As Vincent Katz’s illuminating forward makes clear, poetry has always been an important element of Jim Dine’s art. Dine himself has related his poetry to the performance dimension of his output, and has commented on them as integral aspects of his artworks. Katz tracks the history of Dine’s complicated ventures into poetry, the earliest stemming from the time of his involvement with the visual arts. Indeed, in Katz’s words, Dine’s “oeuvre as a visual artist can justifiably be described as poetry.” Poetry here, according to Katz, is “taking one thing and making it into something else,” a refining of the modern poet’s “defamiliarization” that aligns the Pop rebus or collage of the painter with a poet’s decontextualization or deformation of language. What we get in Poems to Work On, Cuneiform’s beautifully produced book, then, is essentially a gestural act of refocusing, not so much the integrating of diverse pictorial and written elements that Dine is famous for but on a separating out of the linguistic element that enables us to sense and appreciate its qualities as poems qua poems on the page.

Dine’s poetry, like all of his art, draws on multiple twentieth century traditions. He plays with everything, surrealism, Lettrism, Pop Art, New York School (he’s especially beholden to its poets such as O’Hara, Koch and Ashbery) to name a very obvious few. What these movements and practitioners all have in common, as with Dine and his poems, is that they see history, especially the history of art and tradition as a cornucopia rather than as isolate and/or oppositional lesson plans for civilization and culture. The tone of the poems is generosity, and Dine’s relationship to the past is one of lighthearted opportunism, magpie tolerance for otherness, and a comic shoring of fragments as he flails along. Take these few excerpts from “Travel Dust”:

Two eggs follow me to

the Food Derby

I set my sight on toast

and loads of tea and pumpkin seeds,

mixed with four or five grapes

(in my mouth)

so I have energy

to breathe.

. . . .

Going real slow

by foot down river

fumes belching

out of Moscow.

Heavy guards around

your smokestacks.

. . .

All the greasy

machines get down on their knees

to spray hearts clear plastic.

Dine’s world is a topiary: here, seemingly beyond contradiction and critique, the crazy clutter of American city life and its “Food Derby” is set side-by-side with Moscow’s belching river and the machine and plastic littered mindscape of contemporary life. There’s an air of something off-target in Dine’s riffs and concretions as they run from insouciance to pathos, finally to settle into semi-comic professions of indifference, as in his Wolfman (Wall) where “the big action takes place next door. ALWAYS DID,” that often leads that insouciance into a sense of wonderment, as in “Oceans:”

INNOCENCE

THAT’S WHAT i LIKE!

LOOKing down THIS

VALLEY

LOOK—

UP IN THE SKY,

THERE’S

BLUE ON YOUR LIPS/

As with his Mobius-strip geography that is capable of touching a half-dozen points at once, Dine’s typographic moves ironize the passage above, the lower case letters undercutting its unabashed Gee Whiz boyishness in the same moment as its seeming artlessness grabs it back. In this sense, Dine’s work is both pose and poise; this naïf knows just what he is doing.

Which can be not only sophisticated entertainment, a sort of ramble through hi-jinks and mood swings, but also an anchorage for depth of thought. Katz calls Dine’s “The Untersberg Gift” a “limnal poem.” The poem, as Katz notes, constitutes a return to poetry after many years of not writing. At once manifesto and demonstration, the poem sits by itself, mid-book, showing Dine, after some twenty years of poetic silence, reaching down into himself for what impels his art, where having “spoken/to ‘the emperor’ many times,” he’s found in Untersberg the transformative moment of “the body/waiting to be opened to reveal itself (hopefully).” Is this “’emperor’” a self-imposed censorious governor inhibiting Dine’s free-wheeling emotions or are we watching some reconfiguration of an emperor’s “new clothes” moment of revelation that releases Dine from his self-conscious awareness:

‘Are you courageous?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am dazzled by beauty.’

Nature gives me the courage to persist,

in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.

Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.

And Dine does sing again for us, with an often graceful observant humor that strikes me as endlessly quotable. This new mode seems too casual to call a method, but it’s built on juxtaposition and sudden unexpectedness, as in “Nite Letter:”

My, my they’ve taken to watering the red orange juice. Next

they will probably want me to drink umbrella handle wine.

