Despite the impermanence of Thek’s environments, the artist’s Pied Piper-like influence on current art production can be felt in contemporary works such as Sebastian Hammwöhner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstein’s I Cannot Forward, or Rewind This State of Being, This Aged Resign: Let the Wind Catch a Rainbow on Fire … (2004). This eccentric tabletop collection of objects – including a bronze honeycomb bisected by a mirror and a child’s galoshes graced with bells – bears the signature of what seems to be the collective mind of an uncharted civilization. Kai Althoff and Robert Elfgen’s Das Floss (The Raft, 2004), with its makeshift hut on a life-size raft, seemed to be broadcasting from the same evangelical channel as Thek’s Noah’s Raft, which he built with the help of street children at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1985. Many other works – Gregor Schneider’s Hannelore Reuen (2004), a middle-aged lady who has fallen flat on her face in her tights (but missing pants), or the grotesque mannequins of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Outgrowth Family (2006) – were linked, however, only by formal affinities. Which is ironic, given that Thek’s work was less about a succession of similarities than a secession from the compos mentis.
April Elizabeth Lamm, Frieze Magazine, May 2008
Thursday 14 June 2012
Paul Thek at The Modern Institute & Frieze Article
Despite the impermanence of Thek’s environments, the artist’s Pied Piper-like influence on current art production can be felt in contemporary works such as Sebastian Hammwöhner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstein’s I Cannot Forward, or Rewind This State of Being, This Aged Resign: Let the Wind Catch a Rainbow on Fire … (2004). This eccentric tabletop collection of objects – including a bronze honeycomb bisected by a mirror and a child’s galoshes graced with bells – bears the signature of what seems to be the collective mind of an uncharted civilization. Kai Althoff and Robert Elfgen’s Das Floss (The Raft, 2004), with its makeshift hut on a life-size raft, seemed to be broadcasting from the same evangelical channel as Thek’s Noah’s Raft, which he built with the help of street children at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1985. Many other works – Gregor Schneider’s Hannelore Reuen (2004), a middle-aged lady who has fallen flat on her face in her tights (but missing pants), or the grotesque mannequins of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Outgrowth Family (2006) – were linked, however, only by formal affinities. Which is ironic, given that Thek’s work was less about a succession of similarities than a secession from the compos mentis.
April Elizabeth Lamm, Frieze Magazine, May 2008
Jan Verwoert
Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different
Jan Verwoert
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html
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