In its pursuit of “autobiography through objects,” the exhibit Jim Dine: “This Is Me”, closing this weekend at the Yale University Art Gallery, highlights unsung heroes of art-making: the tools artists use to make their artwork—instruments posed here as “avatars,” not just extensions, of the multi-multidisciplinary Dine. His paint brushes look like underwater hula skirts, soot-swept witch’s brooms or fat hairy tongues. His vice grips open and clench their toothy maws, his scissors and pliers their razor beaks. Lightly transparent gray streaks and splatters contrast the wood and metal solidity of his hammers and saws with a sense of the striking and slicing we know they’re made for.
Dine’s lush gray prints soon got my feet doing what they’re made for: walking. My eyes, too, as they searched for those rare occasions when other humble tools of the arts—the painter’s palette, the photographer’s tripod, the lutist’s sheet music, the ballerinas’ shoes, the sculptor’s drawing board—had made it into the actual art. Across the gallery’s block-wide, multi-floor, millennia-long span, here are works that whispered, stated or shouted, whether autobiographically or, on their subjects’ behalf, biographically, “This is me.”
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image features Tools in the Earth by Jim Dine, 2008.