A boyfriend and his girlfriend (two really swell looking kids)

are about to do something stupid in front of a telegram

and some stenciled palm trees.

At once urbane and “raw,” as an anthropologist might have it, Dine’s poems are full of verbal pleasures and comic tonalities, like that “umbrella handle wine” above with all of its top of the palate lollings or the “stenciled palm” that propels the imagination into some gallery of the new where an exhibiton of Dine’s work is being held. In these gestures, Dine replicates the complex feelings that his paintings give to viewers, who marvel at the precision of his draftsmanship as they are carried along through blurring and cascading traditions of art. The eye and ear rarely rest as they move down through the lines of a Dine poem, even as they often amount to self-knowing teasers. The poems are charmers, even as they raise questions of where a word is traveling or how expectations are transformed by syntax and diction. Despite the disjunctions, there’s a seamless controlling ear presiding over Dine’s poems that gives them weight and authenticity. And every now and then, all the lyric power comes over unapologetically, that is, without the interference of art-world and poetry-world zippy-zaps and defensiveness. What happens then is as magical as anything being written today:

Resting comfortably

….my eyes watch the downfall

of your eyes.

the downfall of the Leonardo highway

uncomfortably sitting

with mouth open and face white

phoning the world

to find

new anxieties in free verse

imagine—

one man in the cosmos

the saint of vanishing dreams

blue limbs, gold draperies

the child of the Baptist

rushing the ending

Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine. Foreword by Vincent Katz. (Victoria, Tx: Cuneiform Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0986004032, 300 pp. $50

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February 10 to March 17, 2012
534 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 421-3292

The beauty of performance—or its weakness, if your perspective is financial— is that, in its most pure form, it is as an artwork in time, divorced from objects, fleeting. There is sometimes, in special instances, a greater sense of recognizable aliveness, or beingness imbued in participation or presence. Historical accounts of performances, in this case Happenings, are exciting as stories themselves, as art world mythologies. But recreation is not art; I say this despite recent pushes to have works live forever. To me, the majority of straight re-performances (as if performance art were repertory theater!) recall Cindy Sherman’s intentionally plastic-looking face, in fairly recent work, mimicking surgical attempts to recreate youth. Try as some might to slow down the inevitable, humans just don’t live forever. Neither do performances.

Paintings and sculptures, however, last. So do photographs and films. “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963”, now at The Pace Gallery, is effective and interesting in its multi-room layout because it is first a photo and art object show, and second, through these objects mostly, an historical accounting of the live visual art scene in Provincetown and New York in that period. Five photographers – chiefly Robert R. McElroy, but also Fred McDarrah, Martha Holmes, John Cohen and I.C. (Chuck) Rappaport – captured events by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. The “Happenings” artists were also working in tangible media alongside and in conjunction with performance. Viewed together, the photographs, art objects, multimedia and ephemera develop a convincing storyline in this show about the time of the first Happenings as new, free, special, raw, and developed, without agenda, for the existential sake of its participants.

Schneemann’s Quarry Transposed (1960), a mixed media assemblage —painted wood, a broken red glass goblet dangling from wire, a photograph of a woman, and messily hammered in nails—creates more atmosphere than photographs and wall text ever could alone. Specifically, this piece is arranged in the gallery to animate the artist’s Newspaper Event at Judson Church in 1962, though one could argue that the memory of the event and the object actually enliven each other. Glued to the wall behind the assemblage and photographs is a series of New York Times pages from 2012, there as if to remind us of the tactile quality of newsprint. The affect is aesthetically successful from far, but stories about current events are distracting in this context, and they make the installation feel more superficial than it should.

