Peter Hujar. Thek at his work table in Oakleyville, Fire Island, 1967 (reproduced from the original color slide). ©1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Sometimes, an artist strikes a chord with his contemporaries, and affection for him ripples through culture more distinctly and effusively than anything he’s actually made.  Paul Thek was that kind of artist, perhaps better suited to being a muse than to having one. Homages began coming his way before he’d cleared thirty-five and,  lucky for us, this means countless, compelling bits of him course through the arts and ideas left over from recent decades.

Even before you enter Paul Thek: Diver, the artist’s first-ever museum retrospective, you’ll see a photograph of Thek, blond, big-eyed, wearing a wife beater, surrounded by the eccentric trappings of his trade. Taken by Thek’s then-lover, photographer Peter Hujar, the image radiates deeply shared admiration—born George, Thek took the name “Paul” so that he and Hujar could move through the world as the ecclesiastical “Peter and Paul.” Then, in the foyer before the first main gallery,  you’ll see a screen test of Thek, even younger, with short hair that made him more boyish and less willowy then he later became, excerpted from Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Beautiful Boys. Though the show makes no explicit reference to Thek homages by Mike Kelley, David Wojnarowiz or virtuoso critic Susan Sontag, by the time you’ve wandered through, you’ll have a sense of what charmed them. Everything he made, whether memorable in itself or not, felt drenched in a moment, even though Thek routinely rejected the minimalism and pop sleekness that dominated his era.

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

Paul Thek: Diver arrived at The Hammer Museum via The Whitney late in May, the love-worn project of Whitney curators Elisabeth Sussman and Sondra Gilman and Lynn Zelevansky of the Carnegie Museum.  The exhibition includes two decades of work: gory but still-vibrant flesh sculptures (“meat pieces”), wax effigies, whimsical installations and notoriously “bad” paintings. Its layout, roughly chronological, follows the nomadic artist to his various international destinations. There are rooms dedicated to his early life in New York, his time at a foundry in Italy, time in Paris and Scandinavia, and, finally, his return to NYC. Each phase is particular, though all throughout, stories of loss or near-loss accompany his sometimes exquisite, frequently haphazard objects.

Thek was expelled from a Rome foundry when it went bankrupt in the late 70s, and he lost a portion of The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, small, seemingly charred bronze sculptures of items that could have populated a campsite. Dwarf Parade Table, a long dining table held up by dwarfs he  learned to make from a craftsman of garden statuary, was installed as part of documenta 5 in Lucerne. Three years later, a curator from the Kunstmuseum Luzern asked for permission “to drop all wooden material” from Thek’s work—the museum just couldn’t store it any more. The parade table survived in whole, others not.

Paul Thek working on The Tomb in his studio, circa 1966. Photo © Peter Hujar

In the early 80s, when Thek was back in the states for good, he received a call that a piece he’d made in 1967, The Tomb, had been sent back from Europe, where it had been on exhibit. A wax cast of himself, dead with two psychedelic plates on his cheeks, the piece had been dubbed The Death of a Hippie, though Thek said it never had to do with hippiness. He didn’t pick it up, and it remains, in the words of curator Richard Flood, “one of the great, lost works in American art.”

But such  loss seems a small tragedy for Thek, whose bodies of art were always more instinctively diverse and immediate then tightly directed toward posterity.  In fact, in moving through the Hammer show, the works that have survived appear to have done so by accident, because Thek left them somewhere safe, or happened to craft them out of more or less indestructible material.

“Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses,” wrote Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay, Against Interpretation, dedicated to and likely inspired by Thek (a year after his 1988 death, of AIDS, she would dedicate AIDS and its Metaphors to him as well). “All the conditions of modern life–its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness–conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.” At the Hammer, Thek is present en mass, but he’s best in his specificity, experienced one piece, one phase at a time–not because the pieces are singularly fantastic in themselves, but because each was meant to exist in its own time, and each had its own quirks and inspirations.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970′s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.

Louise Bourgeois, "Echo I", 2007, Bronze painted white, and steel 76” x 17” x 14", Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York; Photo courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

This past weekend, the art world took a collective breath as it was informed of the death of a titan, French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. At the age of 98, Bourgeois had accomplished an impressive sixty-year career which, at the time of her death, was continuing to gain momentum.

