Paul Thek’s 1969 sculpture, Fishman, is a life-size latex cast of the artist’s body covered in fish. It was first exhibited hanging from a tree, suggesting that the human figure might be diving or swimming while being borne up by the fish. Later, the work was reinstalled in another exhibition—suspended high from the ceiling below the table on which it was first made—and was retitled Fishman in Excelsis Table.

Thek created Fishman after exhibiting, as The Tomb—Death of a Hippie (1967), an earlier cast of himself in a tomb. He viewed Fishman as a resurrection, describing it as ‘a figure this time not dead (Reborn! Reborn!)’ (Nagy 2010: 282).

The Ichthys symbol (or ‘Jesus fish’) was originally adopted by early Christians and has been used since as a sign to proclaim an affiliation with Christianity. Art critics viewing the first Fishman installation recognized these Christian associations and were disturbed by them, with one denouncing the installation as a ‘noxious bit of self-parading’ (Pincus-Witten 1969: 64; Zelevansky 2010: 26).

More positively, Fishman in Excelsis Table may help us to imagine the ultimate end of those who have been caught up in Christ, which is to be exalted through being made one with Christ in his resurrection. Thek wrote of having the ‘mind of a fish’, of jumping into the river of life, and painted divers doing just that. For him, the water is warm, and in this warmth we can find ourselves held aloft by the fish so that we fly (Wilson 2010: 116). 

Perhaps an invitation into the river of life—an immersion that is at the same time a raising up—is the core message of all those called by the Jesus fish, the Ichthys, to be ‘fishers of people’.

References

Nagy, Eleonara. 2010. ‘Delicate Matter: Two Conservation Case Studies on the Work of Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.274–83

Pincus-Witten, Robert. 1969, ‘Joe Brainard and Paul Thek’, Artforum, 7.9: 64

Wilson, Ann. 2010. ‘Beatitudes: Remembering Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 116–19

Zelevansky, Lynn. 2010. ‘Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries: The Life and Art of Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.10–27