Paul Thek’s Eclectic Art
The art world loves a tie-in—a book or a movie that provides an occasion to “reframe” certain artists. In recent months, Andrew Durbin’s very fine biography “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” has helped to promote two artists whom younger viewers in particular may have been only tangentially aware of. Paul Thek (1933-88) is the subject of two shows up now, at the Galerie Buchholz (through July 25), and at Pace (through Aug. 14). Each offers credible displays of Thek’s eclecticism, and while he wasn’t easily categorizable, and his producing in various styles confounded the art market, which is a good thing, you really have to pick through the work. Thek used a variety of materials—in addition to painting and sculpture, he designed theatre sets, and used his own body as an object—in order to see what’s good, or merely “interesting.”
For a time, Thek, a onetime Cooper Union student, supported himself driving a cab and doing whatever else he needed to do to survive, but his first paid gig as an artist was painting and, eventually, helping to construct sets for a theatre company in Rhode Island. Following that, he designed sets for a theatre company in Coral Gables, Florida, where he lived for a time with a lover. Through his friend Susan Sontag, Thek met the theatre director Robert Wilson, in 1970; by 1972 he had created sets for Wilson’s hundred-and-sixty-eight-hour piece “Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace,” performed in Iran. Thek had a long-standing fascination with bodies, those repositories of hope and decay, but neither show focusses much on that. At Buchholz, I was particularly taken with several drawings, from 1969, of his studio in Amsterdam, which have a fantastical, Cubist-like structure, but with a lot of flow, too. Whereas the Buchholz display concentrates on Thek’s process of intellection, the show at Pace, “Dream of Vanishing,” feels not so much thrown together as confused. Instead of one curatorial vision, a group of three people organized the display, and you can feel it. Regrettably, much of the show is trained on Thek’s interest in religious iconography—a feathery cross, etc.—but it was intriguing to see his “Red Shrine,” from 1964, inspired by mummified corpses he saw in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, which must have been an influence on Andres Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ)” (1987). But Thek’s fascination with spectacle didn’t necessarily serve him well as an artist, nor did his resistance to curators and gallerists who believed in him: he could have benefitted from distillation, and from editing.—Hilton Als
Read Hilton Als on “Hujar:Contact,” a show of Peter Hujar’s photography, up at the Morgan Library & Museum, through Oct. 25.
About Town
Remarks are “not literature,” as the quippy modernist Gertrude Stein once remarked. Yet, in Eric Bentley’s 1972 docu-play, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” a revealing tapestry of testimonies from Hollywood actors, writers, and directors ensnared in America’s mid-twentieth-century anti-Communist purge, they are woven into something unexpectedly dramatic. Under the sharp direction of Anna D. Shapiro, the play hugs the corners as it pivots from the authority of the House Un-American Activities Committee chairman (Michael McKean, in a rotating cast) to the blustery self-justifications of Elia Kazan (Frederick Weller) to the administrative recitation of names by Jerome Robbins (Steven Boyer). Paul Robeson (Billy Eugene Jones), in his refusal to name other suspected subversives, lends the production its clearest moral voice.—Rhoda Feng (City Center Stage I; through Sept. 11.)
The singer and multi-instrumentalist Kurt Vile started his career making lo-fi home recordings in Philadelphia, so it’s fitting that the album he made as if it might be his last was created as an homage to the City of Brotherly Love. Released this May, “Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me” is mostly self-produced, with a hazy sense of space and time apropos of the ways in which his sound has gradually expanded over the years. Since leaving the band the War on Drugs, in 2008, Vile has become a solo avatar for psychedelic guitar music, his rich catalogue easygoing and nonchalant, but also sprawling. Alongside his backing band, the Violators, he wades into its depths.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; July 23.)
In the nineties, Tori Amos—a survivor of wunderkind expectations (she was a piano prodigy at five) and of a failed stint in a synth-pop band—proved too ambitious not to join a generation’s creative vanguard. Her seminal 1992 début, “Little Earthquakes,” introduced her biting point of view, and the singer-songwriter continued to straddle alt-rock, baroque pop, and more, across a long, adventurous career that included the polarizing, ayahuasca-fuelled “Boys for Pele” (1996) and the acoustic boomerang “Unrepentant Geraldines” (2014). Her latest record, “In Times of Dragons,” is no less bold, staring down threats to American democracy; Amos shares the stage with Bartees Strange, a kindred spirit, politically, whose fanciful music can be similarly boundary-pushing.—S.P. (Beacon Theatre; July 24-25.)
