The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
William Butler Yeats 1
Jack Mim's paintings are large in scale, strongly structured, and complex in their narrative iconography. That is true of Mims work over the last three and one half decades. One of The Oak Cliff Four (along with George Green, Jim Roche, and Robert Wade), Mims contributed to the significant increase in attention Dallas received in the early 1970s and subsequently as a center of artists activity, and has had substantial influence, directly and indirectly, on Dallas artists. Along with Mims exhibition of the Black Map series of 2001-2003 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in 2005, this exhibition makes salient examples of Mims work available to a generation for whom he is perhaps unknown, as well as those for whom he is a legendary, if too frequently invisible, figure.
The vigor and sweep of Mims paint handling, and the audacity of his color is manifest, and has received due critical commentary over the years. What ought be remarked on as well is the ambition of his paintings, not only evidenced by their scale, but of their iconographic program.
In this group of paintings from 1987-1989, a number of Mims' motifs recur: the geographer and mapping, horses, alligators, birds, figures and the dismembered fragments of figures. While the iconography of Mims' works is nothing if not personal, there are art historical references with which Mims deployment of these motifs have an intertextual relationship. The relationships consist in references, allusions, resonances, but not quotations, for there is similarity but not identity with their antecedents in the deployment of the motifs. Thus the compass motif in At Raven's Fountain and The Geographer has antecedents in Vermeer's Geographer, and in Blake's The Ancient of Days. The red male knife-wielding figure (the spread legs acting as a compass-form) in The Raven's Autopsy: That Deals in Destiny's Dark Councils perhaps alludes to the figures in Antonio Pollaiolo's Battle of Ten Naked Men, though it does not refer directly to any of Pollaiolo's figures. The three-headed figure in A Tontine-There is No Sanctuary and in The Veil of the Ephemeral Head seems derived from Titian's Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence.2
Mims repositions these motifs as symbolic forms,3 juxtaposed in implicitly narrative structures. In this repositioning, the signifiers are personalized and transformed, retaining allusive reference to their antecedents while taking on individual inflections particular to their deployment in the work. The process entails operations within a system of differences in which the domain of the signifier expands, and that of the signified is shifted. The geographer motif, most explicit in the foreground figure in A Tontine-There is No Devil (where a sextant also appears, twice) and in the other works where the motif is evoked by the compass-form, draws on Blake's antecedent for the notion of the deity as divine geometer and Vermeer's antecedent for the notion of human mastery of space and by analogy, through the deployment of a promethic charting of one's life. United by the notion of charting and mapping (ultimately a mode of representation), the two readings entailing divine versus human agency are in tension. The three-headed figure in A Tontine-There is no Sanctuary and in The Veil of the Ephemeral Head is a complementary form to the motif of the geographer; as the geographer elicits the concept of space, the three-headed figure elicits that of time, together being the Kantian a priori synthetic categories comprising the ground of perception.4 Titian's Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence is inscribed: EX PRAETERITIO PRAESENS PRVDENTER AGIT NI FUTUR ACTIONE DETVRPET. "From the past the man in the present acts prudently so as not to imperil the future." The three-headed figure represents the three ages of man, while the triple headed beast (wolf-lion-dog) in Titian is symbolic of prudence. That Mims has the flanking heads veiled in both A Tontine-There is No Sanctuary and The Veil of the Ephemeral Head suggests past and future are veiled, obscured, not directly accessible. The recurrence of severed arms and hands reiterate the difficulty of embracing and grasping past and future when the Enlightenment ground of perception is iterated but the transcendental self seems fragmented.
What underlies these motifs of time and space constituting the field of perception is the underlying problematic of meaning: the (in)commensurability of meanings, the difficulty of charting one's course, of discerning the past and the future, of embracing the present situation, of grasping the matter. The place of meaning, ultimately, is narrative, myth. Not 'myth' in the sense of a fiction or fable, but 'myth' in its antecedent sense of "a 'true' story and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant."5 Perhaps, as Yeats suggests, if one might know the myth individual to a person, one "might understand all he did and thought." That we do not know the myth is no fault of the artist, who also may not know the myth; thus the Intentional Fallacy.6 We, like the artist, share in the same problematic of meaning, and confront the same difficulty of embracing and grasping the past and the future, and can scarcely chart a course in the present. It is enough that in the engagement meaning is created.
Jack Mims received the Bachelor of Arts from Austin College, and the Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Dallas. Mims' exhibitions include: The Black Maps, McKinney Avenue Contemporary; On Line Drawings by Texas Artists, Amarillo Art Center; More is More: The Art of the Oak Cliff Group 1969-1974, CRCA, The University of Texas at Arlington; Another Reality, Hooks-Epstein Gallery; Wallpaper and Razorwire, Moody Gallery; Five Texas Installations: Blackburn, Geffert, Little, Mims and Waters, Blue Star Art Space; Line and Form: Contemporary Texas Figurative Drawing, Art Museum of South Texas; Texas Landscape 1900-1986, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; American Narrative/Story Art: 1967-1977, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and traveling to Contemporary Arts Museum, New Orleans, Winnipeg, University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum.