Paul Thek Built Shrines Out of Garbage — and a New Book Shows How

Paul Thek built shrines out of garbage. That is the whole premise of Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek, a new book about the American artist who turned scavenged crates, unmailed letters, and broken glass into holy places. The book, edited by David Zwirner and published by David Zwirner Books, draws on letters, interviews, and archival material to show how Thek treated found objects as sacred relics.

The book opens with Thek carrying a life-sized wooden cross on a German lawn. The weight of the object rests upon his shoulders, a physical burden that stands in for the emotional weight of his practice. Thek’s shrine is a milk crate he found at a bazaar, made of larch wood. He filled it with unmailed letters, pictures, objects, and notes, and called it Shrine.

The Milk Crate

Thek’s method was simple: find something discarded, give it meaning, and put it under his bed. The crate was almost an antique, worn but somewhat fancy. Its lid was made of glass, little rectangular panes that a neighbor threw out the night before. Thek found them in the dumpster, sharp-edged and intact. His fingers bled from handling them.

The contents of Shrine are intimate. There are letters, pictures, objects, and notes, all collected and preserved. Thek took it out from underneath his bed and read from it, referring to it as a crate for milk where he contained his life.

The Bergman Letter

The book includes a letter to Olle Granath, dated September ’71, in which Thek asks for 12 large candles to burn in a chicken coop for a week around Swedish Christmas. He also requests oranges stuck through the chicken wire, to be replaced when needed. The letter is a practical request dressed in ritual, a small domestic shrine built from light and fruit.

The book also reproduces a letter to Franz Deckwitz, written just a month ago, in which Thek says he only wants to do BAD paintings, to shock and hurt people, but that it hurts his spirit always to do the bad paintings. He misses Ponza. He misses eternity.

The Whispered Aside

The book is structured around conversations between Thek and an unnamed interlocutor, who records their exchanges. Thek speaks in an aside, his voice very beautiful. He tells stories about his childhood in church, the darkness, the flicker of candles, the incense, the beeswax, the order and the passion of the liturgy.

He remembers singing in the choir, enjoying the Easter songs, though sometimes his voice would break and he would have to leave. He met Ingmar Bergman once, through Karl Johansson, who did stills for Winter Light. Bergman was a little pompous, though not entirely unkind. Thek was grateful.

Bergman’s words open the book. “Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship,” he wrote. “It severed an umbilical cord and now lives a sterile life, generating and degenerating itself.”

The Garden and the Twins

Thek showed the bottoms of his feet to the interlocutor, dirty from standing on a tenement rooftop. He had planted a garden there, started with a friend named Fenrir, who was Norwegian and got sick and died. The garden has been growing for some years now.

Thek pointed away and toward the twins, calling them Sodom and Gomorrah, rising up in glass and steel to blot the sky. He had painted them before, on newspaper.

The Obituary Painting

Thek opened a yellow notebook to a drawing of a phallic head in blue and white, dated June 19th 1969. He wrote about his first encounter with the poetry of Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” The Pisan Cantos. He chose a dozen copies of Pound’s New York Times obituary as the ground for a new piece, a painting in blue, yellow, and white.

Pound too believed in Paradise. Before he was imprisoned, he believed that he’d been touched by God.

The Environment

Thek wanted to present an atmosphere, an ambiance, that was so peaceful that you were shattered when you left. That is the contradiction at the heart of his work: he made things that were both calming and unsettling.

The book is a record of a mind that refused to separate art from worship, even when the world had. Thek’s shrines are not museums. They are reliquaries, holding the detritus of daily life as if it were holy.

The book ends with the promise of publication. The interlocutor tells Thek that the interview will appear next year in ARTSYMPOSIA, and that it will change things. People have forgotten you, the interlocutor says, but after this appears they won’t forget.

Thek laughs and points away, toward the twins. The book is a shrine to his memory, built from the same materials he used: found objects, letters, drawings, and the spoken word.

Source material: “Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek,” Literary Hub.

art history · book review · found objects · Paul Thek · shrine art