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JIM DINE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEW ART Alan R. Solomon
The recent hubbub about pop art has produced a regrettable distortion of the real ]I ature of this new art. Pop has enjoyed a succes de scandale because of the strangeness of its images, and it has been misinterpreted as an art of protest and a reflection of discontent in the modern world. A series of exhibitions in Europe during the past twelve months, first in London and Stockholm, and then in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, The Hague, and elsewhere, has only succeeded in extending the confusion abroad, since European critics have consistently misunderstood the work. The Am erican exhibition at the Venice Biennale has been described in the European press as an invasion of Pop, and Rauschenberg, the International Prize winner, has been crowned King of Pop Art, despite the fact that none of the artists in the exhibition regards himself, or should be regarded, as a Pop Artist.
The confusion, as I have pointed out before, begins with the term itself, imported into America by its inventor, Lawrence Alloway, who used it to describe an earlier British phenomenon which has some, but only some, elements in common with the new American art. These parallels, as the name itself implies, have to do with the use of images from the popular and commercial culture. The Americans who use such motifs include, among the original innovators, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Wesselmann, and perhaps one or two others. However, all of the members of this group have certain additional characteristics, just as important as their images, and informing their choice of such "distasteful" subjects.
The style of each of these painters depends in one way or another on a kind of neutral or mechanical execution, derived from comic strips, billboards, photomechanical techniques, or whatever. While each of them had individual stylistic characteristics, this approach to the execution of the painting eliminates the traditional issue of handling, and imposes a certain detachment and impersonality on their art. Their attitude is what we would call nowadays "cool," and they actually tell us very little about themselves, their real personal feelings, and their attitude toward the situation in the painting. Instead of protesting, or satirizing, they are telling us that anything goes, and that the mystery of art does not depend on any imaginable preconception. This openness, so much a determinant in the attitude of the new American generation, comes not from indifference, but from a desire for a new esthetic and a new morality. Such a point of view is absolutely incomprehensible to Europeans, except for a few who have had some taste of contemporary American life. Oriented toward Cartesian rationalism by a long and rich tradition, the ambiguity of attitude and the apparent absence of familiar disciplines (there is, of course, a new discipline) annoy and distract them. These qualities are more compatible with the northern mentality, and it is perhaps no accident that the exhibitions mentioned at the beginning all took place in northern cities; however, northern Europeans too still try to relate the new American art to accustomed values.
Other artists of the new generation, operating in reponse to the same spirit of openness and freedom of inquiry, have also turned to the contemporary environment for their material, but their preoccupations center on objects and images from the modern world and the potential behavior of these, rather than on "found" modes of representation of objects detached from behavior.
For these artists, particularly Dine and Oldenburg, among the original group (Rauschenberg and Johns, the precursors of all the artists mentioned here, anticipate the various attitudes, and are excluded from the present discussion), the response to objects in the world is intensely personal, and they are deeply involved in communicating their private feelings through their art. Their styles depend upon expressive means to communicate these feelings, and in fact they hark back, like Rauschenberg and Johns, to the abstract expressionists in their modes of execution, unlike the first group, who have repudiated the older concern with animated surface and active execution.
The familiar world of reality is a secret and mysterious place for an artist like Jim Dine (much of what is said here also applies to Oldenburg), and the objects and images which people it operate on strange and unrevealed levels, beyond our ordinary comprehension. This point of view also determines the ambiguous flavor of the work of the Pop Artists, but in their "coolness" they do not go beyond the point of confronting us with the bizarre or the enigmatic concealed in banality; they leave us to our own resources, since they do not disclose their own.
Unlike the others, Dine sees objects symbolically, not in a conventional or historical sense, but in a new way which is psychologically tuned. Familiar forms become vehicles of anxiety or of sexual feelings, for example, and he systematically explores the unconscious pressures generated by objects. In this sense he has been conditioned by Freud, not as a student of psychoanalytical theory, but as an exponent of that modern temperament which has been touched in certain ways by the complexities of modern existence and which has acquired new insight into the patterns of human response. His symbolism resembles Freud's in that it is based on transformation, formal analogy, and association with human forms and conditions, but it remains an intuitive vocabulary, derived through the special quality of the artist's eye and mind. Objects acquire a new power and intensity for him; things become organic, or more specifically, anthropomorphic, with a potential of action and behavior which lifts them out of their familiar inert and passive identity. I have pointed out before that "happenings," to which Dine and Oldenburg were probably the most important early contributors, not only involved the audience more directly than conventional theater, but also gave to objects, which always played an important part in these events, a new importance, with the result, actually, that objects often became members of the cast, as important as the human actors.
