Portside Date: May 28, 2017

Author: James Poniewozik

Date of source: May 11, 2017

New York Times

Watching “I Love Dick” is like attending an exhibition for which the artist has supplied her own curator’s notes. It’s an experience as much as a story: arresting, disorienting and provocative. It’s also very conscious of explaining to you how and why it arrests, disorients and provokes.

The form of “I Love Dick,” whose eight-episode first season arrives on Friday on Amazon, fits its subject. Adapted by Jill Soloway (“Transparent”) and the playwright Sarah Gubbins from a cult novel by Chris Kraus, it’s art TV about artists, a love triangle as Conceptual performance.

The first corner of that triangle is Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon), a famous abstract sculptor and rancher in Marfa, Tex. (The novel’s Dick was based on the media theory scholar Dick Hebdige; this one is inspired by the Marfa artist Donald Judd.)

As a sideline, Dick runs a residency fellowship program, where he collects artists and intellectuals like prickly cactuses. One makes video game art; another studies the aesthetics of pornography. Enter Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), Dick’s newest fellow and a Holocaust scholar, who arrives from Brooklyn with his wife, Chris (Kathryn Hahn), an experimental director whose latest work has just been dropped from the Venice Film Festival.

Over dinner with Chris and Sylvère, Dick condescendingly suggests that she failed because women are lousy filmmakers. “They have to work from behind their oppression,” he says, “which makes for some bummer movies.”

Chris is infuriated, but also turned on. (Chris and Sylvère have been in a sexual dry spell, and remember, we’re talking Cowboy Kevin Bacon here.) She channels this rage-lust into a series of “Dear Dick” letters, prose-poem mash notes that punctuate the series, in all-caps, white-on-red screen graphics, like Barbara Kruger aphorisms: “I WANT TO OWN EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO ME NOW.”

Chris plans to keep the letters to herself, but reads one to Sylvère. It has an aphrodisiac effect. Dick becomes an invisible third player in their marriage and a source of creative arousal — until the letters become public, and the season spins into drama and farce.

A theme here — and in case you miss it, the characters explain it explicitly — is the experience of women in an art world that has historically seen them as nudes to be painted, forms to inspire. Chris flips this by making the great-man artist into her muse. (“It’s humiliating,” he admits.)

Ms. Hahn, a frequent comedy actress whose dramatic talent Ms. Soloway showcased in “Transparent” and the movie “Afternoon Delight,” shows fantastic range as Chris: raw-nerved, hyperverbal and caught up in her own head.

Dick, whom Mr. Bacon plays as dry as jerky, is her opposite: coolly dismissive and laconic. His work is rugged and phallic, austere and withholding. One of his signature pieces is a brick on a table. He refuses to title his sculptures and says he hasn’t read a book in 10 years because he’s “post-idea.”

More accurately, he’s all idea, a beefcake avatar of linear thinking and pretension. (In a hilarious art-porn fantasy sequence, Chris imagines him shirtless, shearing a lamb in the middle of the road.)

Thematically, making Dick a symbol as much as a person works. Ms. Soloway has said she wants the series to exemplify the “female gaze” in art. But, together with the familiarity of Chris and Sylvère’s frustrated-intellectual-couple dynamic, it makes it harder to invest in the relationship triangle. The characters’ tendency to explicate the story’s themes is also distancing, albeit plausible for a series about theory-conscious aesthetes.

I’ve likened “Transparent,” Ms. Soloway’s remarkable Amazon series about a transgender woman and her family, to “The Wire.” Both are fueled by social mission, which can be the death of nuance, yet they make their messages organic rather than preachy. To push the analogy, “I Love Dick” might be her “Treme” (David Simon’s New Orleans follow-up to “The Wire”), exploring similar themes — here, feminism, identity and power — as expressed through culture and art.

“I Love Dick,” like “Transparent,” owns its seriousness and its characters, but it has a sense of humor about it. Early on, Sylvère is introduced to the president of the fellowship’s board, who, he’s told, is “a big fan of the Holocaust.”

But the series is best when it does what art does: to express what can’t be said literally, to be the painting — or the brick — and not the plaque next to it.

Ms. Soloway directs the fifth and best episode, a transfixingly visualized 20-minute collection of monologues by women in the Marfa community about art and their sexual awakenings. Roberta Colindrez is luminous and intense as Devon, a lesbian playwright and working-class Marfa native. If the series has future seasons, it has a strong ensemble to build on.

If the first season doesn’t entirely hang together, it’s bracingly risk-taking. At its best, it captures the artistic process in a way that TV rarely does, and it works as a kind of video art itself. But as with some other recent experimental series — “The Young Pope,” for instance — it’s best to realize that going in.

Toward the end of the season, Chris mentions to Dick that she’s seen a new work of his — a line of boulders outdoors, snaking toward the horizon. “Did you like it?” he asks.

She hedges: “I just need a little bit of time to, you know, just process it.”

“I Love Dick,” too, feels as if it might work better in memory than in the moment — once you’ve had some time to sit with it for a while, and tune out the noise.

I Love Dick

Streaming on Amazon on Friday

A version of this review appears in print on May 12, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sketching an Artistic Love Triangle. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe