this life-like effect and reinforce the link to the making hand, the work had to be three-dimensional; paintings of hands, in contrast, such as in Théodore Géricault’s Study of Truncated Limbs (fig. 7), give off an air of anonymity. A cast hand refers to the living one that existed in the world prior to the sculpture’s creation—that had made possible, materially speaking, such a (re-)creation in the first place.18 Théodore Géricault, Study of Truncated Limbs, ca. 1818–19. Oil on canvas, 20½ × 25 3/16 in. Musée Fabre de Montpellier
In the scholarship on postwar art, the concept of the index, drawing on the work of the linguist Charles Sanders Peirce, is most identified with the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss. Indexical signs are those whose meanings derive from physical evidence of direct traces or contact with the referents, that is, the objects to which they refer. Krauss uses the concept to theorize the tendency in art of the 1970s to eschew likeness, simulation (icon) or coded meanings through specific signifiers (symbol) and instead work more like a photograph in its evocation of direct traces. An indexical work may shift the viewer’s attention from the work of art as immanent and contained to how it comes to be and where it is being viewed. While Krauss focuses on the indexicality of the photographic process, she also leaves open the possibility of thinking through the index in other mediums, even mentioning the body cast as the photograph’s equivalent in sculpture.19 Indeed, marks made with direct body contact, such as handprints in cave paintings, constitute some of the earliest instances of visual culture in human history. In a more liturgical (and apocryphal) vein, the Veil of Veronica, an image genre in Christian art, was purported to be imprinted with a portrait of Jesus Christ, produced merely by contact with his sweating face. Writing on ex-votos, including casts or objects representing body parts placed as votive offerings, the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman provides an expanded formulation of the index as “resemblance through contact.”20 What would it mean to situate Thek’s self-castings in this lineage of visual and material culture that places more emphasis on the object’s originating event than on individual authorship? For what’s striking about Thek’s indexicality through self-casting is that the objects become embodiments of his “service” to his two masters; they function as art objects, but they also read as votive offerings made through contact with his body. Indeed, Thek professed a belief in the notion that all creations do not belong to the artist, despite the artist’s hand. Thek wrote, “We do gracefully, what we like to do,” reflecting, as Marietta Franke notes, “his belief that he was not the author of his art, that it was rather a consequence of divine grace.”21 The artist’s body in this regard is merely a vessel for this higher source of creation. By self-casting, Thek made use of his flesh, that is, the raw material given to him by God.
Thek’s authorship model—the implied presence of a superior power and absence of a worldly author—is particularly pronounced in his use of wax, a prominent material in Christian visual culture, specifically wax ex-votos modeled on body parts. By contrast, in the context of nineteenth-century Western art, in which individual authorship was venerated, body casting was viewed as inferior to modeling as a method; casts were seen as copies of objects in the world without signifiers of the artist’s hand.22 Outside of the modern conception of originals and copies, however, “copies” can be more than re-presentation. They can be as holy as their “originals,” with the chain of sacredness, such as through contact (whether real or imagined), leading back to the originating event, the moment of the imprint or first emergence of the image. This way of thinking was prevalent in Early Christian sacred image theory.23 Agency in this scenario can be located, loosely, along the chain of replication rather than fixed in the individual act of creation of each “copy.” Worshipers of such images did not distinguish them based on who made them or when they were created. As the imbued sacredness, capacity, and function of the image takes center stage, furthermore, the question of agency—whose hands, creativity, and inspiration are behind it—becomes moot. What’s meaningful isn’t newly created by a human hand but replicated miraculously without human involvement.24 Thek echoed this theory of making and meaning when he proclaimed in 1975:
Thek’s “I am not the author” logic extended into his everyday life. This is most evident in Thek’s many handwritten notebooks, which provide a window into the day-to-day textures of his interiority. A notebook titled “Required Reading” contains lengthy quotes from diverse sources, mostly with spiritual content, including the thirteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart and the early twentieth-century mystic George Gurdjieff.26 With Gurdjieff, Thek gravitated toward the notion of freedom arising out of nonidentification, moving away from the idea of the self: “But in order to learn not to identify man must first of all not be identified with himself, must not call himself ‘I’ always and on all occasions…. So long as a man identifies or can be identified, he is the slave of everything that can happen to him. Freedom is first of all freedom from identification.”27 From Meister Eckhart, Thek took the advice to empty oneself in order to leave space for a higher light to enter: “You must leave them all: sense, perception, imagination, and all that you discover in self or intend to do.” With care, Thek wrote down: “Do not imagine that your own intelligence may rise to it, so that you may know God. Indeed, when God divinely enlightens you, no natural light is required to bring that about. This (natural light) must in fact be completely extinguished before God will shine in with his light, bringing back with him all that you have forsaken and a thousand times more, together with a new form to contain it all.”28
To allow light, extinguish the self. Thek achieved this state of receptivity, I argue, through the act of transcription. Throughout history, the act of transcribing sacred texts has been considered a sacred act. Transcribing enacts the erasure of the subject-author, as writing becomes repeating. Carefully transcribing page after page by hand, in a gradeschool notebook, Thek becomes more like one of the anonymous medieval scribes than a diarist or a modern-day artist-writer, his hand a reproduction machine before the era of print, the chain of sacredness tracing back to the original and originating text itself, not unlike religious objects endowed with sacredness through a chain of contact.
