The Primary Hand

"An image that had been taken as shared, public property was now very much Dine's own to use as an instantly identifiable sign of his own artistic identity and as 'the agent and the organ of my emotions.' As he himself has initimated, it can be used for formal reason, as a stand-in for the figure (and particularly as a busty female form), and as an emblem of longing and desire, both sexual and metaphysical. "

(M. Livingstone, Jim Dine: The Alchemy of Images, New York, 1998, p. 205)