The art of Jim Dine, who just turned 87, is impossible to characterize. He was an instrumental figure in Happenings, a famous pop artist, poet, printmaker and sculptor. Throughout his career he has worked with different mediums and painted in different styles, both tight and loose, which reflects his direct engagement with his art. It’s Dine’s lifelong commitment to using his hands, drawing and shaping that separates him from his contemporaries, especially as he never felt compelled to suppress his love for art. classical art – to explore contour, volume and shading.
Starting with his drawings, what I feel about Dine’s mastery of different materials and processes is an angst that has nothing to do with production and a lot to do with his fierce desire to push beyond his enormous talent. . A masterful draughtsman, he is capable of a fluid and easy line which few of his contemporaries come close to. Rather than just this skill, Dine has spent his career trying to get out on his own without taking any of the familiar routes. He wants to find the outer limits of exploring the relationship between maintaining control (as in classical art) and letting go (as in expressionism). This desire is one of his motivations. This is why his self-portraits, whatever the medium, constitute one of the great corpuses of post-war art.
Although I expected to be surprised by something in the exhibition Jim Dine: three ships at Templon, I was unprepared for the range of works, mediums and processes in the exhibition, from intimate scale drawings to monumental sculptures, all of which felt connected by the artist’s hand.
While many of Dine’s topics are associated with memories dating back to his childhood, he is open to random events. In 2015, when he was about to turn 80, he said this about his use of black forms in his works (exhibited in 2018 at Richard Gray Gallery):
I had found a 3 inch square piece of paper that my printers were testing black litho ink on. The small posed shapes evoked a figurative image that was (and is) human, but visually concrete so that the black shapes can be interpreted unconsciously as so many “non-verbal” things.
The current exhibition includes “Three Ships (The Magi)” (2022), three heavily encrusted monumental bronze sculptures. According to the exhibition catalog, the sculpture’s armature was “derived from a litho inkblot made by Dine’s printer’s granddaughter in his Walla Walla studio”. Starting with this found mark and building an armature to which he applied what looks like “loose dirt and gravel strewn with branches, ropes, planks of wood and dozens of tools including pliers , hammers, saws, drills, shovels and spades,” as Sam Sackeroff writes in the catalog, Dine makes evocative work that resists any reductive reading, and finds a way to undo its own mastery. This desire to undo as many traces of one’s artistic preeminence as possible aligns with the concept of mortality and the realization that one cannot control one’s destiny.
The title “Three Ships (The Magi)” comes from a 17th-century chant about a ship believed to have carried the relics of the Three Magi to Cologne. The patina of the inlaid objects gives the work the feeling that it has just been excavated — it is something that has been found and the purpose of which is not apparent. While Dine was once considered an important figure in the reaction to Abstract Expressionism, he has long since gone his own way. That’s no small feat, especially considering how many artists don’t change substantially. More importantly, the passage of time was never a topic he avoided; he has long made the art of aging.
If “Three Ships (The Magi) was the only work in the exhibition, I would have been more than satisfied, but it also includes two figurative bronzes, three abstract paintings, a suite of 11 self-portraits dated from 2020 to 2023 and begun then than quarantined in Paris, where Dine currently lives, and 19 numbered paintings of ME (2020-23), a series of self-portraits on panels measuring approximately 20 by 16 inches.
Rather than aligning with the art world prioritizing reason and mind over body, Dine embraces his aging, libidinal body, and what he can build, paint, and draw from Eros and break down in the face of death. The motif of a bald head with two protruding ears recurs in the paintings. These self-portraits, begun at the height of the pandemic, are touching, tender, funny, anguished, sinister and stoic. Dine seems determined to dig up and expose any feelings he has about his vulnerability and persistence. A white smear erases the left side of his face in “ME#29” (2023), while the two rows of teeth conjure up images of a skull. The erase instance was shaken to encounter. In “ME #25” (2023), the face became encrusted in a mask of paint, with just the teeth and eyes trying to peer through. Do we consider the drops, the rain or the body as a dilapidated and leaky organism? These paintings speak of the desire to stay conscious and see through, while registering the effects of time.
Also started during the pandemic, the 11 pencil works of the suite Draw minutes A–K (2023) are composed of drawn and erased lines, Dine incising the paper by pressing the lead point against the smooth surface. It both makes a mark and pushes its way through the paper. Sometimes he wears glasses; on some he wrote the date he completed the drawing; and in several he added another sheet of paper. Sometimes he seems resigned. He is sad and lonely, thoughtful and anxious, recording time with every line and deletion. They are – to use a word I have never used before – moving. So much can be read in these designs, their creases, erasures and abrasions.
With these pieces and others made over the past two decades, it seems to me that a museum should study the changes that Dine’s work has undergone and the openness to time that he has expressed.
Jim Dine: three ships continues at Templon (293 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) through July 28. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