Certain nitpicky design details aside, “Happenings” is a good example of the ever-increasing ability of private interests to mount successful museum-style shows. It is to curator Mildred L. Glimcher’s credit that the show does not rely too heavily on video, which is sparingly installed no more than one monitor per room, some of which are silent.  The show also successfully avoids the question of re-performance all together, and doesn’t attempt to sincerely recreate original spaces. We might have walked into slick versions of Kaprow’s Words (1962) or Oldenburg’s Sports (1962), for example. Instead, visitors glimpse the originals through signed photographic prints by Robert McElroy. In the photograph of Sports, Pat Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and the artist roll around on the gallery floor in sweat suits and with painted faces amid a mess of what looks like packing material, linens, and plastic bags. Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain and Richard Bellamy stand aside and look on, in suits, from the audience.

From major pieces like Grooms’s Painting from ‘A Play Called Fire’ (1958), which is on loan from the Greenville County Museum of Art, to ephemera like Kaprow’s Poster for ‘Apple Shrine’ (1960), there is a surprisingly lot to admire in work that was ostensibly done at the service of an ephemeral event. Handmade, lasting, and beautiful, the work makes one wonder if it weren’t actually the other way around. Whitman’s Inside Out (1963), also helps to elicit this sentiment. The artist filmed a meeting of his friends talking and smoking around a table; the grainy black and white images are projected on four walls and a ceiling in a private room, with a sound loop the artist added in 2009.  Surely the meeting was interesting for the participants at the time, but is there any reality that doesn’t look better in retrospect, captured through the keen eye of an artist? Pace is correct to celebrate not just the history of performance events, but the things and images that were left behind.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same title, by Mildred L. Glimcher, published by Monacelli Press at $65. 320pp, many reproductions, ISBN: 978-1-58093-307-0

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Jim Dine is famous nowadays for his images of bathrobes, hearts and tools,  and his  conservative public sculptures. A gifted draftsman, he is generally thought to be a minor  pop artist, occupying an honorable, modest place alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. But  this astonishing installation could radically change how he is understood. Subdividing PaceWildenstein’s elegant 25th Street Chelsea space into a warren of  small rooms, it is an exercise in sensory overload gone mad. As he rightly notes, “I’m not, obviously, a minimalist.” Inexhaustibly ambitious, Dine created a book for each week of the year. Copies hang on a forest of hooks in one room. In other rooms you see large photographs of his tools and hearts, beautiful watercolors of tools, wall drawings, large sculptures and drawings and photographs of Santa Claus and Pinocchio,  many wall texts, often shown upside down, and a large bronze heart; and you hear tapes of him reading. How much you learn about Dine’s performances and books! “I want to know everything” he says. I cannot recall a one-gallery exhibition with so many objects on display.

Typically, installation art is political. It critiques the gallery system or our social institutions. Dine’s dazzling show does something totally different. For a long time, he has made book illustrations. Now this magnificent summary of that career displays the relationship between visual art and books. In the catalogue the Swiss curator Roland Scotti says: “We see a POEM, we read an IMAGE.” This is a familiar distinction: Baudelaire made it when he spoke of that “fatal consequence of decadence,” the trespassing of visual art on the world of the book. Decadent philosophic art, he writes, feels “its duty to juxtapose as many successive images as are contained in whatever sentence . . . it might wish to express.” By including literally EVERYTHING that matters to him in this display, is that not exactly what Dine accomplishes? He is a great decadent, for  Hot Dream, a display we see AND read and hear, overcomes this opposition between seeing and reading, between visual art and poetry. Traditional books present linear narratives. But there is no obvious rhyme or reason to this totally non-linear display of the poetic contents of Dine’s mind. Pinocchio’s nose grew when he lied, and so he is a perfect role model for this artist whose magnificently chaotic installation presents the truthful lies of art. By now Dine must have a very long nose.

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The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL   60208
(847) 491-4000

April 17 – June 18   2006

Jim Dine’s  art –  his emblematic hearts, bathrobes, tools, and paintbrushes – is typically associated with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.  The Block Museum’s exhibition of monumental drawings has a very different story to tell, taking its cue from the artist’s remarkable self-reinvention as a draughtsman of the human figure and portrait beginning in the 1970s.  Most of these unsettlingly expressive works are fraught with  dark intensity,  giving vent to a range of emotions.  “Anger is part of my medium,” said Dine. “I like to walk alongside of it.”