Apart from the new behavior of objects, the work of Dine echoes an intense commitment to life, its process, to human feeling as the measure of experience, and to art as its vehicle. In one of his "happenings," The Smiling Workman, of 1959, Dine appeared as a painter, the happy craftsman of the title, before a large surface on which he began to paint from three buckets of color with extravagant gestures, splashing and slopping the pigment on the "canvas." In an enormous outburst of enthusiasm he printed on his "picture," "I like what I'm doing," picked up the bucket of red paint, and, as the audience gasped, poured it over himself (actually it was tomato juice), and then jumped through the paper on which his "picture" was painted.
In another happening called Vaudeville, 1960, in a set decorated with fresh vegetables, Dine did a kind of comic turn, extravagantly made up and dressed in the straw hat and striped shirt of the old vaudevillian. The girl in the piece was a cardboard cutout, lifesize, which he wore on one arm. This time a bucket of paint was poured down the back of the set, and an uncanny esprit pervaded the whole occasion. It is difficult to evoke in such a description the intensity of the audience's response, which was electrifying. Dine on stage had a charismatic effect which depended on the intensity of his projection of himself and the activities he was involved in.
Most important, however, and this is the key to the impact made by the "happenings," we were individually confronted by situations which seemed very personal, so that we always felt like voyeurs. The problems raised by unaccustomed confrontations of objects and actions were always unpredictable and psychologically disquieting. We were always afraid of what might happen next; yet the happening remained in a certain sense tactful and decorous, never becoming painfully explicit or embarrassing. The point was that we were threatened emotionally and esthetically in a direct and unavoidable way. We went because we were compelled to, and we stayed, one might say, because it felt so good when it was over and the tension had been dispelled.
Dine gave up "happenings" before they began to be fashionable and widely imitated. He did so because he felt that they took him away from his central involvements as a painter, but at the same time they had clarified several critical issues which already preoccupied him in his paintings of the year or so preceding. One of these was the question of the function of the work of art as psychological catharsis, not in a specifically subjective sense, but in terms of what is common and general in all of our responses to art. In this regard, painting has always involved an exploration of attitudes for Dine, and each new work moves farther along this path. As a result, his most recent pictures always raise new difficulties and seem totally unacceptable at first.
The other issues in his paintings result in one way or another from this initial preoccupation. Every picture mocks our preconceptions about beauty, acceptability, taste, the laws of painting, propriety, or whatever. His pictures might be called ugly, but only with respect to existing ideas about the opposition of beauty and ugliness. He is commited to psychological truth, not to ugliness, and he lifts a great variety of tabus which we have only begun to understand in recent times. The confrontation with our intimate thoughts and feelings, with the things we really "enjoy" deep within us but have always prudishly regarded as unacceptable (in the face of our secret pleasure in such things), brings up conflicts which are rather difficult for most of us to face, burdened as we are with conventional inhibitions.
These complexities not only have to do with the variety and richness of sexual feelings, but also with "messiness," disagreeable textures or objects, and a general notion that some kinds of feelings about such things are "bad" or "wrong." On every plane, Dine forces us into the uneasy position of worrying about the way we have spent our lives in contention between our natural impulses and "what mother taught us was right." I cannot avoid the assertion that our response to Dine's art depends on the manner in which we have personally resolved these conflicts. One either hates his work, or derives an unconscionable pleasure from it; we find it simply impossible to be indifferent to his paintings, since their probing strikes so deep. The thrill of comprehension or the shudder of distaste disjoint our emotional composure to such a degree that many earlier involvements with subject matter in art seem superficial, arbitrary, and often dishonest.
