(Thank you Ron Jones for this tip!)
This site is dedicated to the installation work of Paul Thek. It is an ongoing project to collect and contextualize documentary photography and other relevant sources around Paul Thek’s environments.
Various complex questions underlay the consideration and analysis of Paul Thek’s installation work, above all matters of authorship and reconstruction. Many of his installation works cannot simply be reconstructed as in its physical and ideal presence it was inextricably bound up with the artist, the co-operative and, above all, time. From a museological point of view the task to find a final home for the relics and to free them, at least temporarily, from their existence as mere inventory numbers in order to attribute them a function in the context of art mediation thus becomes all the more challenging.
From an art historical point of view other methods come up in order to collect and contextualize information which is the more important the less Thek’s environments can be brought back to life again. From a frank interest to bring to light what was hidden for so long, this website serves not only as a prototype for media-based art historical research, but also as a tool to contextualize Thek’s process oriented use of the mythological object.
More.
"I try to describe with love what I love. My secret ambition is to pierce through the veil: think about a work and then not just describe it but arrive at something, an underlying principal or an underlying emotion and then say what the work's true value and beauty really is." Joan Acocella
Recommended reading
- Baird, George. “Criticality and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine, 2004.
- Butt, Gavin. After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell: Malden & Oxford, 2005.
- Critical Inquiry
- Eagleton, Terry. After Theory, Penguin: London, 2004.
- Hays, K. Michael. “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21: The Yale Architectural Journal, 1984. pp. 14-29.
- Martin, Reinhold. Critical of What?
- Somol, Robert & Whiting, Sarah. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33: The Yale Architectural Journal, 2002.
- Sontag, Susan. ‘Against Interpretation’ and ‘Notes on Camp’, in A Susan Sontag Reader, Intro. Elizabeth Hardwick, Penguin: London, 1983.
- Speaks, Michael. “Design Intelligence, Part I: Introduction,” A+U, 2002.
About Me
- Rolf Hughes
- Writer & critic; Guest Professor in Theory and Practice-Based Research at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; Senior Professor in Research Design at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels & Ghent; Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture, Stockholm.