Bourgeois was born December 25, 1911 in Paris, France where her artistic career started as a young child participating in her family business of tapestry restoration. She attended the Sorbonne in the 1930s, at the height of the Surrealist movement and studied in the workshop of Fernand Léger. In 1938, Bourgeois moved to New York with her husband, American Robert Goldwater (an art historian who specialized in tribal art), and again found herself in the epicenter of the artistic avant-garde, interacting with not only the European artists who were in exile from WWII, but also with the Abstract Expressionists who were claiming the spotlight. From there, Bourgeois was front and center for the subsequent artistic movements that were to follow: Pop Art, Pluralism, Identity Politics, Body Art, Feminist Art and Post-Modernism. Yet, Bourgeois’ work could never be defined as belonging to one. Rather, her work was able to incorporate aspects of all and, working in a variety of mediums, able to elevate into an entirely new category all on its own.

Bourgeois culled her childhood history and personal life as subject matter, and her works were riffed with what we can now categorize as Freudian and Lacanian theory. Growing up in Choisy-le-Roi, France, Bourgeois often references her imperious and philandering father and her mercurial mother, charging her work with sexuality, psychology and mortality.

It wasn’t until the late 60’s/early 70s that Bourgeois begin to gain recognition of her work, and once the ball started rolling, there was no slowing it down. Between 1978 and 1981, she had five-one woman shows in New York. She has participated in four separate Whitney Museum Biennales. She has represented the U.S. in the Venice Biennale and had her work included in Documenta. In the last twenty years of her career, the list of institutions which housed her solo exhibitions reads like a “Who’s Who” of international museums.

A wonderful display of her work is now on exhibit at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. The show, Mother and Child (open through June 12^th), is a collection of recent sculptures, gouache drawings and mixed media print works.  With this particular grouping of drawings, Bourgeois applied blood-red gouache onto wet paper and the affect of the absorption, in some inexplicable way, perfectly illuminates the complicated relationship of the female form with childbirth. I use the word “complicated” because Bourgeois work is such: beautiful, graphic, raw, and visceral. Additionally, Bourgeois often depicts the female form as an abstracted fertility form often encountered in ancient civilizations, reminding us that even with all our modern day technology, childbirth is just as primordial as it ever was.

Louise Bourgeois, "The Birth", 2007, Gouache on paper 23 1/2” x 18”, Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York; Photo courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

The central piece of the exhibition, for me, was the work THE FRAGILE, 2007, a large piece of 36, 10 x 8 inches, archival dyes on fabric. Of all the work in the front room of a female form giving birth, this piece, installed in a smaller gallery room, seems the most intimate to me. This work comprises imagery of a variety of female fertility forms and spiders, juxtaposed together into a large grid. Often, Bourgeois would discuss the association of the spider form to her mother, and it is with this knowledge that the artwork reveals itself the most to the viewer. With THE FRAGILE, Bourgeois is allowing herself to be vulnerable with her audience, trusting enough to confide in us her complicated feelings about her mother, and possibly, her own role she has played in motherhood.

Louise Bourgeois, "THE FRAGILE", 2007, Archival dyes on fabric, in 36 parts 10” x 8” inches (each), Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York; Photo courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

With her passing, there have been a slew of articles written about Louise Bourgeois and her contributions and positioning within art history. Many of these articles allude to the majority of her influence being felt by a largely younger, female contingency. This may be true, but one does not need to be female to appreciate and feel the power of Bourgeois’ work. One must be willing to allow him or herself to let down their walls and engage in the intimacy that Bourgeois invites the viewer to experience. In this day and age of many artists attempting to assert their identity of who and what they are in this world via their chosen medium, I defy you to find one who can strip down their psyche to such a vulnerable state as Bourgeois, while metaphorically returning your gaze.

Robert Mapplethorpe, "Louise Bourgeois in 1982 with FILLETTE, 1968", Copyright the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe

Heitzler, who participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, recently exhibited at LAX Art and Angstrom Gallery among, other venues. for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers, his current exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery, closes January 30th.

Drew Heiztler, "for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers." Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: Your current exhibition makes me think of remixes and mash-ups—art forms that are about rearranging someone else’s cultural product and telling a different story. What prompted you to re-edit historical film and images?

