Page 24 - Studio International - September 1966

Jim Dine's London

by Cyril Barrett

Jim Dine In his last exhibition in London (at the ROBERT FRASER
Tool Box No. 1 1966 GALLERY last year) Jim Dine paid tribute to Mary
Screen print and collage
24 x 19 in. Quant and other aspects of the London scene. (That
Edition size 150 was before Time had discovered 'Swinging London'.)
Editions Alecto But at the time Dine had not yet visited London. Since
then he has been working here and has produced several
series of collages (London, Thorpe le Soken, Dine-Paolozzi),
a series of gouaches (Lips), collage prints (The Tool Box),
and blown-up photographs.
What is surprising about this work is that, though it was
done in London and one of the series bears the title
`London', it makes no direct reference to London. This is
an indirect tribute. 'I did them there in London', he
says, 'because it is what it is, because to me it was privacy
and respect for it. I experienced a kind of new freedom
there, formally and emotionally.'
Dine found that he was able to do things in London
which he would not dare to do in America. For one
thing, he could trust his judgment. The blown-up photo-
graphs, which he did in collaboration with Michael
Cooper, are the result of nothing more than straight
Jim Dine choices of what he considered to be visually interesting.
Dine-Paolozzi No. 1 1966 Personal choices of this kind would not, he feels, be
Collage respected in America.
23 x 25+ in.
Robert Fraser Gallery London also gave him a different attitude towards
America. It taught him to accept certain aspects of
American culture—industrial design, for example—
which most Americans would not regard as cultural.
`We're still so young and naïve culturally that one thinks
of art as a very high thing.' It took people like Richard
Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi (and not, incidentally,
the strictly 'pop' painters) to bring this home to him. In
the Tool Box, which is the first series of collage prints of
its kind (and a credit to the printing skill of Editions
Alecto), he incorporates screen prints from industrial
design magazines and old-fashioned engineering text-
books, as well as pieces of plastic or metal.
Dine experienced a certain ambiguity in London's
respect for personal freedom and privacy. This is re-
flected in the series of graffiti called London and in the
collages made from material supplied by Paolozzi (the
Dine-Paolozzi series). This respect for personal freedom.
while it shows a certain delicacy and refinement, springs
partly from a reluctance to get involved in other people's
idiosyncrasies, problems and enthusiasms, and from a
refusal to face any fact which may be unpleasant or em-
barrassing. At all costs one must maintain the fiction that
everything is sweetness and light. Everything is wrapped
in roses as with a Selfridge's wrapper. But this is not so
much respect for freedom as a cold, rather impersonal
tolerance of it.