Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969
Guggenheim Museum, New York
February 12 - May 16, 1999
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, the first major survey on the earlywork of this important American artist. The exhibition traces Jim Dine's multi-faceted exploration of personal identity through more than 100 works, including photographs of his environment and performance pieces. During the first ten years of his career, Jim Dine seized on the idea of self-exposure to forge new territory for the possibilities of expression. In doing so, he created a formidable visual language of corporeal motifs that tested the conventions of representation and perception.
The exhibition encompasses many of the major mixed-media works Jim Dine created between 1959 and 1969, the same time-frame that traces the trajectory of the increasing use of popular imagery in American art. Though Dine's signature motifs of clothing, tools, painter's palettes, and hearts dovetailed with the familiar images of Pop art, his use of such commonplace objects was deeply personal, derived from his interior world of memories rather than from Pop art's preoccupation with the conceits of mass culture. Dine's work is thus marked by a deep sense of introspection and an abiding interest in the act of painting as a means of unveiling the self.
By bringing together works from Jim Dine's various series, the exhibition provides a striking view of the magnitude of Dine's early achievements and their formidable contribution to the succeeding generation of artists concerned with the politics of the body. The exhibition investigates how Jim Dine developed his personal iconography by drawing on the vernacular of children's art and the carnivalesque to foster a sense of profound psychological resonance in his works.
Jim Dine arrived in New York from Ohio in 1958 and quickly established himself in the avant-garde art scene. In 1959, along with several other artists, Dine began showing his work at the newly established Judson Gallery located in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It was there in 1960 that Dine created the first of his interiors, The House, as part of "Ray-Gun," a two-person exhibition with Claes Oldenburg that also featured the latter's environment The Street. During the course of the show Dine performed his first theatrical piece, The Smiling Workman, as part of "Ray Gun Spex," three evenings devoted to individual theatrical pieces by Dine, Oldenburg, and several other artists. The notoriety that followed this showcase did much to validate this burgeoning art form. Jim Dine's association with Judson and the Reuben Gallery provided him with the opportunity to create other performance pieces and, in the course of one year, Jim Dine created three other theatrical pieces, Vaudeville, Car Crash, and A Shining Bed, which added to his growing renown as one of the brightest new stars of his generation. It was during this time that Dine created such totemic works as Green Suit (1959), Untitled (Winged Victory) (1959), and Bedspring (1960), assemblages that incorporate discarded clothing, bedsprings, and other trash salvaged from the city's streets.
Choosing to immerse himself in painting, Jim Dine quickly gave up creating performance art. By the end of 1961, he had completed a series of childlike, collage-style paintings, many of which incorporated quotidian objects and their written equivalents on the canvas. In works such as Teeth (1960-61), Hair (1961), Coat (1961), and Pearls (1961), Jim Dine conjoined the explosive quality of abstraction with the peculiarities of real life. Like his Green Suit, these works and others that followed are imbued with an eccentric quality that evokes the freakish quality of nature. Jim Dine's deep-seated personal phobias, along with the burden of fame, forced him to seek comfort in the isolation of his studio, and he withdrew from the social scene of the New York art world. By 1962, he was immersed in psychoanalysis, an experience that would inform his subsequent work. His series of Tool paintings, made over the course of one month, were bound up with the artist's vivid memories spent working in his family's hardware stores in Ohio and Kentucky. In his next series, based on his own childhood recollections and the wallpaper and objects of his children's rooms, items such as mirrored medicine cabinets, toiletries, and metal fixtures involve the viewer physically in his remembrances.
In the final years represented by this exhibition, references to the artist himself become even more direct, as in his 1963 canvases featuring painter's palettes and his 1964 group of self-portraits inspired by men's suits; these were later followed by works based on the image of an uninhabited bathrobe, which he first saw in a newspaper advertisement. In 1965, Jim Dine began making three-dimensional bronze and aluminum casts of familiar objects, continuing his trajectory from using junk to employing store-bought items to finally making his own objects. Jim Dine seized on the processes of duplication, repetition, elongation, and enlargement to create a series of hybrid realities in his sculptures of body parts, clothing, furniture, tools, and passageways. His sculptures became increasingly large and his interest in manipulating the space of the viewer became more pronounced. This tendency is evident in his two monumental pieces incorporating images of a heart and hand, from his series of works entitled Nancy and I at Ithaca (1966-69). By 1967, Jim Dine finally had the emotional stability to leave his studio in New York and move to London. In the year that followed he did no painting, instead throwing himself into printmaking, drawing, and writing. Memory was still Jim Dine's driving force, and when he returned to the canvas to create Name Paintings (1968-69), he began to use its surface as a vast journal for his recollections. Jim Dine's concerns during this decade are summed up in Colour of the Month of August (1969), in which bold strokes of paint are juxtaposed with the names of the colors scrawled on the canvas. This piece is a culmination of Jim Dine's work from the period and of the uniquely personal visual language that he created to reference the self.
Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 has been co-curated by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and Clare Bell, Associate Curator for Prints and Drawings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Publication: A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Guggenheim Museum and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., will accompany the exhibition. It is the first catalogue to document the early years of Jim Dine's career and includes rare documentary photographs. In addition to essays by Mr. Celant and Ms. Bell, the book provides an interview with the artist charting his initial development. The catalogue also includes rarely published materials on each of Jim Dine's theatrical pieces, as well as an essay by Julia Blaut on Jim Dine's performances and environments. A chronology of Jim Dine's career from 1959 to 1969 and selected bibliography are also included.
The exhibition will travel to The Cincinnati Art Museum, where it will be on display from October 22, 1999, to January 9, 2000.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), New York City