Thek had a habit of repeating sets of lines, scribbling them furiously, his hand and the pen a vessel for a looping thought with which, it would seem, the process occupied his consciousness so as to rein in darker thoughts. In his list of “96 Sacraments” (fig. 8), Thek recorded various mundane activities, some idiosyncratic and some moving, that made up his daily life: “1. To wake up…. 2. To breathe…. 3. To touch the earth…. 4. To pee…. ” and so forth. After most, he would write, “Praise the Lord!” or, for some, “Sing praises!”29 In reading through the list, a rhythm emerges, like a voice and its chorus playing off each other, an evocation of a duet. This is also seen in his “Relax” note, wherein Thek intercuts short sentences of self-ruminating thoughts dwelling on past slights (“I think I’d like to change my profession,” “This is what he does because he can’t PAINT,” etc.) with “Relax” between them (fig. 9).30 Another page is filled with a series of drawn buntings with the text “Get over yourself!” repeated five times (fig. 10).31 Paul Thek, excerpts from “96 Sacraments,” notebook #75, 1975. Watermill Collection, Water Mill, N.Y. © Estate of George Paul Thek; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, N.Y. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins Paul Thek, “Relax,” 1979. Reproduced from Paul Thek: The Wonderful World That Almost Was (Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, 1995), 22. Watermill Center Collection, Water Mill, N.Y. Courtesy Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins Paul Thek, “Get over yourself,” notebook #81, undated. Watermill Center Collection, Water Mill, N.Y. © Estate of George Paul Thek; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, N.Y.
Did Thek’s habit of not only transcribing but also repeating lines constitute a process of emptying himself, so that higher forces could “blow through him,” allowing him to break through from his self-doubt? He repeats, “get over yourself!” like an admonition, but that repetition might also have served to quell other thoughts that otherwise would have arisen in his mind and disturbed his creation process. His writing and transcribing practices appear to have been akin to a devotional practice rather than a tool for self-expression or generation of thoughts. This can be perceived by looking at the text not for content but for the indexical marks that resulted from a transposition process of contact between mind, hand, paper, and pen. The droning repetition, like the recitation of a mantra, might have achieved that effect of evacuating his mind as in the process of meditation, which many contemplative traditions have refined over centuries, all alighting at this quieting of the self through different means.32
Agency and Ambivalence
Thek was not the only artist in his milieu to push the boundaries of agency in art-making, even as his spiritually inflected way of going about it made him an outlier. The avant-garde composer John Cage used chance and indeterminacy as a compositional technique because it allowed him to undercut personal preference and style. This provided an influential, alternative form of agency in art-making, and it resonated with artists working in different media, not only music. Reflecting on this strategy from the 1960s, the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris aptly characterized it as “agency reduction.”33 The painter Jasper Johns, part of the composer’s circle, never went as far as Cage with chance methods, but he did make use of indexical processes, from casting body parts to imprinting his bite mark on his work, to printing his own skin. He was also an important figure for Thek.