The drawings impress with both their large scale and expressive line.  In some drawings the layers of charcoal are so densely erased and reworked they resemble ash left from some kind of immolation, an elegaic residue of intense emotional combustion.  This is particularly apparent in Dine’s self-portrait series Looking in the Dark and his 1996 portrait Nancy.  These darkened faces have eyes that are full of hard intensity, frozen into expressions of accusation, anger, or wild anxiety.  This same mood is reflected in drawings of sculptures from antiquity such as Homer and Socrates (1989).  The face of Socrates on the top of the drawing is a mask of hard black stone, open-eyed, impenetrable and defiant.  The portrait of Homer just below reflects the opposite mood: the blind poet’s eyes are closed while his face is rendered with a smoky softness that is inward, ghostly, and vulnerable.

This same inarticulate fragility appears in the drawing A Variation of Jessie Learning Things from a Man (1976).  A woman looks over her shoulder to a man seated next her.  Her face is defined by deep shadows whereas the man’s face is practically erased: his tightly closed eyes hold some impenetrable secret.  In Fading Away(1993) the face of a female cat gently holds the chin of her male monkey companion whose face has become a mass of erased charcoal dust.  In both images the female counterparts seem to be the sympathetic witnesses of their partner’s unspeakable melancholy and dissolution.

A number of works feature hearts, trees, skulls, owls, and plants which resonate as comparisons with the human figure and anatomy.  In Drawing from Van GoghII(1983) a frightening tree trunk with breast-like tumors and short clawing branches draws an association with the female figure.  In Study for the Venus in Black and Grey (1983), a voluptuous sculpture from antiquity has  transformed into a monstrous mass of black chiseled rock.  This same Venus is present in a panel from Childhood (First Version) (1989), except the softer arms and head of a woman have been added, completing the figure.  This powerful six-panel piece has other female figures which link her naked body to erotic desire and death symbolized by the image of a skull.  Dine’s unforgettable 1976 drawing A Study From Blake places the skull directly on the body of his nude female subject.  Other works such as Hair (1970) and depictions of plants such as orchids in Mid-Summer, Paris (2002) imply female genitalia.  Plant life becomes erotic, imbued with a mysterious and soft tactility.

Several works are haunted by the brooding presence of skulls that appear in combination with many of Dine’s past themes.  When Dine’s insignia hearts appear with skulls they set up an intense symbolic tension between love and death.  The skull makes a mockery of Dine’s brightly colored Pop Art bathrobe in the drawingDancer (1997).  A skeleton wearing a blue bathrobe has his arms outstretched as if caught spinning in the middle of a dance.  The most moving depiction of a skull is in the drawing Walking With Me (1997) showing the skeleton in a suit carrying a Pinocchio doll on his back.  Here is the artist’s symbol of pop optimism, youth, and innocence merged with existential death.  The contrast creates a powerful synthesis of Dine’s past and present themes,  becoming a poignant reminder of the fragility and brevity of human existence.

Questions of suffering and melancholy abound in images of sculptures from antiquity.  Many of these corroded visages ask age-old questions through their solemn silence.  The Portrait Bust of the Emperor Trajan (1989) seems rueful with disgust as he looks imperiously out of blank stone eyes.  Large Drawing of a Small Statue (1978) shows an Egyptian pharaoh bearing an ashen expression of wounded sadness.  Study For Europe (1987) depicts a wide-eyed female portrait reminiscent of painted Roman tomb masks.  Her closed mouth seems pregnant with tragic words that cannot be said: only her large glinting eyes seem to speak over the silence of ages.

In retrospect Dine’s Pop Art work did not reflect the true emotional identity he sought to develop and of which he was capable.  Though this earlier work served the purpose of garnering him art world attention it was only a prelude to the artist’s development as a draughtsman with a deeper expressive purpose in the human subject.  Dine hit his stride when he confronted sexuality and death as the major themes of his work.   The Block Museum exhibit shows Dine flourishing in the realm of life’s deeper and darker mysteries, looking to the art of antiquity, its Eros andThanatos, as a meditation on time, desire, and human suffering.

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