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Theodore Newman, Paul Fisher & Paul Thek, Rhode Island, 1957
Contemporary silver gelatin print from negative, from the Collection of Peter HarveyTo be queer is to be an archeologist. In order to find our traces in a world that prefers we be hidden, we excavate, combing the cultural cannon for clues about ourselves, our elders and our ancestors. Dig we must.
Enter curator Jonathan David Katz, shovel in hand, intent on unearthing a simple set of truths about visionary artist, Paul Thek, the subject of recent retrospectives at The Whitney and The Hammer museums. Its true, Thek’s wax reliquary was an antecedent of Bob Gober’s political waxworks. His dwarf processions were a premonition of Paul McCarthy’s fetishization of otherness. Trace evidence of his Untitled (Diver) can be seen in Michael Bilsborough’s recent aerial schematics of suspended desire. But what Katz asks us to dig through are the densely queer underpinnings of the artist’s most personal exploration of the meaning of selfhood, as evidenced in documentation of the doings of his closest community of friends and companions. Thek’s story, Katz is telling us, is our story.
In Paul Thek and His Circle in the 1950s,at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Katz and co-curator Peter Harvey circumnavigate any overly intellectualized or simplistically sexualized depiction of what is most clearly queer. Katz favors a more deeply intimate rendering, one that is momentary but modern. He is unveiling a queer humanism, tucked within one of the most reactionary periods of the American politics, the McCarthy years. As with all of Katz’s explorations of the queer responses to the heterocentricity of the period’s abstract expressionism, it is an exhumation that might assist any queer national in their search for a communal soul, past, present or future.
-Avram