Asked about his decision to use wax, Thek referred specifically to Johns’s use of encaustic: “I went to see a Jasper Johns show and I saw that he was working in wax and I started to work in wax. Then the meat pieces happened” (fig. 11).34 The two artists were alike in their drive to capture flesh, the texture of the body. An affinity first manifests in the presence of body fragments in their work but, more importantly, in their use of wax as a means of representing flesh and skin, all the integuments, membranes, and linings of the body that are of ourselves yet not quite ourselves, which Wittmann highlights as the two artists’ “thematic correspondence.” Straddling the aesthetic and the real, wax is moldable, pliable, and sensitive to touch and temperature change. It lends itself particularly well to contact-based processes and representation of flesh.35 Paul Thek, Untitled (Blonde Meat Piece), 1964, from the series Technological Reliquaries. Wax, hair, plexiglass, silkscreen, steel, 22⅛ × 22⅛ × 7½ in. Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz © Estate of George Paul Thek; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, N.Y. Photo: Orcutt & Van Der Putten
In both Thek’s and Johns’s art, an intriguing tension exists between the specificity of self-portraiture and the anonymity of casting (or printing) parts of the body other than the face. While Thek pulled the art object into non-authorship in the religious realm, Johns was more aligned with Cage’s aesthetic program of agency reduction. Both presented work created out of their specific bodies, but, unlike most portraits, the objects do not give us a window into their lives. Such indexical anonymity may raise further questions about their self-expression or lack thereof. Is it significant that both artists were gay men, who, each in their own way, had a complicated relationship with their sexuality and self-presentation in the art world and beyond, in an era before a rights-based model of gay identity had emerged?36 The circle that included Cage and Johns, active since the 1950s, consisted largely of gay men. Through their artistic contributions and, just as importantly, careful calibration of their public self-presentation, they had risen to the top of the New York avant-garde art world by the 1960s, despite intense homophobia. In the early 1960s, Johns was in a relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, one of the most prominent art stars of the decade, gay or straight. The literature on each of the artists in this circle, including the painter Cy Twombly and the choreographer Merce Cunningham (Cage’s partner), is vast, as are discussions of the intersection of sexuality, their art, and their public image, which I will not repeat here. Suffice it to note that, as the art historian Jonathan Katz has argued, there are possible connections between how the artists presented and managed their non-normative sexual identities in public and the aesthetic program to which they subscribed. For instance, Cage mobilized silence as part of his drive toward agency reduction.37 Still, Cage’s aesthetic, although most obviously derived from Zen Buddhism and its teaching of non-self, was a complex amalgamation of philosophical sources and interdisciplinary artistic lineages. It would be reductive to characterize his refrain from artistic self-expression as resulting only from his discomfort with his sexuality or with the public knowledge of it. As Katz has also argued convincingly with regards to Agnes Martin (born in the same year as Cage, 1912), there is limited value in understanding an artist’s turn to an “other” philosophical tradition that does not prize individual subjectivity (also Zen Buddhism in Martin’s case) as a turn away from a homophobic world that did not respect artists’ expressions of their queer identities. If the philosophical basis is seen as mere recourse to shy away from confronting homophobia, the interpretation shortchanges the artists’ deep engagement with the teachings that imbued all aspects of their thinking and living, including art-making. Rather, their artistic output should be understood as an earnest attempt at translating a philosophy of being into art-making. Sexuality is inevitably part of the picture, but the broader question is how these artists pursued ways of making art that aligned with their spiritual life.
Given Thek’s Catholic upbringing and homosexuality, it is possible to see the historical tension between the two at the root of his struggle. It may even explain why he pursued a model of authorship that obscured the self. To what extent is non-authorship, deferred to a higher force of creation, a proposition for a different way of art-making, and to what extent is it a hesitation from expressing who he was? Unlike Cage’s aesthetic program, which privileges emptiness, noticing things as they are, such as the ambient sounds during the performance of 4:33 minutes of silence (4:33, 1952), there is no evidence in the Thek oeuvre of this method of directing the viewer’s senses to what existed beyond the artist’s making. If anything, he sometimes elaborately ornamented many of the Technological Reliquaries through paint, and his color choice indicates a level of comfort with—if not an intention to induce—a queer reading of the work. From the colorful butterfly-wing pattern of some of the cast pieces (fig. 12), to the allover pinkness of his tomb installation, critics have interpreted both as an index of his sensibility and sexual identity. In his incisive and influential reading of Thek, the contemporary artist Mike Kelley commented on Thek’s use of pink: “Pink is THE hippie color. It’s fairy-dust color, gender-bender color …THE HERMAPHRODITE COLOR.”38 Thek would use the color again in Pyramid/A Work in Progress, a tunnel-like installation in Stockholm (1971–72, Moderna Museet). He likened the passage to a womb.39 According to Michael Nickel, who worked with him in Europe, pink for Thek meant the here and now, as opposed to red for hell and white for heaven.40 Yet the association of the color with femininity, established by the 1970s, surely would not have escaped him. Paul Thek, Untitled (Self-portrait), 1966–67, from the series Technological Reliquaries. Wax, acrylic paint, wood, metal, plexiglass, 22⅛ × 12⅝ × 15½ in. Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg, Germany © Estate of George Paul Thek. Photo: Octavian Beldiman
Pink objects and installations can be seen as corresponding with the quality of exaggeration that the critic Susan Sontag sees in camp aesthetic, in a 1964 essay that links it explicitly with a homosexual sensibility. The essay was included in Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays, which she dedicated to Thek.41 Her familiarity with queer camp sensibility might have been partly informed by her closeness with him and exposure to his life. During his summers on Fire Island in the 1960s, Thek wrote letters to Sontag and discussed his desire and sexual life openly. The tone and contents of the letters exhibit a sheer sensuous joy of being in the world, as well as of the pleasures of the flesh, even as these sentiments were accompanied with ambivalence, delivered with humor but no less indicative. Despite the relatively free lifestyle that he carved out for himself as an artist, he expressed moments of doubt, a longing for stability, a desire for something long-term—patterns of affective affiliation that he, as someone born in 1933, might not have expected to find in same-sex relationships—even as he also felt embarrassed for having wanted it. On meeting people, he wrote Sontag in 1965, “It seems pointless to open up for interim affection. Everything of that dreamy-eyed world is interim, as it should be. I approve. But of course still want a solid long term + do not approve of the wanting.”42 A year later, he wrote her, “I wonder why you never believed me when I said I felt that people involved in long relationships were sick …. Im a latter day Free Spirit, promiscuity is a sacrament.”43 While Thek’s queer desire would have posed a difficulty given Catholic doctrines and societal norms, it only exacerbated his underlying ambivalence toward matters of the flesh and wariness toward worldly relationships in general, regardless of his partner’s gender. (Thek also had sexual relations with women, including Sontag.) In one of his notebooks are jottings about relationships with men: “He sought his manhood in other men! When he could never find it! Warriors!”; about avoiding emotional attachments: “Make love A LOT so as to avoid feelings involvements with any particular ONE”; and a reminder to himself of sex positivity: “Avoid ever feeling shamed or degraded by ANY genital act.”44 Overall, his writing presents a picture of a gravitation toward, and practice of, sexual liberation. Yet, his need to advocate for multiple sexual experiences, along with his emphatic disavowal of shame, is also a good indicator of an underlying uneasiness that he was trying to work through.
