"Jack Goldstein"
Art Monthly, London, April 2002, p.33-34
For someone who has reputedly spent the last ten years living in a caravan, Jack Goldstein has entered the canon at astonishing speed. The last 18 months have seen a shower of small shows and longer articles on the Californian artist, and the Magasin's ample retrospective, the first in ten years, completes this process - and hopefully brings it to a sober conclusion.
Recent critics have sought to resituate Goldstein by placing him within the context of Douglas Crimp's 'Pictures' show of 1977, which brought together several figures who were later to become central to critical Postmodernism. There's nothing unhelpful in this, yet the value of the Magasin's show lies in demonstrating that Goldstein deserves to be seen in a wider context; indeed, what is extraordinary about him is how his trajectory united styles and media which are usually perceived as being radically different.
His films and paintings have attracted the most attention recently, and that's understandable given the indifferent character of his early post-Minimal sculpture and post-Conceptual films, yet both clearly carry the germ of his later development. The sculpture is of the dull balancing-act variety and the films are long exercises in pain and patience, yet these are where Goldstein first got to grips with the thematics of energy and collapse, the central tropes of late Modernism. As he matured, he carried these into other media where they became inflected with his innate Romanticism and they took on more obviously metaphorical and emotional meaning. It is when Goldstein gives way to molten emotion that he really comes alive. In his installation Burning Window, 1977/2002, fairy lights behind frosted glass give the appearance of blazing flames, flames which carry on consuming but never scorch the window frame itself. It's an extravagant leap into myth and the subconscious, with the portal appearing like a too-vivid translation of gingerbread houses and haunted woods.
This is the ersatz Romanticism which is Goldstein's natural style, though his best work came when it met up with pop culture. A thoroughbred Californian, he adored the cheap effects Hollywood had at its disposal; he often used them in his work, and this soon led to his conceptual interest in appropriation. The sound works of the late 70s are a marvellous illustration. Seeing that the canned sounds that film studios used were also in some way canned emotion, he set about building his own library of tragic and grandiloquent moods, which he pressed individually on vinyl: the canned fighting noises of Two Wrestling Cats, 1976, reaches for excruciating pitch and Lost Ocean Liner, 1976, cans a distressed, distant honk which is a tour de force in treacly sentiment.
The sound pieces are often wryly comic and warmly humane, yet an important undertow of Goldstein's fascination with audience engineering is also, inevitably, a fascination with power, and this is something which became a central theme in his painting of the early 80s. Large, black canvases with smaller images at their centre, they depict lightning, war planes, fireworks and burning cities, with the sharpness and blur of timedelayed photography. This is the imagery of power politics and spectacle - fascism, in other words - and it extends into the videos as well. Indeed Shane, 1975, is the briefest, most ferocious expression of it: an alsatian that barks to a trainer's off-screen commands, it has that combination of pathetic, craven supplication and vicious malevolence which is the essence of jackboot politics.
Some measure of Goldstein's interest in distance and control points back to older interests in appropriation and photography, particularly in the paintings. Yet what is remarkable is that these issues which once defined his significance as a postmodernist now seem quite unimportant: they've simply been done and digested. And this makes one question the supposedly neutral reasons for renewed interest in him: historical revisionism is only one, merely adequate reason.
It is the cocktail of power and emotion which is the most potent lure in Goldstein's work, the mood of fullblooded Wagnerian melodrama turned on and off by a man who claims to feel nothing. The orchestrated emotion retains remarkable force as an attack on the entertainment industry, yet what the Magasin's retrospective brought home most starkly was the way this original intent was bound up with an attack on the political style of the period. And this is what is most perturbing about his return. The political styles of the new decade are only beginning to emerge and one would like to think that they won't bear comparison with the malevolence of the 80s. Let's hope that Goldstein's return is just interesting, and not fortuitous.
Morgan Falconer