Paul Thek

Last week, I went to Whitney Museum of American Art and was fascinated with the exhibition of Paul Thek. In that exhibition, I felt his challenge to real from reality and the dominant concept of beauty in art.
In 1964, he made a work called ‘meat pieces’ with wax, which resemble the body flesh. The flesh was cut into pieces and was put into a Plexiglas box. Even though the flesh itself seems material and was not realistic, it hardly can be accepted as a beautiful art piece. It shows the material aspects of our human body, which rather lack the respect to physical beautifulness. With the fact that he was a bisexual and the object petit a, that seems to me to be suggestion of his denial to the way a body is expected to be.
The body flesh reminds us of death that is beyond our control. Paul Thek himself left a comment saying that he felt a strange attraction when he held a chunk of meat, which became the trigger of this creation. While the real was presented as a desire, it was separated by a box and implies the distinct border between the real and reality. The body itself was rather like an object without bloody cruel reality, which can be said as a denial of the death. This work can be said to show the desire to conquer the real while it gives a clue of its impossibility.
Anyways, I was completely fascinated with the aura of the real art. As we discussed in our class, I felt an indescribable excitement when I faced to the real art of work.