Thek used to refer to an untitled Technological Reliquary piece now known as Untitled (Warrior’s Arm) as The Gladiator’s Arm (fig. 13). It is another mutilated cast arm in leather armor, this one more mortal, if not more conventionally manly, without bright colors or butterfly wings. The gladiator title adds a layer of queer desire even as it also captures the sense of conflict. Wilson, recipient of the “two masters” note from Thek, sees the piece as “an emblem of his struggle” between his “capacity for intense and complex sensual passion,” and his desire “to live as a contemplative monk.”45 In his own private reflection in one of his notebooks, this conflict plays out in what was most likely his autobiographical narration: “He learned to follow the others, to do it ‘all wrong’ so as to enjoy the peacefulness of holy solitude. After a bit of holy solitude he liked to get way down and smell crotch. He suffered the vertigo that goes with standing upright.”46 Rather than gay sexuality and its prohibition by the Catholic Church, the fundamental conflict for Thek went beyond sexual practice. It was the push and pull between worldly and ascetic desires, between embodied sensuality and a path toward transcendence. Such a dichotomy tracks with the one he faced as an artist: his two masters of art and religion. The tug of war is concretized and managed by Thek in another self-cast: that of his own penis (fig. 14). He enshrined it in a tubular resin, compressed, like a specimen in an anatomical museum. Notwithstanding the precedent of penis votive objects in history, this piece stands out from the other self-casts. It is not a discrete object over which Thek put a clear plexiglass box. Rather, there is no space within “the container” as the penis and its surroundings are one, evoking the sense of a stillness that embalms dead flesh. At the same time, pink in tone through Thek’s paint, it is also particularly life-like because of the hair that Thek attached to the cast. The viscous-looking resin covering enhances the reality effect as much as it contains the associations one makes with the genitals, the chain of sexualized signification and possibly queer readings lurking within, congealed.47 It can be read both as his homage to religious material culture and a modern work of art that literally doesn’t shy away from the artist’s crotch (even as it also serves perhaps as a sly response to Catholicism’s homophobia). Paul Thek, Warrior’s Arm, 1966–67. Wax, paint, leather, metal, wood, and resin in a plexiglass case, 8½ × 35½ × 9½ in. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: The Henry L. Hillman Fund, Mr. and Mrs. James H. Rich Fund, Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery Fund, and A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund, 2010.3 © Estate of George Paul Thek Paul Thek, Untitled (peniscast in resin), ca. 1964, from the series Technological Reliquaries. Wax, paint, resin, hair, 4 × 2¼ (dia.) in. © Estate of George Paul Thek; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, N.Y.
Crisis
By 1967 Thek had abandoned the Technological Reliquaries, bid farewell to the New York art world with The Tomb, and left America for Europe, spending most of the next decade there traveling and creating shows from city to city. With collaborators, he created museum installation environments incorporating multiple religious symbolisms, a departure from his (and much of the art world’s) model of the unique art object. Working with others to create installations, as opposed to exhibiting art that was his alone, seemed to have kept him moving forward and continuing to make art. It’s not known for sure why he left New York, but if the 1969 note to Wilson is any indication, his sense of alienation had been brewing for quite some time. He was dissatisfied with the art world, and, like many artists of his generation, had been affected by the war in Vietnam: the news of deaths, losses, and destruction; the images and video documentation of veterans’ injuries, amputations, and hardships broadcast on television for all to witness.48 “The world was falling apart, anyone could see it,” he said, “I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck; and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone.”49 (Thek’s target here would be the two reigning movements at the time: Pop Art and Minimalism.) The “glittery, swanky” art world seemed to continue operating in the business-as-usual mode.50 It prompted an existential crisis for him as an artist. Speaking of having a “cooped-up feeling” in New York in the late 1960s, Thek said, “I felt like a rather useless member of society, just producing more and more rarefied artifacts while all hell seemed to be breaking loose…. The artist’s role was simply insufficient as it had been presented to me.”51 Reflecting on society at large, Thek felt the need for a “spiritual education” rather than a “technological” one.52 He showed his body cast in The Tomb with all his right fingers cut off, perhaps a reference to war mutilation but also a concretization of that sense of uselessness, of being unable to go on and make work with his hands.
