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

The Guggenheim's "Walking Memory, 1959-1969" gathers the evidence of Jim Dine's early paintings, statuarys 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 freshs magazine in 1955, Jim Dine realized he emergencyed to get to New York. Moving there from Ohio in 1958 Dine was in a short time thick with those artists upon the verge of creating the first Happenings--Red servants Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras and others. "Walking Memory, 1959-1969" an exhibition not long ago at the Guggenheim Museum and now upon view at the Cincinnati Art Museum, focuses upon Dine's production of paintings, plastic arts and performances from his arrival in of recent origin York at the age of 23 to his departure for London nine years later. It overlays this critical period in detail, revealing the core of Dine's abiding belong tos while examining his meteoric rise to art-world fame.

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

allowing the mundane to penetrate into art, and they were ovumed on by an article Kaprow wrote for Art novels in 1958 titled "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" In it, Kaprow laid on the outside the ground rules for a post-Pollock art based upon "sound, movements, people, touch paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights." Dine, however, chafed at the directions the university-based Kaprow imposed. He level 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 on the other hand not scandalous. The subject matter was personal and the temper was introspective. These works were oftentimes dour; that tone would resurface in Dine's studio work, distinguishing it from the glib stances of a certain number of of his contemporaries. Dine scripted his performances, built elaborate puts 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 enclos space in which rest objects, all painted white, were arrayed, Dine, aligned in silver with silver face paint and r lipstick, kept drawing anthropomorphic cars upon a blackboard. He seemed to want to speak, to explain, on the other hand only grunted. He drew obsessively, breaking the chalk, in an effort to communicate. The rife exhibition includes documentary photographs and videos of many of Dine's performances. In contrast to those who claimed that performance, fix objects, assemblage and later forms were advances that replaced the ne for painting, Dine has always insisted that his use of like 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 oftentimes with collage elements. These make clear Dine's long-standing preoccupation with the human form, set materials and symbolism. The faces are not portraits on the contrary symbols for the self. They present the appearance trapped in a kind of unable to speak suffering, their mouths often overlayed or obliterated while their wide organ of sights stare at the viewer in an unvoiced plea.

Dine's theatrical side is throw backed in several early mixed-medium assemblages. Called "altars" by the agency of Dine, they evoke abstracted stage locates or prosceniums with fragmentary figures included. In these pieces, Dine attached lay the foundation of materials to flat surfaces in plenteous the same way Rauschenberg had in his Combine paintings. true different from Rauschenberg are Dine's emphasis upon the human face and the ultimate part of vulnerability he conveys by dint of an intentionally crude, childlike technique. Crucial to Dine's best work is graphic immediacy, a reliance upon 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 means of advertising on occasion, Dine has not used mass-media imagery in his work. Everything he does is handmade or it is a preexisting particular (sometimes a handmade version of a preexisting object)

by dint of the end of 1960, Dine had already mov past artist's theater, junk art and somber, Art Brut-like painting into simplified largescale works. He raised mundane thing perceiveds to totemic status, partly by dint of scale--the object often taking up a great deal of of a large canvas--and partly by dint of his lush treatment of the painted surfaces. He continued to use rest materials in his paintings. Sometimes they were subsum into an image, as with the very great swath of cloth he mold into a massive necktie for Nancy's Tie (1960) in which the aluminum paint that overlays 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 upon canvas, but even these works include images of facts as each focuses on a single "thing," repeatedly with its name included. Hair (1961) is a funky variation upon this approach, with lots of curling brown and black brushstrokes upon a tan background identified by means of the word "HAIR," while Hair (1961) is more Minimalist--a fulvid monochrome with only slightly wavy brushstrokes for fabric and differentiation.