NYAB Event - Paul McLean “Dim Tim”

Paul McLean “Dim Tim”

Slag

This event has ended.

“DIM TIM” will be on view for Bushwick Open Studios Tour 2013, Friday, May 31st, Saturday, June 1st and Sunday, June 2nd. SLAG and the exhibiting artist will host additional events and programming in conjunction with the “DIM TIM” exhibit (TBA).

Bushwick-based artist Paul McLean first etched his signature Cyclops figure in 1984 into the wet black ink on a silkscreen support board. The Cyclops peered quizzically from the picture plane at the viewer, standing at attention by a Revolutionary War era bulwark, holding a musket with bayonet attached, a massive spiral spinning overhead. McLean recalls the episode as critical turning point for him as an artist, the moment he commenced to call himself a “4D artist,” long before 4D achieved the aesthetic currency it enjoys today.

Dim Tim, who has often shown his weird face in McLean’s painting series and digital work, in the SLAG Contemporary exhibit bearing his name and subtitled “Fallacies of Hope,” assumes the starring role in the narrative arc. Comic historical cinema is an influence here, and Dim Tim manifests as multiplicity personified, echoing Peter Sellers and Jonathon Winters at their hilarious and fungible finest, or as a man of his times, Zeitgeist embodied (on film), like Woody Allen in Zelig, Sellers in Being There, or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. Dim Tim shines as Freud, as Napoleon, as a Yankee titan. The role of Dim Tim, though, is not reducible to dress-up play. He is not just a stylized figuration, a cut-out. He more than just a combination of Baldachuk’s Napoleon at Borodino, scanning the carnage of Borodino in the epic War and Peace, and David’s Napoleon, heroically perched on his white steed. Dim Tim pushes though bathos and the suspension of time. He in some measure curates his own representation with the self-consciousness of a veteran stage performer: for instance, he mugs for the viewer; apparently relishes close-ups and candid turns; and flexes in his poses. He strays into the sphere of sacred clown. He penetrates the moment as an assessor, albeit one installed in place, static, but containing the potential of being animated. These types of self-reflective or model moves imply his awareness of his own subjectivity as focal image. He seems comfortably prepared for a snapshot, or the still, and simultaneously captured, as a combination of form solid in time and yet movable, of time’s action. In short, he is at ease with the Gaze, and even may be up for a mimetic confrontation with it (and the artist or viewer), but he rarely satisfied with enslavement to it. In some paintings, Dim Tim is menacing, threatening, his animus not directed at some Other within the painted universe he inhabits, but at Us, the Gazers! – Milo Santini