JACK GOLDSTEIN

The selection of Jack Goldstein’s film and record productions focuses on the role of cinema in his art practice, as a device to link desire and technology, the individual and the sublime, media and Hollywood culture. At the same time, it reflects on another characteristic of his art—the transformation from “artist as producer” to “Hollywood Producer” as part of the character of transformations underway between the seventies and eighties.

The exhibition presents the 1975 film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a 16-mm film loop based on Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s famous company trademark of the roaring lion. The film represents a short performance sequence that signifies the power of MGM as the penultimate studio—in fact, as the very model for the Golden Era of Hollywood studios, which even already in 1975 belonged to a distant “then” of the past. “Going to the movies” represents a staged sequence of ordered entrances into the apparatus of cinema. Conventionally, after the public’s entrance into the architecture of the cinema space, and followed by the darkened interior and projection, the studio trademark always introduces the first visual access into the celluloid space, followed by subsequent entrances to credits, titles, and space of the filmic narrative. In Goldstein’s film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the lion’s roar gives an early example of an appropriated sequence: it floats isolated within a brightly red-colored field, thus commodified by the artist in a subtle but significant gesture, an endlessly repeating technological sample, its roar audible in a symbiotic relationship with the mechanical noises of its origins, the nearby 16mm projector.

Once this iconography was resituated within the institution of art, it turned into an entrance to itself. Instead of entering into the sublime of a sequel, the past, or the powerful spectacle of Hollywood cinema, it renders a contemporary signification of the moment, which is also more than the sum of its collectible parts. It represents a recollection of Hollywood cinema and the twentieth-century mass media as the producer of a very specific space/time continuum. The work offers an access to enquiry into the new cultural character of an era still unfolding and uncharted, and links to issues of media and power as characterized by the notion of the industry spectacle, that was already underway in 1975. Goldstein also specifically used music and pre-fabricated, “canned” sounds from Hollywood film sound archives that condense into only a few minutes, themes of technology and nature with more than a hint of the sublime. This gesture transposes the character of the earlier performance-based work onto the medium becoming “the performer.” In 1976, parallel to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Goldstein produced his first audio work, a suite of nine 7-inch colored vinyl records: (The Burning Forest, The Dying Wind, A Faster Run, Three Felled Trees, A German Shepherd, The Lost Ocean Liner, A Swim Against the Tide, The Tornado, Two Wrestling Cats.)

His last audio work is the 6-part series Planets from 1984. The title is reminiscent of certain orchestral works with an earthly gaze onto the sublime nature implied by the cosmos. For this audio work, Goldstein recombines and newly arranges stock atmosphere soundtracks prepared for science fiction films. Composed by then-current, state of the art-synthesizers, already in 1984 these atmospheres suggested a double-edged “weltanschauung”: a new media future as history-less spatiality, yet hinting at a prepackaged sense of nostalgia and recollection. From today’s perspective, Planets offers a summarizing perspective of Goldstein’s vinyl audio works, where synthetic atmospheres are the main characters. It is a sign and pop cultural artifact, an audio composition originally intended as a component for another media (film), a condensation as expression of a communication model. The vinyl artifact of his audio works is also divided along consumer and institutional modes: thus as art work it implies presentations in art spaces as well as purchase and performance in private consumer spheres.

With the vinyl albums of Planets, the contemporary state of consumer audio at that time was sequenced to reflect on the stacking of records on the turntable “apparatus.” The albums’ overall composition contains an internal order. In terms of their role as art objects in installations, the records were to be presented together, composed in a circle on a painted (yellow or red) wall, appearing like a 2-D diagram: spheres held within one circular orbit around some imperceptable organizing force, a psyche as medium of a cosmic constellation. Craig Owens writes: “When he wanted to speak of the politicization of the artist, Walter Benjamin wrote a text titled The Artist as Producer, in which he argues that, by focusing not on the product but on his mode of production, the artist can align himself with the proletariat in the class struggle. Goldstein’s relationship to his work, however, is that of a Hollywood producer, the impresario who coordinates a variety of activities belonging to different modes of cultural production, but who does not himself create any of them. (…) In the ’70s, Goldstein produced a series of short single-image films as well as a set of sound-effects records. None of these works was made by the artist himself, but by a team of professional technicians working in conditions identical to, or closely resembling, those in which commercial films and records are produced.

Goldstein is interested less in the technologies of filmmaking and sound reproduction per se—this is what is meant when it is claimed he is an artist who works with film and sound and not a film or record maker—and more in the effects which these technologies can produce.”

In linking the seventies to the eighties, Goldstein’s productions played a crucial role in the American art scene. As precursor of an art practice which critics then termed “post-studio” art, his artistic development clearly shows the shift from the role of artist to the role of “artist as producer.” Accordingly, Goldstein’s body of work is divided into different genres—performance, film, audio/records, and paintings—, thus constituting a cosmology of various modes of production charged by a continuous media interplay. While fabricated by contracted industry and media professionals, Goldstein’s productions accentuate the artist’s position as one situated directly within a new kind of public space offered by (new) media spectacle. The transformation from an ideology putting forth romantic individual notions of “artist” to the role of active “producer” reflects his interest in the mechanism, apparatus and effects of the Hollywood Spectacle Industry of the late seventies, cast in the light of various media technologies at work. In this respect, his productions do not display a simple fascination with Hollywood, but register and interrupt the signals and signs of what at the time was a newly forming global industry. They are invested in constructing a subject in the Hollywood imaginary of power relations and commercial interests, and emerged at a time when Hollywood’s global visual and economic hegemony was just beginning.

Goldstein always emphasized the object quality of his productions. His records, pressed in colored vinyl, are exhibited as framed objects behind glass. The MGM lion also turns into object/commodity. It is heightened in color, tinted, almost as if wearing some colored camouflage: thus the image becomes an isolated icon severed from the realm of the industry. As a solitary projection it is still charged with the self-conscious gesture of the Hollywood Industry announcing itself, but transformed and interrupted by an artist’s singular intervention: we are watching a film as well as “the industry.” The lion means simply, The Movies. The MGM icon is imbued and saturated with innumerable cinematic and screen memories. It signifies the intrinsic experience of cinema and at the same time suggests an ongoing process of separation between the sign and what is signified, in an attempt to render this icon so charged with meaning insignificant again, to return it to a state of “pure image.” The promise of libidinal fulfillment and release of a spectator’s desires remains caught in a loop that announces itself alone as the “Coming Attraction.” And with each return to the film’s beginning the seduction is completed as a narrative already arrested at its very origin. Nothing remains but an image. (CR)

Parts of this text are based on an interview conducted by Lionel Bovier with Fareed Armaly in spring of 2002, which was first published in the exhibition catalogue Jack Goldstein, Le Magasin Grenoble, 2002.