DH: Subway Sessions and TSOYW are two previous films I made and actually shot. The first on super-8, the second on 16mm (TSOYW was a collaboration with Amy Granat and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial). In both cases I relied heavily on the tropes of specific film genres. Subway Sessions used the aesthetics of 70′s surf films to tell the story of a certain time and place, specifically, Rockaway Beach New York just prior to September 11, 2001. TSOYW looked like a 70′s biker film and relied heavily on the tropes of that genre. So it wasn’t a big step to go from using the look of earlier film genres to actually using earlier films themselves. Also, I had read a book on documentary film making by Erik Barnouw that my wife Flora found for me in a thrift store. In the book, the Soviet cine-clubs were discussed. It seems that after the revolution it was impossible for Russian film makers to get film stock due to western boycotts. What they had in abundance were western news reel and even films that were being smuggled into Russia in effort to undermine the Revolution. The cine-clubs would re-edit these films and news reels in order to create new narratives that supported their cause. I liked this idea of re-ordering an existing cultural image to better fit your own perception of the world. It’s collage.

CW: How important is story-telling to you?

DH: Story telling is what I am interested in. I love those French paintings like The Oath of the Horatii or The Raft of the Medusa. They operate like movies. They tell stories which can exist at different allegorical levels.

CW: Each of the three films that make up for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled ) were originally presented on their own, right? Why combine them?

DH: The combining of the films came out of a problem of exhibition. This show was originally scheduled to open at MOCA in May, 2009. Then it was postponed to September of that year and then postponed again to January of 2010 before it was eventually canceled all together. The result was that I had a long time to think about how these three films would be presented. I had always intended for them to come together as a trilogy, but as I kept messing around with ideas of how they would actually be presented in the gallery, they morphed into a triptych, becoming a whole new piece. What I discovered and enjoyed was that once the three individual narratives were doubled and superimposed over one another, they operated in a much more complex way. The individual narratives were still visible, but complicated by their interaction with one another. In other words, the lines of thought were confused, which seems to me much closer to the way we go through life. At least that seems to hold for me.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: The other day, you used the words “sticky stuff,” referring to the way the oil industry lurks underneath L.A. culture. I love those words and they’re definitely relevant to your work. How do you relate the historical, anthropological side of your project to its sticky, psychological underbelly?

DH: I think it has something to do with the problem of truth, or more accurately its impossibility. I came to Los Angeles with an idea of what I would find when I got here. It was the idea that had been presented to me, sold to me in a way. What I found was something completely different. History and anthropology work the same way. They present themselves as framing a truth while they are only presenting a perception (I was assistant to Fred Wilson for several years and I learned from him how important this idea is). However, the idea of truth is absolutely vital to our ability to exist as a society, this is common sense. Likewise, sublimation is absolutely necessary for the ego to exist within a society. There are rules to follow. Once again, the only way this sublimation works is to accept certain ideas, certain perceptions as true. But just like the oil that bubbles up into the sunny Los Angeles landscape, the sticky stuff that we sublimate, keep subterranean, or relegate to the subconscious can’t be kept at bay. It always bubbles up.

Drew Heitzler, "Untitled (Ladera Heights)," 2007. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: While the story you’re telling is ostensibly about the past, it seems really timely. As you developed this work, were you thinking of anything happening on today’s cultural landscape?

DH: Once again, I’m going to bring up The Oath of the Horatii (god, I love that painting). The painting is a depiction of a moment of Roman lore but this is not what the painting is about. It is a call to arms for a new Republic in France. This is the subtext. So while the historical anthropology that I am engaged in is ostensibly about historical power structures in Los Angeles, I believe that when the work is looked at closely, the relationships to our current cultural moment are clear.

CW: On a related note, I was reading Camille De Toledo’s Coming of Age at the End of History the other day. This passage, about a new breed of romanticism, reminded me of you: “We kept alive the idea that man was capable of acting upon History, but we abandoned the . . . heroism of the avante-gardes that imagined they could overturn it.” Thoughts?

DH: This goes back to the idea of truth that I addressed in a previous question. I feel that as we have observed how the successive avant-gardes were absorbed into the monolith of capital it became more difficult to take the idea of revolution seriously. One truth gets replaced by another truth to then be absorbed by the previous truth and none of them are true anyway.  I am quite certain that it is useless to try and overturn the dominant discourse as the result is merely a different dominant discourse. But what remains is agency. I feel that it is important as an artist to act upon the dominant discourse not with the intent of overturning it, but with the intent of revealing its contradictions; confusing it and so bringing it closer to a universal idea, which is as close to an idea of truth that I am willing to entertain.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Blum & Poe.