Artist: Jim Dine by Richard Schulman
Fictional Truths
The lens is so very naked when it is raised to see. For decades, the camera has remained under wraps: a secret agent masquerading as a personal diary keeper. It does record years alive, days spent, seconds dreaming, operating like a Samuel Pepys in celluloid.
While fictional and historical diarists like, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Kerouac and more recorded time and effect in pen, pencil, diaries can take many forms. When I am alone my camera only sees castles in the sky. When I was of another age, I imagined my career would entail something more dangerous; maybe a Day of the Dead dance with extraordinary risk factors at every turn. I wanted to be a part of dark evenings and blinding lights of day. Every frame moving forward gave me an imagined sense of intimacy with whatever the frame saw.
“Come a little bit closer/ Hear
what I have to say,” Neil Young
Before I ever met Jim Dine, before I had photographed even one artist, I stood in awe of his work. I found myself alone on one of New York City’s avenues, eyeing an inspirational moment manifested in a wavering, two-step of sculptural dreamscape and unimaginable beauty. In that single moment, I became part of the nightfall melding with light, swinging gesturally into dawn. The light I saw would be impossible to repeat; it was a god’s eye view, as if a rising Poseidon had just breached the ocean’s surface. There was more; there was a wind:
If memory serves me fairly, It was the earliest hour I can remember photographing an awakening. Ideas and mechanical artifacts steadied before my Nikon “f1/.2”. lens. I began to capture the surreal definition of being alone embedded in loneliness. I began to capture. I stood nearing a sway. I rehearsed my pose. I pressed the shutter-release, and then realized, the image failed. As I tried to repeat my shot, my eyes suggested the moment would never be the same. I moved on. I began to imagine who the maker of those dreams truly was.
I entered his realm. Desperately I tried to trace the origins of the germ or germs that have facilitated my interests in living. When it comes to the whys, the Petri dish warrants an even stronger microscope; I just scamper forward. Destiny hides in a story waiting to be told. Decades matter: watching an artist age is like watching paint dry in a subterranean cave … it may never happen in front of us but science tells us it is. Dreaming more about life than what you see is what illuminates my “Castles in Spain”, something children do, or what our minds near the living end may do.
I consider both states like mining for gold in the California Gold Rush: squatting atop a brook or a riverbank, I imagine sifting through a history of lives lost, lives discovered and a magical moment realized. The camera lives beholden to a framed pocket of histories, capturing currents merging into oceans beneath the Earth’s surface and above. Drawn from a particular planets reserve of H2O. All the while, the camera waits in the cushioned cusps of my hands. The hands that are home to seemingly many Mount of Venus-the bulbous thenar eminence. Words of science words of mindful imaginations adore what may become in fractions of a particular forensic DNA, proving that a photograph truly lived in celluloid and digital dreams.
I remember photographing Jim Dine four times in one decade. I am pretty sure London, Paris and New York twice. I still remember the London studio. Jim’s space was tiny, inside a building that felt like a beehive of artists scurrying in and around the hallways. It was almost the size of a cubicle.
Jim’s great friend was the artist R.B. Kitaj. It was whispered that around that day and time they had a falling out, though the reasons were never clear. Kitaj’s studio was literally on the other side of the wall. In my imagination they were like two bearded birds of prey looking for recognition from each other and the art world; two gunslingers waiting for the command to “turn and fire”.
I prefer a greater extreme; a Zen mode brawl: Imagine the adjacent studios rumbling like Ali and Foreman in Zaire. Paint brushes and jealousies raging just between them. The ending friendship was like something gnawing on sheetrock tearing apart both souls. I think the more intellectual love and admiration separated them, the greater their bond.
I have photographed both men in separate sessions. I never mentioned the strains between them while my camera was firing shutter sounds. I think they knew that I knew, and how it empowered my camera to flex and see more. It is a funny thing to know a secret, especially when it wasn’t really a secret to anyone but me.
The vibration of minds played heavily in my four sessions with Dine. I remember from the first time to the last. His eyes shared a breathable soul. That first time he was more like a cat peering under prescription sunglasses wanting to know what I see and when the session will close. In the following years, I could hear him telepathically utter: “Do what you need until done is done.” Trust is earned.
A building wavers and possibly stresses under its load-bearing system: The pleading sounds from days, years, decades and centuries of history can be heard: But a human measures pleasures and pains in mere seconds, minutes. I have been a recipient of passions from both hemispheres.
I can remember Jim Dine examining my portrait of him. I can remember R.B. Kitaj examining my portrait of him. My camera has a Merlin-like effect on people to be brought together in history and a look ahead. It brought in my mind the three of us together. The camera has a way of exchanging conversations when exposures on print share naked truths.