To all of this Dine brings a sense of humor and of irony which moderates the insistence of his probing and allows it to be tolerable. Otherwise, the psychodramatic aspect of his work would render it egocentric and bathetic, a kind of permissive self-indulgence. In other words, he sees these fundamental human problems with a certain objectivity; his detachment, operating at the same time as his commitment, raises the issues to a more general level.
In this respect, his art deals not only with human feelings but with painting itself; his exploration also embraces an ironical examination of the resources and the attitudes of the painter. He intimates that a facile acceptance of given ideas about painting dissembles as much as easy assumptions about experience. His drawing and his execution seem clumsy and inept because he cultivates an expressive awkwardness and a naive vision. (This places a terrible burden on the knowing viewer who recognizes a "bad" painting when he sees one.)
Only in his most personal drawings, those be does for his children, for example, does he display his natural skill.
Dine's handling varies enormously from picture to picture and often within the same painting, ranging from a juicy curvilinear impasto which painfully reveals the bombastic overindulgence of van Gogh's expressionism to excruciatingly delicate wishy washes of color which become almost obscene in their attenuation. Some of his most beautiful (please remember how relative these words must be!) passages result from the offhand slap-dash introduction of apparent accidents which he calculatedly exploits, as a kind of pervading messiness, not as "found" effects of inherent beauty in the way that some of his predecessors used them, but set deliberately in opposition to the idea of refinement, whether it results from accident or design. It must be understood how antithetical suave strokes and elegant textures are to his way of thinking about surfaces. And as if his clumsy, impulsive, erratic marks were not enough, he often presses unpleasant stamped textures of metal, cardboard or wood into thick wet paint, or uses them as stencils, as in the Four Rooms, or the Red Bathroom, or else uses unpleasant metal or cloth surfaces as sources of texture. In other words, he purposely avoids the conventional and accepted ways of producing beautiful surfaces in search of new, more complex sources of interest which depend on visual or tactile irritation - on effects which open up a new vocabulary of response for the viewer. The discomfort stirred by these irritants inevitably results in kinds of response which suggest a scatological preoccupation on the part of the artist; I have explained earlier why we are affected in this way by such experiences.
Dine's colors usually raise the same problem, since most of the time they are quite disagreeable and "tasteless," nasty browns, outrageous pinks, sickly greens and blues, or cold metallic silvers. In our annoyance at his unpleasantness, we might easily reject his colors, like his textures, because art "should be pleasing," but to reject them leaves unanswered some very important questions about our conscious or unconscious choices in such matters, particularly when so many of us choose precisely these colors for our kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, or institutional spaces. Dine simply wants to know why; for that matter an even more important unanswered question remains, about why we perhaps feel the need to escape from reality into art, into "pleasant" or "beautiful" colors and textures. We might well ask whether this involves some kind of evasion, and if so why it is necessary.
The earlier work by Dine tended to be more conventional in execution, simpler, with a single image. It was the concept or the image which was new and unfamiliar, and from the beginning, the choice of color and objects. As I remarked earlier, all of his work is based on autobiographical considerations, and his pictures should always be regarded as projections of himself, and vice versa. For example, his own clothes somehow continually get into his pictures, from an early tattered green corduroy suit splashed with paint, through Shoe and Hat, the various Tie and Coat paintings and An Animal (made from a bearskin coat he acquired that winter) of 1961, and the recent self-portraits in a red bathrobe, the White Suit, etc.
Shoe and Hat, like most of his earlier pieces, are seen with a poignant crudeness, a calculated naivete of vision, which forces our attention on the character of the object, usually isolated in a field. The effect becomes bizarre and strangely intense, so that we see the objects with an unfamiliar wonder, as a child might see new things. Dine often incorporated the titles into these paintings, as in the case of Shoe, An Animal, Hair. etc., and the lettering reveals the same kind of awkward crudeness. The word becomes as important as the objects in several cases; the graphic symbol for the object somehow becomes another of its attributes which additionally alters the ambiguity imposed by the formal intensification.
