Jim Dine, Revealed Through His Photographs

Jim Dine’s work had begun to feel as comfortable and predictable as that bathrobe he’s painted for years and years, and now suddenly there’s this from him: a new body of work in a new medium and a decidedly different tone of voice. It’s darker and sexier than that old robe, not nearly as cozy but far more intriguing.

The show, “Jim Dine Photographs,” is a declarative surprise. He does?

It turns out that Dine has used the camera for years to make pictures as source material for his prints and paintings, but he has been making photographs intended as independent works of art only since 1996. The 20 or so images now on view at the UC Riverside/California Museum of Photography are moodier, more brooding and closer to the bone than we’re used to getting from Dine.

A recycler of familiar icons and implements from mass culture, Dine is usually lumped with Pop artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. He’s adhered a bathroom sink to one canvas, leaned a lawn mower onto another and painted, drawn or printed innumerable images of hearts, robes, flowers, tools and the Venus de Milo. What Dine’s works have had in common over the past 40 years is an iconic simplicity, immediate and accessible legibility. Dine invests them with intensely private meaning through texture, color or nuanced brushwork, but they usually smile a very public smile.

The photographs, on the other hand, have a much quieter, more personal presence. They feel more overtly charged with emotion than Dine’s work in other media, more resonant with deeper, internal mysteries. “Photography,” the artist said in a recent interview, “has allowed me to access my unconscious in a very immediate way.”

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Most of the prints in this show, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, were made in the controlled space of the studio, where Dine set up still-life arrangements and photographed them with the same frontal directness characteristic of his work in other media. A stuffed owl, a crow and human skulls reappear in many of the photographs, loading the images with the weight of impending mortality. A few of the setups are less conventionally symbolic, more ambiguous and engaging. “Light” (1996), a study in subtle revelation, shows the crow in profile within a dark gray space. A hand reaching toward it appears to emit a small flame, though the actual source of the light is unclear. The intense bead of brightness elicits a glint from the bird’s eye and articulates just enough of the crow’s beak to fully animate it.

“Nancy #5” (1996) is equally simple and similarly compelling. The artist’s wife, subject of many of his drawings and prints over the years, is seen here deflecting Dine’s insistent frontality. She faces forward but tips her head down, casting an oversized shadow on the wall directly behind her. Attention centers less on her features than on the dark, billowing penumbra that encircles her head. The portrait discloses little but conjures much.

The richness of Dine’s prints offsets the starkness of their imagery, and that tactile beauty is due to their being printed in photogravure. The process, popular among turn-of-the-century Pictorialists intent on claiming the status of paintings for their photographs, involves transferring the photographic negative to a copper plate, then printing the image in ink. The resulting tones are velvety as a charcoal drawing, the forms soft-edged and sensuous.

Dine also makes inkjet prints, in color and black-and-white, though only his work in black-and-white is included in the Riverside show. The inkjet prints here are larger and more complex compositionally than the gravures--or at least more crowded with subjects--but have none of their physical lushness or mystery. The still lifes feel more forced, and a self-portrait in a mirror seems drab.

An intriguing exception are several photographs of black backdrops, hanging by clips and bearing writings in white chalk. Extracted from the artist’s journals, the texts are fragmentary, impressionistic--poems found in dreams and memories. Other elements in the photographs--a sitting man, a pair of arms, toys hanging by string--complicate the narrative snatches, but it’s the writing that is most gripping. Erasures are evident, and sometimes written over, giving the whole the feeling of a stream-of-consciousness script being worked and reworked in real time. Dine’s own movement in the framed space--evidenced in the writing and revising--has a performative quality to it that gives these images a sense of the raw and vivid.

As new as photography is to Dine, performance is where he started (with Happenings in the late ‘50s), and poetry was another significant stop earlier in his career. The pathos and intimacy of these photographs, then, might not be as much a deviation for Dine as a return--to an original state of nakedness preceding the robe.

* “Jim Dine Photographs,” UCR/California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside, (909) 784-FOTO, through March 11. Closed Mondays.