Green Suit

In late-1950s New York, Jim Dine was a key early practitioner of Happenings—antic, loosely scripted, multidisciplinary performance events. He was painting avidly as well, often incorporating personal, domestic objects into both his canvases and his performances. In Green Suit, thought to be Dine’s first sculpture, the paint-daubed object itself takes precedent. Indeed, this was not just any found object, but clothing taken from the artist’s own closet. The suit’s trousers are shredded into strips, some of them suggestively bundled. Painted cardboard stands in for a shirt and tie. If in his performance work Dine made use of his body, in this assemblage he offered up the trappings of a slack, nearly two-dimensional “everyman,” untidy and poignant, anonymous yet familiar.