Paul Thek’s work resists organization. Though most known for performance/sculptures that helped establish installation as a viable medium, Thek was also a meticulous draftsman who drew and painted daily. His life was similarly diverse, with perpetual wanderings broken up by long hermitages in Rome and New York's Lower East Side. Rather than evade this diffuseness, Thek’s retrospective exhibition Diver at the Hammer Museum of Art emphasizes it: performance and privacy, myth and messy reality.

Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective. Installation view at the Hammer Museum includes the work 96 Sacraments, Los Angeles. May 22 – August 28, 2011. Photography by Brian Forrest.

Diver opens with Thek’s handwritten notes, titled “96 Sacraments,” where we learn that Thek’s idea of sacraments included everyday occurrences such as seeing a cat and swimming in the ocean. The Hammer installed this whimsical list next to a cluster of Thek’s Technological Reliquaries from the mid-1960s, an assortment of disembodied artificial limbs resting in colored plexiglass, seeming to quiver with gore even after five decades. By posing such dark material with Thek’s sacraments, the Hammer foregrounds Thek as an artist with an expansive approach to physical experience that was sometimes chilling.

Sussman’s blurring of the lines between Thek’s public artwork and private life—with her inclusion of pages from his diaries as well as the paintings and drawings on paper that dominated his output during his twenty years of isolation in an Lower East Side apartment—is an attempt to reframe Thek as interested in much more than the grotesque and uncanny. The notebook drawings’ opacity matches the restlessness of his overall output, as his shifts from subject to subject are captivating but often inscrutable. Reading the text in his notebooks suspends his more visceral work in a kind of dreamy envelope; the bloody limbs of the early 60s, the body casts and garden gnomes of the later 60s, and the forged iron knives and tanks of the 70s all appear very different after having looked at these smaller works. They help to frame Thek as intensely introspective—the wall text argues that these notebooks represent his effort “to be serious and stable in every way”—rather than as an obtuse meanderer.

 

Despite this early contrast between objects, the exhibition layout feels squarely like a retrospective. Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman divides Thek’s work into seven sections with each representing a successive period in Thek’s career. Given the difficulty of organizing Thek’s oeuvre, however, this move on Sussman’s part is somewhat strange, particularly in the way she deals with his scattered installations that appeared in several versions over the years. In a late-1960s German show, for instance, Thek laid out sculptures that had broken during shipment from the United States in the exhibition space and gradually repaired or re-purposed them into new works. At the Hammer, Sussman installed some fragments of those sculptures in a large room, but the photographs of the resulting German exhibition appear in the next room. Such a move seems to over-distinguish sculpture and performance photography; moreover, the porous aspect of Thek’s German show makes such curatorial decisions seem particularly arbitrary.

At any rate, Sussman makes clear Thek’s lack of allegiance to any one medium, and doesn’t make a great effort to cement his work as narrative or process-oriented. Scattered performance ephemera notwithstanding, this show provides as good a structure as any for encountering an artist whose work pushed against art history’s now-familiar divisions of media and temporality.