Modern Death: Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek

Abstract

By representing or performing death in significant yet divergent ways, Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek accomplish two major modifications to histories of art in the 1960s. Firstly, if the art of the 1960s frequently called the subjectivity of the viewer into question, their works in film, sculpture, and performance uniquely stage the radical contingency of the viewing subject. Secondly, and as a refinement of the first hypothesis, they stage the absolute historicity of death and dying. In short, all three artists articulated new types of dying-that is, distinctly modern deaths-gesturing to the impossibility of a transhistorical conception of death.1 My understanding of the absolute contingency of death is informed by Jacques Derrida's argument in Aporias (1993), a book that challenges Martin Heidegger's articulation of death in transhistorical terms in Being and Time (1926). Derrida critiques the fiction of a unilateral understanding of death, stating that can be an anthropology or history of death, there can be culturologies of demise. . . . But there is no culture of death itself 2 The modernity of death does not assume a break with a specifically premodern or antiquated death but instead assumes that, in every period and place, death is significantly remodeled and reinvented anew by those whose experience is lost to it. This position assumes the absolute historicity of subjectivity, the particularity of individual experience, and death as the exemplary limit-experience of the subject. How, I ask, do Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek call into question the subject in one's utter particularity?Beginning with Flaming Creatures (1962), Smith's films, performances, and writings evidenced a striking fascination with death and decay, through the recurring motifs of reanimated corpses, vampires, mummies, and other figures of the undead. A sculptor, painter, and creator of ambitious installation projects, Thek is perhaps best known for his untitled meat pieces of the mid-1960s, a series he retrospectively referred to as technological reliquaries. These were paneled vitrines that recreate the primary structure of the minimalist cube as quasi-commercial display cases housing disturbing wax effigies of meat, often resembling hunks of flesh shorn from a slain body. A dancer in the first Judson Dance Theater concert in 1962, Fred Herko has entered history books on account of his final performance-a suicidal leap from a tenement window two years later. Until recently, Herko has mainly figured as a morbid footnote to studies of more established dancers in the period, such as Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, or Steve Paxton. However, enacting his own excess as a suicidal dispersal, Herko figures a performance mode in which the performing subject-in Smith's evocative phrasing-is given every opportunity to disintegrate to the point of gilded splendor.3 In formal terms, Smith, Herko, and Thek may seem initially like an unlikely trio of case studies, yet they belonged to the singular but broad social and artistic milieus of Downtown New York in the 1960s (and after, in the case of Smith and Thek). Comparative analysis of their distinctive practices stages the ways artists tend not to think of their own work in relation to a single art form or medium, but instead draw upon and inform (and indeed repudiate or disclaim) peers who they perceive as contiguous (or oppositional) to their own ambitions and imperatives.In the unlikely triad of artists discussed here, the links between Smith and Thek are particularly compelling, beginning with striking similarities in their lives and careers. Born within a year of each other, in 1932 and 1933, respectively, Smith and Thek were culturally prominent in the 1960s, and regularly reviewed in relevant periodicals, only to be largely forgotten in later life (and, indeed, recuperated posthumously to some extent). Both were vocal in their pessimism and their rage. Like Thek, Smith benefited from critical support by Susan Sontag, then perhaps the most eminent public intellectual in America; while Thek and Sontag drifted apart, Smith turned on her with disproportionate animosity, as was his wont in matters of art and the heart. …