Thek’s alienation and frustration may have stemmed from major realignments in the Catholic Church during the 1960s, which led to “a seismic upheaval” and “identity crises,” writes Philip Gleason, a historian of American Catholicism. As the Church gained public visibility, more internal consciousness (and discord) about the management of public perception arose.53 Toward the end of the decade, attendance at and participation in religious services dropped considerably at both the Protestant and Catholic churches.54 Although for many laymen, Gleason writes, life went on as before, there was “a sense of malaise,” which he links with a “crisis of authority, …a weakening of confidence and an uneasiness about the direction in which things are going.”55 Among Catholics the feeling would have been no doubt intensified by the debates and divisions within the Church that played out in the public eye.56
Still, it would be simplistic to credit this “uproar” within the Catholic Church as a key source of Thek’s unease and alienation.57 For one, his private writing lacks direct commentary on what was going on in the United States or elsewhere in matters of public faith; his relationship to the religious establishment, though deeply ingrained, was more skeptical, renegade even.58 His letters and notebooks indicate a spiritual interiority operating on a plane of his own, a religious world-making that drew from disparate sources beyond the mainstream of contemporaneous organized religion. “Would like to turn my life on,” he wrote to Sontag in 1966. “A Summer Project. It is turning on. Loved Tanchelm. I dedicate 38 pieces to him. The Drummer of Niklashausen.” Tanchelm was an itinerant, heretical preacher active in Flanders, Zeeland, and Antwerp in the early twelfth century. The Drummer of Niklashausen refers to Hans Behem, a peasant who had a vision of the Virgin Mary before becoming an advocate of social equality, a revolutionary against the clergy and established feudal order. He was ultimately executed for heresy in 1476.59 Thek wrote to Sontag about his experience of “soul states” on the beach. He was in search of a spiritual experience beyond the mundane: “Im a renegade Christian still looking for The Transcendental Experience …. its in my blood I guess. Thats where the Big Experience is too.”60 A Meat Piece he made in 1965 titled Hippopotamus Poison gives us a clue to this pull within him toward extremes. On a slab of meat in a rectangular form evoking stone tablets with sacred pronouncements, he inscribed text referencing the activist Sylvia Kraus, who had protested on the streets—a direct action party of one—against what she claimed was a conspiracy to put “hippopotamus poison” in food and water for public consumption.61 Thek admired Kraus’s steadfastness despite the social consensus. He would like, he tells Sontag, to “drive myself into fanaticism, craziness. Sylvia Krauss [sic].”62 Ultimately, given the draw of the transcendental and the sense of fanaticism against social norms with which he sympathized, the internal landscape of his mind might have rendered being in secular New York unappealing to him. The sociopolitical context, the art world, or even the period’s religious “crisis” only made the alienation more manifest and gave him the clarity to move forward. With a Fulbright Scholarship (1967), he returned to the place that had inspired the Meat Pieces: Italy, where the integration of faith, ritual, and public life were, to him, still intact.
An oft-quoted story that Thek told about his first stay in Europe (1962–63) is that while in the catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, he picked up what he thought was a piece of paper, but it turned out to be a corpse’s dried thigh. This prompted in Thek the feeling of being “strangely relieved and free,” as he reflected on the human body’s “thing-ness.” “We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy,” he explained.63 While the catacombs encounter has been enshrined as a pivotal origins moment for Thek’s Meat Pieces, more can be parsed from this scene. It was through his hand that he touched the long dead flesh and then felt it as one with himself because of its (and his body’s) quality of thingness—the thingness he used to make art and that he would later cast as art. The self-casts, as I’ve argued, reinforced, through indexicality, how bodies and things on earth had been God’s creations. And while the terms of secular modern art favor individual authorship, the realization of thingness opens up the possibility of non-authorship that can be freeing, even a joy. If Thek’s castings were a kind of modern acheiropoieta, then art-making, even for a modern artist operating in a secular art world, was an arena for a spiritual subjectivity.
