History is mobile. It lives in the present and is always already rushing ahead into the future. The objects with which we share our world are containers for the residue that history leaves in its wake. They are embedded with stories, images, voices that wait silently for their moment of (re)discovery, the moment in which someone or something casts them out of their dormant state and fills them with the transformational energies of the contemporary.

With A History of Communism, Jim Dine presents the result of his metamorphic engagement with objects and the elements of history preserved within them. In 2011, Dine’s friends and fellow printmakers, Sarah Dudley and Ulie Kuhle, were given 100 lithographic stones from what was once a Socialist art academy in the German Democratic Republic. Preserved on the surfaces of the stones were drawings made by the school’s former students.

Tools, horses, the face of Marx and of Rosa Luxemburg; a flood of images that served the now-failed Communist agenda. Dine took these drawings and combined them with his own artistic vocabulary. He layered etchings and marks on top of the lithographs, thereby allowing the images to grow and shift into another state. It was this act of creation/recreation that, as Alan Cristea, curator and director of Alan Cristea Gallery, explains, was a core motivation for the series.

Lina Kavaliunas: When did you first meet Jim Dine? What drew you to his work?
Alan Cristea: I first met Jim Dine in 1979, 35 years ago. Dine is one of the greatest living printmakers, who has used a vast array of printmaking techniques during his career. I have always loved prints for their inherent creative potential and because they were more affordable. I was drawn to Jim Dine’s work because of his love for prints and printmaking.

LK: I am interested by your decision to open A History of Communism and Jim Dine: Printmaker simultaneously. In what ways do these exhibitions complement one another? How does pairing them augment the viewer’s understanding of the works presented in each?
AC: The main reason for staging a Jim Dine exhibition at this time was to show “A History of Communism” in its entirety. I took the opportunity to mount a second exhibition of Jim Dine’s prints to demonstrate the range of his subject matter and of his printmaking techniques whilst highlighting some of his most recent prints alongside older material. The two exhibitions also profile different printmaking techniques. The series A History of Communism, which is being shown at 34 Cork Street, are all lithographic prints, created from stones found at a socialist art academy in the former German Democractic Republic and passed onto Jim by printmaking friends, Sarah Dudley and Ulie Kuhle. The other part of the exhibition gives viewers a chance to see a great many other printmaking techniques and to give a broader idea of his subject matter.

From Jim Dine, ‘A History of Communism’, 2012. Courtesy of Alan Cristea Gallery

LK: Multiple histories converge in these prints: the history of the stones and the ‘Eastern bloc’ artists that created them; Dine’s own personal history as someone of Lithuanian and Polish descent; his history with printmaking. How did his engagement with these various histories, especially his own, inform the work?
AC: That’s an impossible question to answer definitively. He has chosen to spend half his adult life in Europe. He is originally of Polish extraction but he has no direct links with the country. He has never suffered political oppression but he is certainly very conscious of such oppression in Europe, whether it be Stalinist or Nazi. He is Jewish. I think that he was very intrigued by the discovery of stones made by unknown art students from an art school which was part of a totalitarian regime. I think he liked the idea of conjoining different periods of history and taking control of these pre-existing works but, in the end, I think the act of creation, of recreation and of “making” was far more important than any possible desire to comment on a political situation. I did however choose to ask political historian and analyst Gwendolyn Sasse to write the introduction to the catalogue in order to comment on this rather fascinating dialogue between a famous living artist and completely unknown artists operating under a past political regime.

LK: In this series, Dine combined his own artistic vocabulary with the visual language preserved in the stones. Can one understand this process as a kind of collaboration between the artist and the anonymous students that made the drawings?
AC: As with all Jim’s editions, you can describe these “History of Communism” prints as collaborations with his regular printers in both Germany and the States. It really would be stretching the notion of collaboration to a ludicrous degree to talk of a collaboration with the original students from the DDR. This is more a question of appropriation. And I have to add that the appropriated images are mostly of very poor quality. It is Jim who has turned them into vibrant, genuinely creative works.

Jim Dine: A History of Communism and Jim Dine: Printmaker run until 7th October at Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 and 34 Cork Street London W1S 3NU