Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek

The article introduces Paul Thek, an artist whose work revolves around a personal collection of objects, notes, and letters stored in a wooden milk crate he calls a Shrine. This crate, found at a bazaar and lined with glass panes from a neighbor’s trash, becomes a portable archive of his life, filled with unmailed letters, photographs, and sketches. The Shrine symbolizes Thek’s attempt to preserve fragments of his existence, blending the mundane with the sacred. The crate’s contents, including notebooks from his travels to Rome and Ponza in 1973, reflect his introspective and ritualistic approach to art. The term Shrine here refers not just to a physical object but to a conceptual space where memory, spirituality, and creativity intersect. Thek’s process involves repurposing discarded materials, such as an old milk crate and broken glass, to create something meaningful, highlighting his belief in art as a form of worship or devotion.

Thek recalls his childhood church in Germany as a place of profound beauty and ritual, where the darkness, candlelight, incense, and liturgy created a sacred atmosphere. He participated in the choir, particularly enjoying Easter songs, though his voice would sometimes break during performances. This memory of the church as a site of order, passion, and collective experience deeply influenced his artistic vision. He later reflects that art lost its creative vitality when it separated from worship, drawing a parallel between the artist’s role in former times—where art served as a vessel for eternal values and immortality—and the modern artist’s struggle with self-doubt and commercialization. Thek’s reverence for the church’s liturgical gestures and communal rituals underscores his belief in art as a form of spiritual expression, echoing the ideas of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, whom Thek met once. Bergman’s quote, used as an epigraph, argues that art’s detachment from worship has rendered it sterile, a sentiment Thek seems to embrace.

Thek describes his artistic environments as spaces designed to evoke a peaceful yet overwhelming atmosphere, intending to shatter visitors upon leaving. One such environment involved a chicken coop filled with 12 large candles and sections of oranges sticking through the wire, as part of a Swedish Christmas ritual from December 1971. His environments often incorporate elements like cages, lilies, mice, fish, and cut glass, creating what he calls an ark—a liturgical space that serves as an offering. Thek’s work also includes newspaper paintings, where he uses The New York Times obituaries as a base for abstract art in blue, yellow, and white, referencing the poetry of Ezra Pound, whom he admired. Pound, a poet who believed in Paradise and claimed to have been touched by God, died in 1972, and Thek’s paintings from June 1969 and later reflect this fascination with transcendence and decay.

Thek’s life is marked by personal struggles, including his mother’s illness and death from cancer in the gut, which he describes in raw, unflinching terms. His mother, a poet who wrote unhappy rhyming poems and read him Finnegans Wake at age six, represents a complex figure in his life. Thek also mentions a friend named Fenrir, who died after falling ill, and his partner in gardening on a tenement rooftop. His relationship with the art world is ambivalent; while he laments being forgotten, he finds solace in nature and creativity. Thek’s humor and defiance emerge in his references to modern buildings as Sodom and Gomorrah, a biblical allusion to corruption, and his playful yet poignant remarks about his own mortality and the healing power of art. His mother’s illness and his own physical ailments, such as bleeding fingers from handling sharp glass, add a layer of vulnerability to his otherwise enigmatic persona.