Thek’s search for a transcendental experience echoes in his last known letter to Sontag, dated March 12, 1987 (he died the following year): “I always recall our weekend at Nicoles place in the country, our afternoon ‘walk in the Compeign’, in search of (if I recall) some trace or other of some meteorite that may or may not have fallen thereabouts. Our search, as ever, for something …beyond.”64
Art’s Ownership
In the introduction to their groundbreaking volume on America’s religious visual culture, David Morgan and Sally Promey delineate four types of visual imagery in religious culture based on their function: communication (with a higher realm), communion (among group members), commemoration, and imagination. Notably, two of the four—communion and imagination—may especially apply to fine art as we understand it in the modern Western sense, in Thek’s time as well as ours. The two functions complement each other in the workings of art objects in the secular art world, with its rituals and jargon that reinforce communion among self-selected members. Together they constitute a subculture propped up by “the power of images to generate meaning, to stimulate associations or suggest interpretive strategies for making sense of one’s individual existence and communal life,” to quote Morgan and Promey’s evocative description of visual imagery’s role vis-à-vis the imagination.65 For Thek, what were artworks if not objects that mediated his life process of understanding his own existence, and, beyond that, the broader religious culture and social context that had shaped him? I have argued that Thek’s Meat Pieces concretize the push and pull in his inner landscape between his “two masters”: art and religion. Moreover, Thek’s model of non-authorship bridged them and his spiritual and artistic subjectivity. Could such a model of authorship grounded in faith have something to offer modern art?
In a taped conversation with the curator Harald Szeemann, who, as artistic director of documenta 5 (1972) in Kassel, Germany, included Thek’s work, Thek repeated several times, at first with a chuckle acknowledging the absurdity of the claim (or at least its “inappropriateness”) and later with a tone of humility and contented resignation:
I would say I copy everything I do.
Say it again.
I copy everything I do.66
We regard our own individuality and our own inspirations as if they were our own inspirations and our own ideas, whereas [they are] a group idea that’s given to us by God that belongs to everyone. But unfortunately economically we’re forced to fight for them and to hold on to them with patent, guarantees, property rights, and things like that. And I think that it’s beautiful when artists can share whatever they have. And it just makes it so much richer. It becomes a real carpet instead of just an isolated object.67
Notes
Paisid Aramphongphan earned a Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, and previously held a Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His book Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960s New York is forthcoming (May 2021).
I would like to thank Robin Veder, Marie Ladino, Sara Morris, and Emily Campbell at American Art; Emily Park at the Getty Research Institute; Caroline Kelley at Alexander and Bonin Gallery; as well as the Terra Foundation for American Art, for a travel stipend which allowed me to consult primary materials in Los Angeles. Special thanks also to the jurors of the Terra Foundation International Essay Prize and anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on this essay.
1. Paul Thek to Ann Wilson, May 1, 1969, quoted in Wilson, “Beatitudes: Remembering Paul Thek,” in Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky, Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010), 118. The note is dated in Harald Falckenberg, “Freedom is First of all Freedom from Identification,” in Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, eds. (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2008), 32. The year 1969 was the one “in which Thek participated in and had the most international exhibitions.” Margit Brehm, “Chronology,” in ibid., 592.
2. Neil Jenney quoted in “Body of Influence: Six Views on Paul Thek,” Artforum 29, no. 5 (January 2011): 165.
3. Paul Thek, “Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding,” interview by Richard Flood, Artforum 20, no. 2 (October 1981): 49, in Paul Thek: The Wonderful World That Almost Was (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1995), 107.
4. Wilson, “Beatitudes,” 118.
5. Paul Thek, notebook, ca. 1979, in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 19.
6. Biographical information from Katharina Winnekes, “Life is Like a Bowl of Cherries: Biography and Catalogue of the Collection,” in Paul Thek: Shrine, ed. Winnekes (Cologne: Kolumba, 2012), 41.
7. Wilson, “Beatitudes,” 119. See also Lynn Zelevansky, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries: The Life and Art of Paul Thek,” in Sussman and Zelevansky, Paul Thek: Diver, 26n29; and Thek, “Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding,” 115.
8. Paul Thek: Processions (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1977); and Sussman and Zelevansky, Paul Thek: Diver. The exhibition opened at The Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2010, and traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum of Art through September 2011.
9. Philipp Wittmann, Paul Thek: Vom Frühwerk zu den “Technologischen Reliquiaren”; mit einem Verzeichnis der Werke, 1947–1967 (Friedland: Klaus Bielefeld, 2004).
10. Lena Tacke, Körperbild und Bildkörper: Die “Technological reliquaries” von Paul Thek und die christliche Reliquientradition (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019).
11. Paul Thek to Susan Sontag, June 24, 1966, box 143, folder 16, Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA (hereafter Sontag Papers). All unconventional orthography and syntax are in the original. Excerpts of the letters are also published in Falckenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, 296–311, with an introduction and annotations by Margit Brehm.
