13 - A PUZZLED MIND
We are pleased to share this insightful essay by Olympe Racana-Weiler. Olympe writes about the lynchpin of Jim’s Dog on the Forge exhibition, a large bronze, My Puzzled Mind, a Mangum opus that both confronts and intrigues at the ingress of the Palazzo Rocca.
Dog on the Forge is on view for two more weeks.
—Jim Dine Studio
It was the summer of 2023, when the first exchange between Jim Dine and Gerhard Steidl occurred at the Palazzo Rocca. The grand palazzo was set to host the exhibition Dog on the Forge for the Venice Biennale 2024 at the invitation of Galerie TEMPLON. The need to preserve the palace's appearance became obvious to both and with it, a desire for an authentic conversation between the artist's work and the historic setting in the ancient city of Venice.
With Jim’s Dog on the Forge, the palace's five rooms and garden house works of art that seem, astonishingly, to have always resided there, despite their contemporaneity.
This tour-de-force is emphasized as soon as the viewer arrives in the courtyard of the Palazzo, to discover the sculpture My Puzzled Mind, 2017/23, a monumental bronze (91 x 69 x 71 in/231.14 x 175.26 x 180.34 cm) representing the artist's face covered with tools.
My Puzzled Mind, 2017/23
Jim Dine looks directly at us—embodied in bronze and laden with autobiographical attributes. The tools dancing around his face have followed him all his life. When he recalls his childhood in Cincinnati, his grandfather's tool store is akin to the discovery of his first museum visit. He would remain fascinated by the beauty and diversity of the form and color of all these objects. He subsequently relied on them for their function in his work as an artist, but also perpetually invited them into his oeuvre (Black Shovel, 1962) and represented them through drawing (Untitled (Five-Bladed Saw), 1973), and engraving (A History of Communism, 2012).
From Left: Black Shovel, 1962, Untitled (Five-Bladed Saw), 1973, A History of Communism, 2012
In the courtyard of Palazzo Rocca, My Puzzled Mind is an ode to the artist's work. The sculpture, guardian of the artist's knowledge and know-how, holds us in awe. It is the epicenter of the thirty-two works on display throughout the exhibition.
The question of tools and their humanization is a recurring theme. One thinks, for example, of the two intertwined hammers in the sculpture, A Beautiful Day (with Cats) Two Hammers (Creeley), 2023, set directly on the terrazzo floor of the piano nobile in the Palazzo. In the same room, the painting, Fragile Landscape With Shadows, 2024, is composed of four rosette-shaped hearts, an emblematic symbol of Jim Dine's work, on which hang necklaces of networked ropes and chains.
A Beautiful Day (with Cats) Two Hammers (Creeley), 2023
Fragile Landscape With Shadows, 2024
The impact of My Puzzled Mind also lies in its colossal self-portrait. Self-portraiture is a recurrent theme in Jim Dine's work, particularly through drawing. We're thinking here of the I never looked away exhibition devoted to him by the Albertina Museum in Vienna in 2019, which brought together a large number of self-portraits.
Yet, we also see it in his paintings. Since 2017, Jim has found a new symbol in his free, synthetic pictorial interpretation of the characteristic lines of his head drawing. A self-portrait without a face, or a face that gives way to painting as such. In the cellar of the Palazzo, we discover a large part of the Me ensemble, which reflects this—an endless exploration of his palette and gestural strokes, sometimes featuring a set of teeth, a look in slightly variable formats, but always relative to that of the portrait.
In the piano nobile's main room, we find Blue Ohio, 2023 and The Landscape Eunice Made, 2023, large-format paintings perfectly sized to fit into the wall moldings, using the same process and projecting their dimensions into an interior landscape. Then, Dry Ridge Portrait, 2023 and My Angel in Bardo, 2023, face each other: a large mouth for one, an uncovered dentition for the other. Here, we lose the contours of the head and ears, and with them the idea of self-portraiture.
