Symbols for the Self - Jim Dine painting exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Vincent Katz

The Guggenheim's "Walking Memory, 1959-1969" gathers the evidence of Jim Dine's early paintings, sculptures and performances to examine the artist's long-standing preoccupation with the human form and its surrogates.

Having discovered Robert Rauschenberg's Combine paintings in Art News magazine in 1955, Jim Dine realized he needed to get to New York. Moving there from Ohio in 1958, Dine was soon thick with those artists on the verge of creating the first Happenings--Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras and others. "Walking Memory, 1959-1969," an exhibition recently at the Guggenheim Museum and now on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum, focuses on Dine's production of paintings, sculptures and performances from his arrival in New York at the age of 23 to his departure for London nine years later. It covers this critical period in detail, revealing the core of Dine's abiding concerns while examining his meteoric rise to art-world fame.

Dine and his friends were no doubt inspired by John Cage's example of

allowing the mundane to enter into art, and they were egged on by an article Kaprow wrote for Art News in 1958 titled "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." In it, Kaprow laid out the ground rules for a post-Pollock art based on "sound, movements, people, touch ... paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights." Dine, however, chafed at the rules the university-based Kaprow imposed. He even objected to Kaprow's term "Happening," preferring the more precise "painter's theater."

Dine's theater pieces of 1960 were brief, colorful and visually shocking but not scandalous. The subject matter was personal and the mood was introspective. These works were often dour; that tone would resurface in Dine's studio work, distinguishing it from the glib stances of some of his contemporaries. Dine scripted his performances, built elaborate sets and acted, often enlisting other artists to accompany him. In 1960 at Reuben Gallery, Dine created Car Crash, which lasted about 15 minutes; he had experienced a crash himself the year before. In an enclosed space in which found objects, all painted white, were arrayed, Dine, dressed in silver with silver face paint and red lipstick, kept drawing anthropomorphic cars on a blackboard. He seemed to want to speak, to explain, but only grunted. He drew obsessively, breaking the chalk, in an effort to communicate. The current exhibition includes documentary photographs and videos of many of Dine's performances. In contrast to those who claimed that performance, found objects, assemblage and later forms were advances that replaced the need for painting, Dine has always insisted that his use of such forms is a continuation of the tradition of American abstract painting.

The first pieces in the exhibition are from a series of small expressionistic paintings of faces from 1959, often with collage elements. These make clear Dine's long-standing preoccupation with the human form, found materials and symbolism. The faces are not portraits but symbols for the self. They seem trapped in a kind of mute suffering, their mouths often covered or obliterated while their wide eyes stare at the viewer in an unvoiced plea.

Dine's theatrical side is reflected in several early mixed-medium assemblages. Called "altars" by Dine, they evoke abstracted stage sets or prosceniums with fragmentary figures included. In these pieces, Dine attached found materials to flat surfaces in much the same way Rauschenberg had in his Combine paintings. Very different from Rauschenberg are Dine's emphasis on the human face and the element of vulnerability he conveys by an intentionally crude, childlike technique. Crucial to Dine's best work is graphic immediacy, a reliance on painting and a fascination with medium, whether it be the melted-down crayons with which he first experimented, housepaint, automobile lacquer or classic oil paint. While he may have been inspired by advertising on occasion, Dine has not used mass-media imagery in his work. Everything he does is handmade or it is a preexisting object (sometimes a handmade version of a preexisting object).

By the end of 1960, Dine had already moved past artist's theater, junk art and somber, Art Brut-like painting into simplified largescale works. He raised mundane objects to totemic status, partly by scale--the object often taking up much of a large canvas--and partly by his lush treatment of the painted surfaces. He continued to use found materials in his paintings. Sometimes they were subsumed into an image, as with the huge swath of cloth he molded into a massive necktie for Nancy's Tie (1960), in which the aluminum paint that covers every inch of both tie and background adds to the monumentality of the image. At other times, Dine used collaged items to play themselves--buttons, a pair of suspenders, more neckties. Occasionally, he simply made an oil painting on canvas, but even these works include images of objects, as each focuses on a single "thing," often with its name included. Hair (1961) is a funky variation on this approach, with lots of curling brown and black brushstrokes on a tan background identified by the word "HAIR," while Blonde Hair (1961) is more Minimalist--a yellow monochrome with only slightly wavy brushstrokes for texture and differentiation.