The Smiling Workman

Jim Dine, 26, is one of those artists who are hard to take seriously and equally hard to laugh off. They produce kooky art so earnestly that it makes a certain sense. In his current show at Manhattan's Martha Jackson Gallery, Dine concentrates on paintings of articles of clothing --suspenders, shoes, hats, and a gaudy parade of neckties. Dine fans have bought up three-fourths of the paintings, and the show boasts a learned interpretation by the British critic Lawrence Alloway. who was recently named curator at the Guggenheim.

Cincinnati-born Dine hit the Manhattan scene only three years ago, but his name is one to reckon with in avantgarde circles. Like a number of other rebels against abstract art, he began producing art not out of paint and canvas, but out of everyday objects. "I loved the city." he says, "I loved seeing so much being discarded. Every time you turned a corner, you'd see in the next trash can some wonderful piece of sculpture.'' So Dine became a member of the "found object" school--a group dedicated to the proposition that many an old piece of junk, if placed in a fresh context, would become a thing of beauty. Then Dine decided that he did not want to deal with found objects any more. "There's too much of other people's mystery in them," he explains.

Four-Sided Collages. At one point Dine took up what has become known as "happenings." which are essentially ideas or feelings spontaneously acted out for an audience against a background of painted props. In one of his happenings called The Smiling Workman, Dine was seen writing ''I love what" in orange paint and "I'm doing" in blue. He then dumped the two cans of paint over his head to show "the feeling of a happy, compulsive painter, which I am." About the same time. Dine began experimenting with "environments," or "four-sided collages."

After that, Dine went through a purgative period: he did canvases that were all black or white except for some arbitrary mark or tiny design. "It was a renunciation," he says, "to get clean." Finally, he was ready for his present phase. One painting in his current show is called Red Suspenders. It consists of a pair of red suspenders that have been painted over with red paint and fixed against a red background. Says Artist Dine: "I like painting red and red." The suspenders are not "found objects." They were bought new for the painting, like a fresh tube of paint.

A Necktie Is a Poem. The neckties--some of them are made of paint, while others are real ties painted over--are for Dine "remembered symbols that are important because they keep coming back. I used to write poems in the shape of neckties." All the paintings, whether of a shoe or hat or necktie, are labeled shoe or hat or necktie, because Dine likes to repeat his theme "over and over in your head like a textbook."

What does all this add up to? Says Critic Alloway: "Whereas the surrealist sought mystery. Dine calmly shows it to be unavoidable." This implies that in these everyday objects there lies some deep mystery that Dine dramatizes by transforming them into paintings. Unlike the surrealist, he does not distort the objects or place them in absurd contexts; he presents them, in whole or in part, essentially as they are. In theory, he has brought the everyday object--one preoccupation of the avant-garde--to a state of isolated glory. This is a serious attempt to do something bold, but it is not so much art as antiart. A necktie, presented so literally, remains only a necktie, and for all his obvious talent, Jim Dine has not changed that situation.

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