From Left: Me #8, 2020, Me #9, 2020, Blue Ohio, 2023, The Landscape Eunice Made, 2023, Dry Ridge Portrait, 2023, My Angel in Bardo, 2023
My Puzzled Mind was first shown in November 2017 during the Montrouge Paintings exhibition at Galerie Templon. The exhibition was the artist's first solo show at the Parisian gallery since establishing his large studio in Montrouge, near Paris, in 2016.
The large bronze was at the center of the gallery, surrounded by a set of fourteen large-format paintings. Four abstract paintings (This Big City Song, 2017) and ten others, with the characteristic features of the artist's head (Four Ears, 2016). This recurrence of self-portraiture with tools was also evident in another room of the gallery, where a large number of prints were shown, most of them made at Michael Woolworth's studio in Paris (Tools Puzzled Vessel (Eight), 2017), as well as at Jim Dine's studio in Walla-Walla, WA in the USA, where every summer the artist invites a group of master printers with whom he has long collaborated (The Floral Scream, 2017), and in Montrouge, printed directly with a spoon by the artist and his team (The Bees and their Merriment, 2017).
The exhibition thus ushered in this new form in Jim Dine's work, which came at the end of a long cycle of radical abstract paintings (Late Friends, 2012). The rediscovered figure was freed from the literal representation of the face to become a symbol.
From Left: This Big City Song, 2017, Tools Puzzled Vessel (Eight), 2017, Four Ears, 2016, The Floral Scream, 2017, Late Friends, 2012, The Bees and Their Merriment, 2017
My Puzzled Mind was created over the course of 2017, at Jim Dine's Montrouge studio for the plaster work and object assembly, and then at the Blue Mountain Foundry in Baker City, USA, for the bronze work. After its first showing, the bronze patina was reworked in 2023 at the Kunstgiesserei Foundry in St. Gallen, Switzerland, where the artist has a permanent studio.
The idea for the sculpture emerges in the context marked by the exhibition Jim Dine - Muscle and Salt at the Antikenmuseum in Basel (Switzerland) at the invitation of Richard Gray Gallery during the 2016 Art Basel International Fair. The exhibition presented The Flowering Sheets (Poet Singing), 2008, for the first time in Europe. The installation consists of a monumental sculpture of the artist's face in plaster, surrounded by four solid wooden naiads and a long poem written in charcoal on the walls of the room that houses it. This self-portrait of the artist-poet surrounded by his muses was later developed in other forms in his work.
The Flowering Sheets (Poet Singing), 2008
My Puzzled Mind takes up the proportions and first steps of the The Flowering Sheets production process. First, the volumes of the head are sculpted in a polystyrene cube with a hot iron, then plaster is used, to which burlap and filasse are added to give the face its distinctive features, re-cut with chisels, clubs and chainsaws. As the figure was being built, a large number of tools—pincers, brushes, hammers, pliers, wrenches, clubs, axes, ropes, etc.—were brought in from the workshop or from stores. These were added using plaster and plasticine.
Where The Flowering Sheets described the poet's song and his imagination projected into space, in the sculpture My Puzzled Mind, it is the tools that replace the words and participate in the emergence of the figure. They form a corolla at the edge of the face's interior and exterior, and seem to activate themselves, continually working the fixed material of bronze. Their dynamic arrangement redefines the contours of the monumental figure of the artist, who observes us impassively.
A third sculpture of the artist's head, Jim's Head with Branches, was subsequently created and shown at Jim Dine's New Painting and Sculpture exhibition at Galerie Thomas in Munich, Germany, in 2018. In the same proposal, it is surrounded by branches that partially conceal it. The bronze sculpture is completely painted white. This time, it is silence and tranquility that shine through.
From Left: Flowering Sheet (Poet Singing), 2008, Jim's Head with Branches, 2018, My Puzzled Mind, 2017/23
With these three sculptures, Jim Dine magnifies the different states of the artist: the state of the word is embodied in The Flowering Sheets (Poet Singing), the state of interiority and silence in Jim's Head with Branches, and the state that activates and transforms matter in My Puzzled Mind.
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Olympe Racana-Weiler
Paris, July 2024
JIM DINE: DOG ON THE FORGE
20 April — 21 July 2024
La Biennale di Venezia
Organizing Institution: Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany
Supported by TEMPLON