In France, Hugo Marchand is a ballet superstar in a way we seldom see here. He walks fashion runways and appears on chat shows, where interviewers fawn over him. He is also a very good dancer, with a sinuous grace and an intense commitment to his roles. For “Artists at the Center,” an evening of dances chosen by Marchand features him in a famous, over-the-top table-dancing solo by Maurice Béjart—“Boléro,” set to Ravel’s eponymous score. Marchand also performs a rather dreamy duet with the equally glamorous Dorothée Gilbert—“Le Parc,” by Angelin Preljocaj—and another, by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen and set to Satie, with another French star, Léonore Baulac.—Marina Harss (New York City Center; July 23-26.)
The Venezuelan director Lorena Alvarado’s real-life family is the basis for her first feature, “Lost Chapters,” a lyrical, multigenerational fiction. Ena (Ena Alvarado, the filmmaker’s sister), a twenty-five-year-old writer, returns home to Caracas to visit her father, Ignacio (Ignacio Alvarado, the filmmaker’s father), a bookseller and collector. He shares a house with his elderly mother (Adela Rodríguez, Alvarado’s grandmother), whose memory is failing. After getting wind of an unusual novel, from 1912, Ignacio tries to find it, while Ena makes the elusive tome the basis of her own docu-fictional novel. Father and daughter reconnect through book hunts and research trips; tender reunions over poetry recitations fuse literary passions and family bonds with cinematic grace.—Richard Brody (Opening July 24 at IFC Center.)
The comedy-drama “A Sad and Beautiful World,” by the Lebanese director Cyril Aris, maps a young couple’s romantic destiny along the country’s political and social agonies. Yasmina and Nino, born a minute apart in the same Beirut hospital, become childhood sweethearts but lose touch; they reconnect as adults through the antic calamity of a minor but spectacular car crash. The fiercely critical Yasmina (Mounia Akl) is a business consultant whose parents are divorced, and Nino (Hasan Akil), funny and optimistic, is a restaurateur who was orphaned as a child; their efforts to build a relationship and form a family are strained to the breaking point by war, civic strife, and economic disaster. The decades-spanning tale, told in sketch-like anecdotes highlighting witty and fervent performances, is sentimental and tender, clear-eyed and melancholy.—R.B. (Opening July 24 at Quad Cinema.)
Pick Three
Amanda Petrusich on Grateful Dead ephemera.
“Summer Tour,” a new documentary about the famously fervent and nomadic fans of the Grateful Dead (and of the band’s later iteration, Dead & Co.), débuts this week. It’s a heartening reminder that, despite enormous changes in the way we consume and share music, there are still vital, real-life scenes unfolding out there. Though I wouldn’t dare describe myself as a scholar of the band (I’ll leave that to the Grateful Dead Studies Association), here are three Dead-related things that bring me tremendous joy.
1. “Morning Dew,” Cornell University, 5/8/77. Admittedly, this is not an especially adventurous pick for the best Grateful Dead performance (this particular show, disseminated via bootleg for decades, was reissued as a five-LP set, in 2017), but I do think it’s a true apotheosis: thrilling, transporting, startlingly lovely.
2. The third verse of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” “Out on the road today / I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac / A little voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back,’ ” the Eagles front man sings on his swooning, synth-driven solo hit, from 1984. I’ve always loved the way that lyric encapsulates both the inevitable sublimation of counterculture, and also a certain gnawing, beautiful nostalgia.
3. Double Wonderful. Perhaps no group before or since has merchandised better than the Dead. That tradition is carried on by Gordon Kenny, the artist behind Double Wonderful, a (deliberately) inscrutable T-shirt brand. Kenny makes incredibly funny, weird shirts about the music he loves (especially Steely Dan and Phish).
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: