The Modern Institute, April 20th-June 2nd 2012
3 stars
‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions
of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost
a hundred notebooks left behind by the Brooklyn-born painter and
sculptor, which came to light following his death in 1988. Given the
sculptures and installations that formed the body of much of his work
from the 1960s Technological Reliquaries series onwards, where one
might expect blueprints for the environments shown at this year’s Thek
retrospective at the Whitney in New York, one is hit instead with
something infinitely more personal.
Such a panoply of ripped-up autobiographical scraps and pencilled-in
dreamscapes lays bare a candid close-up into one man's self-reflexive,
self-absorbed but self-aware quest towards a higher state of being.
Thek's ruminations on art, sex and spirituality are Me-Generation
pre-cursors to a similarly confessional Zine and blog culture that
followed. The works beyond this are big-bang stream-of consciousness
splodges of colour, finished products borne of a self-analysis
subsequently captured in the notebooks for precious posterity.
The List, May 2012
ends
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