This kind of attitude reminds us, of course, of Jasper Johns and his similar use of isolated objects, with which he often included words, usually the title of the picture (Tango, Tennyson, Device Circle, etc.). Without a doubt, Johns was an important source for Dine, as he was for all of the other members of Dine's generation, it was he who first brought up the original problems about objects and their behavior. Even though Dine's early work obviously demonstrates his obligation to Johns, his attitude from the beginning was different and he has moved along another path, as I will explain in a moment. There has been a certain tendency to consider Dine a follower of Johns, and to cite the similarity of pieces like Dine's Shovel to pieces like Fool's House by Johns, including the presence of the single hanging object (a shovel in one case, a broom in the other), and the writing on the painting, with arrows pointing to objects. I have pointed out before that Johns, Rauschenberg, and Dine all saw a good deal of one another in 1961-62, that there was much discussion of ideas of mutual interest, and that the influence exerted was by no means all in the direction of Dine. Granting Dine's obligation to Johns and Rauschenberg (whose Charlene Of 1954, with its flashing light and movable parasol, set the original precedent for all these ideas), the fact remains that the suspended objects and written labels with arrows in Dine's Shovel and Job No. 1 predate Johns' Fool's House.
The aloofness and commanding imperturbability of Johns' paintings make his objects function ambiguously because their passivity and inertness calls into question his reasons for attaching so much importance to them. Dine, on the other hand, from the very beginning imposed a fierce intensity on his objects, in contrast to Johns' coolness; for him objects make terrible demands, equivocal, and full of overtones of suggestive sentiment.
Things for Dine assume a new kind of identity, they acquire human attributes, personality of sorts; they become agents of human interplay, of anguish, of sexuality, of threatened violence, and most of all, they become the instruments of a pervasive irony. The hardware and tools with which he has continued to be obsessed since they first appeared in his work in 1962 have perhaps been the most crucial objects for him. ("I use only new things tl-tat are familiar, such as hammers, pliers, etc., so that there will be no confusion about the mystery the viewer brings to the picture. I am also able to milk the urge to be quiet (sometimes pure) in this manner, since a hammer with a blond handle and a silver head needs very little (nothing) to be a pretty thing. I also love the anonymity of tools because they cross more visual boundaries in their real state than all the various forms of romance around us.")
Most of his paintings up to that point had functioned in a specific way, as kinds of icons. The simplicity and the central placement of the image, as well as the concentration on static forms, gave these pictures a contemplative quality, which, however, in each case usually projected a strong sexual image, by deliberate intention, according to a private symbolism derived from associations with the shapes and characters of the forms. Hat of 1961, is a good example of this kind of painting.
However, in a painting like Job No. 1, from somewhat later, 1962, the iconic monumentality gives way to a kinetic complexity which is new in his work, and which really has to do with a new kind of factual literalism. The painting becomes directly involved in a series of actions, its existen cc in fact depending on these actions, the tools for which are at hand, together with the written instructions: "After you're through painting the walls paint this board black and white." There are no symbolic overtones here. Rather, that irony of which I have spoken repeatedly comes to bear upon the idea of the painting. One of the key motifs in Dine is the elaboration of the painting in unconventional ways, so that it might become a job, part of the artist's life (with the tracks of his motions on the canvas), still incomplete since we have not carried out the instructions. He constantly confounds the identity of the picture: It may become part of our space, like Vise, 1962, part of our environment, like Four Rooms, 1962, with an armchair on which gallery goers never know whether to sit or not, or part of our landscape, like Lawnmower, 1962. The fact that the summery landscape of Lawnmo wer bleeds out onto the mower, or that the paint of one panel covers the armchair in Four Rooms, or that the texture of the chair appears on the panel, all have to do with Dine's wry reflections on the mutability of the conditions of painting in relation to reality.
In his more recent work, objects which come within a certain distance of the canvas run the risk of being magnetically drawn into it, or at least leaving their mark upon it in some way. Lately, Dine's paintings have been full of shadows or ghosts, beginning with the silhouettes of arms in Job No. / and including the shadows of the hatchet in Hatchet with Two Palettes, 1963, and the illusionistic cloth in My Long Island Studio, 11963, which replaces a real paint rag hung there at some point: a whole series from 1962 with plumbing leaves a trail of painted water droplets or rays of light on the surface. Dine's restless exploration in these later paintings tends to remove him from the iconic symbolic preoccupations of which I spoke earlier. Yet his habit of finding analogs persists: the sexual meaning of Vise is clear enough, once it has been pointed out. A certain overtone of violence in it becomes explosive in Hatchet with Two Palettes,- at the same time, however, this last picture also contains a clearly personal image, the palette, which Dine compulsively repeated through a whole series of paintings in 1963-64.
