Jim Dine: This Goofy Life Of Constant Mourning (Rare edition)

Hardcover | 22.35 x 3.45 x 26.42 cm | 296 pp

Steidl | 2004 | 9783882439670

Rare edition

Jim Dine (b.1935) has been making art for over six decades, producing paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, performance works, stage and book designs, poetry and music. This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning is a long visual poem - 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, a torso of Venus, 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.