12. “Acheiropoieta,” Oxford Reference, accessed October 13, 2020, oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095347462. My thinking about Thek here draws on Jeffrey Weiss’s explication of Jasper Johns’s process in relation to “sacred image practice” in his “Painting Bitten by a Man,” in Weiss, Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955– 1965 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 29. See also Robert A. Yelle, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
13. Carolee Schneemann quoted in “Body of Influence,” 163.
14. Margit Brehm, “ ‘Keep Trying to Get IN not OUT’: Paul Thek in the Context of American Art, 1964–1967,” in Falckenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, 70–95.
15. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23. Robert Slifkin elaborates on the concept as applied to art of the 1960s in Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2013); and Slifkin, “Now Man’s Bound to Fail, More,” October 135 (Winter 2011): 49–69.
16. Sally M. Promey, “The Visual Culture of American Religions: An Historiographical Essay,” in Exhibiting the Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Promey (Valparaiso, Ind.: Brauer Museum of Art, 2000), 1–8, quotes at 5.
17. Mignon Nixon, “Posing the Phallus,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 98–127. See also Helen Molesworth, Part Object Part Sculpture (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2005).
18. For an overview, see Édouard Papet, “Historical Life Casting,” in Stephen Feeke and Penelope Curtis, Second Skin: Historical Life Casting and Contemporary Sculpture (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2002), not paginated.
19. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” and “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 2,” October 3 (Spring 1977) and 4 (Autumn 1977): 68–81, and 58–67, respectively.
20. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Ex-voto: Image, Organ, Time,” L’Esprit Créateur 47, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 13. My thanks to Ben Carpenter for this reference and conversation on the topic. For a history of the Veronica (and, relatedly, the Mandylion before it), see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 215–24.
21. Paul Thek, notebook, ca. 1979, quoted in Marietta Franke, “‘Be Abstracted’: On Paul Thek’s Artistic Oeuvre,” in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 145, Franke quote at 150; see 144–56.
22. Papet, “Historical Life-Casting.”
23. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 29 (Summer 1984): 63–81.
24. On the logic of transferability of sacred power and reproduction of images not by human hand, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 49–57.
25. Inset in the catalog box set, Paul Thek: Alexandre Iolas (Paris: Alexandre Iolas, 1976). An excerpt was also reprinted in Michael Compton, Continuous Creation (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981).
26. Dirk Teuber, “Required Reading: Sources Concerning Paul Thek,” in Winnekes, Paul Thek: Shrine, 37–50.
27. Paul Thek, “Required Reading” notebook, 1970, reproduced in Winnekes, Paul Thek: Shrine, 184. See also Teuber, “Required Reading,” 42.
28. Winnekes, Paul Thek: Shrine, 193. See also Teuber, “Required Reading,” 45.
29. Paul Thek, notebook, 1975, reprinted in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 136–43.
30. “Relax,” in Paul Thek, notebooks reprinted in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 22.
31. Paul Thek, notebook #81, reproduced as front endpaper of Sussman and Zelevansky, Paul Thek: Diver.
32. Among Thek’s contemporaries one thinks of the labor- and concentration-intensive work of repetition in Yayoi Kusama and Agnes Martin, among others. See Jonathan D. Katz’s illuminating gloss on Martin’s painting and meditative process drawing from Zen Buddhism in Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2011): 171–97.
33. Robert Morris, “A JUDSON p.s.,” December 31, 2012, Artforum, artforum.com/words/id=38415.
34. Thek, “Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding,” 106.
35. Wittmann points out affinities between wax in works by Johns and Thek in Paul Thek, 209. On the theme of the body and skin in Johns, see Kirk Varnedoe, introduction to Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996). In contemporaneous reception of Johns, art critic Max Kozloff referred to “membranes” in discussing Johns’s use of encaustic, and the material’s visual and material proximity to skin and organic matter. See Weiss, “Painting Bitten,” 53n5. See also Kozloff, “The Division and Mockery of the Self,” Studio International 179 (January 1970): 9–15, quotes at 12, in which terms such as “integument” and “epidermis” are used in describing Johns’s work. On the material properties of wax and its historical and cultural association, see Roberta Panzanelli, “Introduction: The Body in Wax, the Body of Wax,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 1–11.
36. Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2001).
37. Jonathan D. Katz sees a Cold War–specific political valence in Cage’s aesthetic program. See Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” GLQ 5, no. 2 (1999): 231–52. The essay, as well as related articles by Katz, is also available on the website of the Queer Cultural Center: queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzIntro.html. See also, for a queer theoretical perspective on the use of non-expressivity and withholding as a form of resistance and subversion, Nicholas de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012).
