Go See – New York: Paul Thek “Diver: A Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum through January 9th, 2011

Go See – New York: Paul Thek “Diver: A Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum through January 9th, 2011: "

Paul Thek, Technological Reliquaries, 1964-66. Via Tumblr

The most surprising thing about Thek perhaps, was his age. Of Andy Warhol’s generation, he is more theoretically aligned with the sincere art of David Wojnarowicz, who was twenty odd years his junior. Diver: A Retrospective manages to be a comprehensive overview of his work and his position in art history as well as a heartfelt look at his life and continuing influence, despite the absence of many seminal pieces which are no longer in existence. Thek is certainly a case of an artist before his time and perhaps is one who is altogether difficult to categorize.

Paul Thek, Technological Reliquaries, 1964-66. Via Un Regard Lubrique

more story and images after the jump…

“In the early 1960s, when everyone else in New York was into hands-off fabrication and Benday dots, he was modeling hyper-realistic images of meat, raw and bleeding, from beeswax,” according to the New York Times. This series, titled Technological Reliquaries, consisting of Plexiglas containers of hyper-realist body parts (and even one in a Warhol Brillo box) consumes the viewer upon first entering the exhibition at the Whitney. Reliquaries was Thek’s entrance into the New York art world and is especially important for Diver because it introduces his origin before embarking on his later work that can be difficult for viewers to contextualize. Reliquaries introduces Thek’s signature morbid humor, that emerges in defiance of Minimalism and Pop art. The humor involved in filling a gallery room full of oozing, rotting limbs encased in Plexiglas (a la Minimalism) is buttressed by Thek’s clear insistence on returning to an art that dealt with life and emotion. Reliquaries has also been read as an homage to Minimalism ignoring the Vietnam war.

Paul Thek, The Tomb, 1967. Via Blogspot

Thek’s most famous work from the “meat pieces” period, The Tomb, later renamed Death of a Hippie, was lost and is only present in the exhibition through photographs. Much of Thek’s work survives only in films or photographs, but the overall sense of him is achieved nonetheless. The ephemeral environments that Thek created all over Europe for the ten years he lived there as a nomad are not re-recreated. Instead, remaining artifacts from the environments are dispersed singularly throughout the exhibition, many of them slightly ragged. Fish Man, an effigy of Thek’s body covered in latex fish, is one such artifact which museum goers come upon in a corner of the exhibition.

Paul Thek, Dust, 1987. Via Visual Aids

Like Wojnarowicz, Thek was interested in the messiness of feelings and life experiences. Both ruminated extensively on religion and their queerness. However, Thek existed just outside of any one artistic generation. His use of latex and wax and his interest in the body (or body-like shapes) can be traced to the sculptress Eva Hesse, whom he met in the 1950s. Upon viewing the exhibition, his influence on dozens of artists becomes clear, such as Marcel Broodthaers, Ed Kienholz, Paul McCarthy, Franz West, Kiki Smith, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney, and Mark Dion. It is also arguable that Thek’s influence is prevalent in artists of the current generation, such as Ryan Trecartin, whose grotesque videos have a similar humor and skewing of Pop elements to Thek’s gnome or mushroom paintings.

- E C Feiss

Related Links:

Believing is Seeing (Or, the Meat of the Matter) [New York Times]

Paul Thek at [Alexander and Bonin]

Paul Thek gets a major retrospective at the Whitney [Village Voice]

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Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder and the Destruction of American Childhood

Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder and the Destruction of American Childhood: "

Today, a Democracy Now! special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Dr. Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. [includes rush transcript]

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A Day In Decay: Merry Christmas

A Day In Decay: Merry Christmas: "

Time to rock out in classic holiday style.

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Cuban Medics in Haiti Put the World to Shame

Cuban Medics in Haiti Put the World to Shame: "

Nina Lakhani writes in the Indepedent:

They are the real heroes of the Haitian earthquake disaster, the human catastrophe on America’s doorstep which Barack Obama pledged a monumental US humanitarian mission to alleviate. Except these heroes are from America’s arch-enemy Cuba, whose doctors and nurses have put US efforts to shame.

A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti, as part of Fidel Castro’s international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends, but little international recognition.

Observers of the Haiti earthquake could be forgiven for thinking international aid agencies were alone in tackling the devastation that killed 250,000 people and left nearly 1.5 million homeless. In fact, Cuban healthcare workers have been in Haiti since 1998, so when the earthquake struck the 350-strong team jumped into action. And amid the fanfare and publicity surrounding the arrival of help from the US and the UK, hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses and therapists arrived with barely a mention. Most countries were gone within two months, again leaving the Cubans and Médecins Sans Frontières as the principal healthcare providers for the impoverished Caribbean island.

Read More in the Indepedent

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Evil Santa’s Crimes Against Humanity

Evil Santa’s Crimes Against Humanity: "

Science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson once researched all of Santa’s “Crimes Against Humanity.”

Jolly Ol’ St. Nick is guilty of more than just paganism, perjury, and trying to steal Christmas from Christ. “Pope John XXIII threw the suspiciously merry old clown out of the Roman Catholic church back in the late 1960s,” and “The Jehovah’s Witnesses have always denounced Santa for his unsavory pagan past. (They also recognized Christmas trees as phallic symbols long before Freud.)”

Santa also has “a rather criminal family history all around,” since he’s a descendant of the primordial bear-god. And in some rustic parts of Europe “and probably in Kansas, Santa retains traces of his carnivorous past. Children are told that if they are good all year, Santa will reward them, but if they are bad, he will EAT THEM ALL UP.”

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City Workers Force low income man to Eat Cabbage Rolls Instead of Turkey Dinner on Christmas Day

City Workers Force low income man to Eat Cabbage Rolls Instead of Turkey Dinner on Christmas Day: "A Downtown Eastsider who had not had a turkey dinner in several years, didn't want to miss out this year. He had been told by other Downtown Eastsiders that the Christmas dinner at the Salvation Army can be counted on to be good, and the volunteer servers are always eager to ensure people enjoy their dinner. So he headed over there today. But he got there too late; the security guard told him"

The World’s First ‘Quantum Device’

The World’s First ‘Quantum Device’: "

Thanks to Greg F. for sending along this story from the Belfast Telegraph:

A device that exists in two different states at the same time, and coincidentally proves that Albert Einstein was right when he thought he was wrong, has been named as the scientific breakthrough of the year.

The machine, consisting of a sliver of wafer-thin metal, is the first man-made device to be governed by the mysterious quantum forces that operate at the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles.

Normal, everyday objects obey the laws of conventional Newtonian physics, named after Sir Isaac Newton, but these rules break down on the sub-atomic scale and a whole new branch of theoretical physics had to be invented to explain what happens on this sub-microscopic level.

Einstein was the first to embrace quantum physics but later rejected it on the grounds that it made everything unpredictable – “God does not play dice with the universe,” he famously stated.

However, a range of effects has been recorded over the past few years that can only be explained by quantum mechanics and in March scientists were able to build the first device that seemed to follow the quantum rules that Einstein was the first to realise applied to light waves.

The breakthrough, recognised by the journal Science as the most significant this year, opens the way to a range of practical developments such as quantum computers that are far faster than conventional processors and which could never be hacked into because they handle and transmit data using an unbreakable form of encryption.

“Quantum theory dictates that a very tiny thing can absorb energy only in discrete amounts, can never sit perfectly still, and can literally be in two places at once,” said Adrian Cho, a writer for Science. “This represents the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object. It opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality.”…

[continues in the Belfast Telegraph]

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