I took these photos at the Cincinnati Art Museum this weekend. They are of Jim Dine's new bronze sculpture, "Pinocchio (Emotional)," a scary/creepy/mystical thing that seems to want to conjure a lot of pop-culture nightmares while also paying serious homage to the original 1883 children's novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The statue is imposing, and the glazed patina of it harkens back to Rodin. High art crashes into low, but also a heavyhanded sentimentality gives the whole enterprise a strange, beautiful kick. It's as if Dine wants to transform the Disney puppet-boy into a man-boy-god of steel, a cartoon pulled from suspended animation and recast as personal totem. It was a beautiful sunny day, which only made "Pinocchio" seem a lot more imposing and a little more terrifying. The facelessness and the wipe open arms are somehow disquieting and Golem-like. Suddenly it just might come to life and move slowly toward you, like a figure in one of those movies made by the Quay Brothers...
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