One of these, A 1935 Palette has that central emblematic character which I remarked as a feature of his earlier work, and which continues to recur at frequent moments. At the same time, this picture might be taken as a literal rendering of a palette, with oleaginous smears of thick pigment on its surface. Yet the date in the title happens to be the year of Dine's birth, and he obviously has something more complex going here. The palette shape also appears in a series of self-portraits, paintings about himself like the Red SelfPortrait, 11963. The flavor of the palette changes constantly in its suggestive overtones, now becoming oppressive, now erotically female. Above all, it reminds us without exception that Dine's paintings are always about painting, no matter what else they may be concerned with.
The huge My Long Island Studio in a way typifies this preoccupation with the facts of painting. Essentially it is a gigantic color chart, that is, a replica of one of those color cards with chips of the most popular (!) shades. However, in contrast with the unyielding rigidity of the scheme of such a card, the squares of color are unevenly painted, hastily and intensively worked, so that the effect becomes curiously inert. This flat, passive regularity has been complicated in a number of ways. At the left another color chart has been superimposed, altering the original plane, the original scheme, the relation to the margin, etc. At the right a transparent palette fills the whole panel, creating further spatial ambiguity. These confusions have nothing to do with familiar cubist manipulations of form and space. Rather, they produce a discontinuity of meaning which confounds all the issues of spatial coherence, formal unity, temporal relationships, and once again, the rockbottom issue of identity, of the identity of the things in the painting, as well as the painting itself. The picture contains an inventory of different manners of handling. The fussy flatness of the color squares contrasts with passages of impasto, scumbling, transparent washes, drips, and shadings. The way of making a painting constantly intrudes, so that the illusionism of the rag, so smugly settled in space over the apparent surface, cannot overcome the denial of illusion he forces on us by leaving the lines with which the squares were ruled, or the computations of dimensions on the left margin, or the reality of the paint-dipped sticks on the right edge, which compromises the illusionism of the rag.
I find an extraordinary boldness, and a real virtuosity, in the way Dine trifles with conventional principles of "good" design, "coherent" organization, "consistent" handling, 11 plastic" space, etc., not because these manipulations are permissively destructive, but because they challenge our attitudes so effectively. They do this not in a polemical way, but simply because he brings through such practices an extraordinary new sense of mystery to the painting, and a new sense of ambiguity.
He is one of the most interesting exponents of this new ambiguity, which is so much a part of the contemporary spirit. The evocative indeterminacy of his work depends on two things, his obsessive impulse toward reiteration and variation, and a distinctly polar ambivalence. He unequivocally acknowledges that oscillation between attraction and repulsion, which he tends to think about in terms already familiar here: "I have always gone from one pole to the other of scatology ... too clean ... too dirty; this compulsion, along with the fear that the paintings may go away, are the reasons for making the things I do, probably." Or again, "I like the idea of making things that look like they are useful, i.e., Job No. /. This invites some to touch and others not to want to. Always the two poles of scatology. The frustrating thing is that they'd better not ... but that sometimes I'd like them to." At one exhibition opening, another artist literally accepted the implicit injunction in Hatchet with Two Palettes, and chopped three or four holes in the canvas.
The special psychological openness of Dine's art springs first from a kind of creative generosity which verges on prodigality, both in the performance and in his feeling about the beholder. Thus, he is drawn to invite the destruction of his pieces, on the one hand, and on the other, he speaks of those who "run scared at the hint of favors, as they know nothing anyway, and hence one wants to make objects of objects to give to any eye (the generosity of big ideas is the frightening thing). This is what upsets them."
His openness leaves him anywhere in the world to go, unlike some of his contemporaries. Paradoxically, his work has been closed to many people, simply because it is so intimately tied to the new sensibility; in this sense his paintings are more demanding than anyone else's. Since we are still somewhat remote from a common level of awareness of these issues, what is enduring and meaningful generally in the new art, and specifically in the work of Jim Dine, will take a little while to be understood.
