This work appears to be a slab of rotten meat, realistically rendered in wax and sealed in a display case made from colored plexiglass. It was partly inspired by a summer in Sicily, where the artist observed firsthand the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating saintly bodies through reliquaries, and reflects his reaction to the state of the art world of his time. “The world was falling apart, anyone could see it,” Thek explained. “I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck; and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone.” The fictional text inscribed on the case, with its pseudo-legal terminology and warnings of massacre, highlight the heightened distrust of established institutions of the time.
420: Picturing History, 2026
Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69 , March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017.
Hippopotamus Poison belongs to the series Technological Reliquaries, which Thek began in New York after a summer spent in Sicily. The work engages the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating saintly bodies that Thek had observed firsthand in the catacombs near Palermo and simultaneously offers a critique of the art of the time, Pop and Minimalism in particular. Within a visually seductive display case made from colored plexiglass sits what appears to be a slab of rotten meat, realistically rendered in wax. Inscribed on the vitrine is a paranoid quote that nods to a generation's underlying fears. "The world was falling apart, anyone could see it," Thek has explained. "I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck; and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone."
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Picturing History
Gallery 420Her response to this omission was to create American People Series #20: Die. For the mural-sized painting, Ringgold depicted contemporary events using a figurative visual language—at a time when the art world celebrated abstraction.
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