38. Mike Kelley, “Death and Transfiguration: A Letter from America,” in Falckenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, 254–60, quote at 260, originally published in Daniel Buchholz, Paul Thek (Turin: Castello di Rivara, 1992). Milena Tomic emphasizes Thek’s color choice in her reading of his Tomb. See Tomic, “Biopolitical Effigies: The Volatile Life-Cast in the Work of Paul Thek and Lynn Hershman Leeson,” Tate Papers 24 (Autumn 2015), tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/biopolitical-effigies-paul-thek-and-lynnhershman-leeson.
39. Harald Szeemann, “Interview Paul Thek, Duisburg, 12 December 1973,” in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 83.
40. Zelevansky, “Bowl of Cherries,” 15.
41. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 515–30, reprinted in Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966; New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 275–92.
42. Thek to Sontag, July 18, 1965, box 143, folder 16, Sontag Papers.
43. Thek to Sontag, June 24, 1966.
44. Thek, undated notebook page, ca. summer 1979, reprinted in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 23.
45. Wilson, “Beatitudes,” 116.
46. Thek, notebook, ca. summer 1979, in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 36.
47. For a discussion of the queer meaning of a cast of a penis—and the need for the artist to manage it in homophobic culture, see Gavin Butt’s perceptive analysis of Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955) and its reception in Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2006), chapter 5: “Bodies of Evidence: Queering Disclosure in the Art of Jasper Johns,” 136–62.
48. A recent exhibition explored a variety of artistic responses to sociopolitical context and also significantly broadened the canon of 1960s/70s art beyond Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. Thek’s Warrior’s Leg was included in the show. See Melissa Ho, ed., Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2019).
49. Paul Thek quoted in object information for Thek, Hippopotamus Poison, 1965, Museum of Modern Art, accessed August 15, 2019, moma.org/collection/works/81404.
50. Thek, “Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding,” 107.
51. Szeemann, “Interview with Paul Thek,” 85.
52. Numbers 53–55 from Thek’s “96 Sacraments,” reprinted in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 137–43, 140.
53. Philip Gleason, “Catholicism and Cultural Change in the 1960’s,” Review of Politics 34, no. 4 (October 1972): 91–107, quotes at 91, 96, 92.
54. Hugh McLeod, “The Religious Crisis in the 1960s,” Journal of Modern European History 3, no. 2 (2005): 205–30, 205, 225. McLeod dates a “turning point” and cause for some serious soul-searching and internal splitting in the Catholic Church to 1968 with the official condemnation of contraception (McLeod, 226).
55. Gleason, “Catholicism and Cultural Change,” 101.
56. Richard Fenn, “Secularization in American Society: A Review of the 1960s,” The Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol. 3, 1945 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 149–69, 151. On press coverage of the church, see Gleason, “Catholicism and Cultural Change,” 94.
57. Gleason, “Catholicism and Cultural Change,” 95.
58. “Love destroys institutions,” Paul Thek wrote in a notebook, “Institutions were formed for lack of spontaneous love. Imagine a world without any institu[tions], etc.” Thek, notebook, ca. summer 1979, reprinted in Paul Thek: Wonderful World, 26.
59. Thek to Sontag, June 24, 1966. Both Tanchelm and Behem are mentioned in Norman Cohn’s Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford Univ. Pres, 1957), which, in his June 24, 1966, letter to Sontag, Thek mentioned he was reading (“quite marvelous”), possibly after Sontag’s recommendation or reading list (“I do wish you were here to teach me that course”).
60. Thek to Sontag, July 18, 1965; and Thek to Sontag, June 24, 1966, box 143, folder 16, Sontag Papers.
61. The full inscribed text is as follows: “I [sic] SYLVIA KRAUS, BEFORE GOD, DO HEREBY ALLEGE, THAT A PROTRACTED DESOLATING WEAPON HIPPOPOTAMUS POISON IS BEING USED TO INSIDIOUSLY ANNIHILATE MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN. THIS POISON IS BEING BLENDED INTO FOOD, BEVERAGES AND TOBACCO TO SIMULATE HEART ATTACK, CANCER, STROKE, ETC. LEST WE PERISH FROM WITHIN … STOP THIS MASSACRE.” See a reproduction of the artwork, Paul Thek, Hippopotamus Poison, 1965, Museum of Modern Art, accessed August 15, 2019, moma.org/collection/works/81404.
62. Thek to Sontag, June 24, 1966.
63. Paul Thek, “Beneath the Skin,” interview by Gene R. Swenson, ARTnews 65, no. 2 (April 1966): 35, in Falckenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, 347.
64. Thek to Sontag, March 12, 1987, box 143, folder 16, Sontag Papers.
65. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, introduction to Morgan and Promey, Visual Culture of American Religions, 1–24, quote at 12.
66. Paul Thek, interview by Harald Szeemann, December 12, 1973, Series V.B. Artist Files, C104. The audio recording is kept in the Harald Szeemann Papers, 1800–2011, bulk 1949–2005, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2011.M.30.
67. Ibid.
68. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); Jill Fields, ed., Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 2010).
