“I don’t have any rational
thoughts.”
Jim Dine
American artist Jim Dine was in his mid 20’s
when he acquired his own Pinocchio doll. As he told artnet’s
Ilka Skobie “I saw the Walt Disney movie when I was six, and I was very
frightened by it, enchanted by it. And I identify with it. I was a liar, little
boys are liars. And then in the ‘60s I found a Pinocchio doll in a junk store,
and I bought it, it was a beautiful thing, it was papier-mâché with real
clothes sewn by hand, probably made in Japan.”
It took Dine another 30 years
to figure out how to incorporate the puppet who became a boy into his work. But
once discovered he has painted, sculpted, made pints about and written poems
for Carlo Collodi’s fictional children’s hero. Pinocchio joined his tools, hearts and Venus di Milo;
another theme of fascination for the dyslexic
artist.
Not being able to read Dine
was the quintessential disruptive student. As he has said “the only thing I
could read was poetry till I was 22 and I started to read novels. But you know,
poetry kept me in the world of language…I went to art school because it was
better than going to regular school.”
Loosely identified within the
pop art movement for his depiction of everyday objects, Dine’s incorporation of
abstract expressionist and surrealist sensibilities in his work pushes that categorization.
Dine’s Venus Di Milo series
is more about his need to connect with the past than the depiction of plaster
cast kitsch object. As he said in an exhibition catalogue ““So that when I went
to the art supply store…and got a Venus de Milo figure, it was not with the
idea of celebrating kitsch. I was not responding to it as an object of Pop Art,
or popular culture. I saw it as a timeless classical figure which held the
memory of its magnificence even in its reduced size…I was painting still lifes
in the late 1970s, and I would include it, the plaster cast. But then I knocked
the head off of it and made it mine.”
Likewise, his heart series which
Dine uses as a landscape to explore emotions in general and Pinocchio’s heart in
particular as it fuels the puppet’s determination to triumph over adversity. As
Dine said at the age of 75 “it is a great story because it’s a metaphor for
art, this old man brings the puppet to consciousness through his craft, and in
the end I am Geppetto, I am no longer Pinocchio.”
The exhibition Jim Dine: Tools is currently on show
at New York’s Senior &
Shopmaker Gallery until the 28th of March.
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