980  MADISON  AVENUE      NEW  YORK,  NY  10075          212.980.0700            VENUSOVERMANHATTAN.COM  

Woodward, Richard B. “An '80s Casualty Gets His Due.” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2013.

An '80s Casualty Gets His Due By RICHARD B. WOODWARD New York

'Jack," one of six short 16mm films playing on a loop near the entrance to " Jack Goldstein x 10,000" at the Jewish Museum, is a good place to try to get a handle on this elusive, passive-aggressive artist.

A performance piece from 1973, it's a simple two-person interactive drama: A young man stands in a desert landscape and calls out the name "Jack," at which point the filmmaker takes a shaky step backward. Similar to other minimalist time-and-space dissections, this one also has a forlorn, autobiographic undertone. With each step of the procedure, repeated over the 11

minutes, 24 seconds of the film, the man grows tinier, his voice fainter until he is so distant from the camera and us as to be an inaudible speck in the twilight. If Goldstein feared that his name would be forgotten after his death—and his art is riddled with anxieties about the Void—he shouldn't have. Since his 2003 suicide in a San Bernardino, Calif., trailer park after years of heroin addiction, his peculiar and sometimes

 

2  

poignant art is more visible and honored than when he was alive.

His films (most less than five minutes, some as short as 19 seconds) have entered the postmodern canon, appearing in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2009 survey "The Pictures Generation," and in the "Pacific Standard Time" exhibitions about West Coast art. Earlier this year, Venus of Manhattan mounted a gallery retrospective that rivaled in scope this one, which originated at the Orange County Museum of Art with curator Philipp Kaiser and is installed at the Jewish Museum by assistant curator Joanna Montoya.

Goldstein's oeuvre was slight and uneven in quality, superficially unified by issues of reproducibility. (The title refers to a wisecrack the Canadian-born Goldstein once made about his own name: It was so common, he figured, there were 10,000 others just like it in the world's phone books.) Neither his sculpture, barely represented, with one wall piece and an installation, nor his paintings of man-made and cosmic-light spectacles, which dominate the last half of the show, match the enchantment of his modest films or his sound pieces.

In his preference for impersonal or ready-made images, Goldstein was typical of his generation. His brand of conceptual art, developed while a student at the California Institute of the Arts, was forged from the tailings of Pop, Minimalism and Performance. Although associated with the Pictures artists, named for a 1977 show in New York organized by critic Douglas Crimp that first brought attention to Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman, Goldstein was, as Alexander Dumbadze notes in his catalog essay, older (born 1945) than almost everyone in this crowd.

Nor was he well situated to take advantage of the art boom of the 1980s and '90s, when his peers—mainly the painters and photographers—became darlings of the market. His 16mm films and his sound pieces, issued as playable records, were about as noncommercial as art could be in those days, except for Performance—and he did that, too.

Early '70s films, such as "A Spotlight" (1972), in which a man dodges a light tracking him around a darkened studio, or "A Reading" (1973), in which a voice races to finish reciting a typed text that is dissolving into ash in front of our eyes, have the same panicked slapstick as Bruce Nauman's early video work.

More distinctive (and original) are "Shane" (1975), featuring a trained German Shepherd

 

3  

that stares at the camera and barks upon unseen command, and "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer" (1975), a loop of the studio's famous logo, with Leo the Lion roaring himself hoarse. (Both are viewable on YouTube.)

With their candy-colored backgrounds and viewer-friendly running times, both films are shiny Pop objects that hang there, out of reach. With only a few tweaks, Goldstein contorts the banal into something arcane. They're salutes to Hollywood, albeit too removed from it to seem like anything but a parody. Goldstein had discovered one of Andy Warhol's secrets: Aiming a camera at one thing for any period of time, without cutting away to something else, can be discomfiting. The grammar of studio (and home) movies depends on movement and changes of scene. When the camera or a subject doesn't blink, we feel impolite for staring. The neutered helplessness of these animals may be hinted at as well. Caged inside a frame for our entertainment, they've been tamed by technology.

Goldstein's paintings from the '80s are of an entirely different order. Self-consciously grandiose and produced under his direction by assistants, they are based on photographs of war, lightning storms, volcanic eruptions, solar flares and underwater creatures. Toward the end of his life, he admitted these slick, lustrous, air-brushed works were done to compete in New York with his painter friends. For a while they raised his profile, selling briskly. But by the late '90s they hardly sold at all.

His retreat from New York to East Los Angeles in the '90s marked a withdrawal from the art world. Samples from "Totems: Selected Writings 1988-1990" occupy vitrines in the last room. Goldstein was always fond of aphorisms and in his last years occupied himself by reading philosophic texts—backwards—and stacking quotations in various typefaces on the page ("a nightmare, looking in the wrong direction"). Like dialogue from the transcribed dreams of Ludwig Wittgenstein and William S. Burroughs, they are products of a mind that believed only in truths that were crooked, and probably doubted there were any truths at all.

In a 2001 interview with the artist Meg Cranston, found at the end of the catalog, Goldstein explains why he believed in an art based on found material. "Nothing I've ever done was made up, because if I made it up, I felt it was inferior," he said. It was more honest to describe his thoughts about nature—which was eternal and "too slow"—through reproductions.

He also expresses uncharitable thoughts about former colleagues, such as Ms. Sherman and Mr. Salle, whose fortunes rose as his sank. His memories of the American art scene

 

4  

in the 1980s can profitably be read alongside Eric Fischl's new autobiography, "Bad Boy," with its refreshing candor about the jealousies and temptations of those years. Goldstein and Mr. Fischl were both ambitious graduates of Cal Arts who came to New York at about the same time. And yet one became a casualty, the other a celebrity.

This show helps to redress the imbalance. Jack Goldstein was an artist unlike any of his generation. The peculiar films he made, 17 of which are being screened here, should keep his name from vanishing.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.