Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger

by Thornton Dial, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Thomas McEvilley

Book by Dial, Thornton, Baraka, Imamu Amiri, McEvilley, Thomas, Arnett, Paul, Arnett, William

Genres: Art

160 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to evaluate for me. There's no denying the importance of Dial or the power of his art. Much of his work, with its assemblages of found objects and detritus attached to canvas or wood backing and slathered with paint, is aggressively three-dimensional, in a way that makes it fiendishly difficult to capture in a photo. Even though the camera work is lovingly done here, and printed in high quality, it's still hard to make out some of the details and figures in the pieces, in a way that isn't true if they're actually in front of you. I have no idea how anyone would solve this problem in order to make a book that really conveys Dial's art. In a way, it's sort of like Jackson Pollock's work, with its layers of paint that jut off the canvas in a manner impossible to reproduce in two dimensions.

Be that as it may, the explanatory notes that accompany the photos are beautifully insightful. The essays struck me as more of a mixed bag. I found the Thomas McEvilley one useful; the Amiri Baraka essay, which is much longer, seemed to me to say more about Baraka than it really said about Dial.

Anyway, I guess the upshot is that Dial's work is critical, powerful, and necessary. This book does its best to convey that, but this is a case where the exhibition guide really doesn't serve as a substitute for having seen the exhibition. (Which I dearly wish I had.)