This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning

This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning is the sincere title of a long visual poem by artist Jim Dine. The result of years of photographing poems after he has written them on walls and objects, it presents a symbiotic marriage of three very personal elements: his photographs, his handwriting and his words. While unique in and of itself, this particular body of work is in keeping with Dine's greater oeuvre, a multi-disciplinary enterprise in which the artist seeks to access his unconscious. Regardless of which media Dine is working in, he maintains a familiar but ever-expanding repertory of images: tools, hearts and a torso of Venus, plus the more recent iconography of crows, skulls, a Pinocchio doll and an odd-couple ape and cat. As with his paintings, sculptures and graphic work, for which he is better known, Dine seeks to record his physical and emotional presence concretely, not gesturally. The camera is but one of the many tools he has at his disposal for making such pictures. Though he has been making art for over four decades, producing paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry and even music, Dine has only been working with photography since 1996.

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied art at the Cincinnati Art Academy, the Boston Museum School and Ohio University during the 1950s, and made his entrance into the art world with his Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s in New York. He has since had many exhibitions of his paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures that reinterpret common objects, including at venues like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, The Guggenheim Museum and The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Dine has taught art at institutions including Yale University, Oberlin College and Cornell University, and currently lives in New York and Paris.