Slow. Fade.

I met Paul Thek in 1977 while he was installing Processions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Watching him madly attempting to create his kind of something out of a plenitude of other people’s nothing was like stumbling on Hamlet directing the play within the play. Wrenching a cathartically redemptive environment out of the sterile, ungiving architecture of the ica space perfectly suited Paul’s psychodramatic persona. The first time I encountered him he was flailing around the gallery plaintively crying out for stuffed birds, which he wanted to hang from the ceiling. Components of the installation were pouring in all around him—bales of newspapers, oars, a bathtub, tons of sand, park benches—but he was missing birds and that was all he could think about. He was also working, essentially, alone. At the time, I didn’t understand how different it was for him to be lacking the theater of collaboration. In Europe, he had put together a carnival of players whose contributions melded into his own and catalyzed the whole (rather like what Julian Beck and Judith Malina were doing with the Living Theater); in Philadelphia, there were certainly plenty of ica -supplied assistants, but they were not collaborators and he knew it, and, by the time I arrived, they knew it.

I was naïvely enraptured by Paul’s temperament and eagerly jumped at an invitation to have dinner with him and the director of the ica , Suzanne Delehanty. Too quickly, it emerged that all three of us were raised as Roman Catholics, and I remember clinging to that odd unity of past history as an increasingly rocky evening progressed. Suzanne’s religion was still in place; mine was long gone. Paul’s