»Jack«, a film made in 1973, could stand emblematically for Jack Goldstein\'s whole artistic career. It already shows signs of the distancing steps that were to characterize Goldstein\'s life as an artist from then on. The 16mm film at first shows a close-up of the face of a man who loudly calls out the name »Jack«. As if responding to an order, the camera moves back a few meters, stops, until the man again calls out his stereotyped »Jack«, upon which it starts moving backwards again. In this way, the area surrounding the lonely caller (Goldstein himself, incidentally) gradually becomes visible - the barren, monotone landscape of the Mojave Desert in California. At every call uttered by the seemingly ever more isolated and lost figure, the camera moves further away, each time revealing more of the void expanse of the surroundings. The vanishing subject\'s call, on the other hand, becomes softer and softer, until in the end only the mute mechanism of the rhythmic withdrawal is recorded on the film. Finally, the figure merges completely with the background, and what is left is an emptied picture that also no longer contains any trace of camera movement.

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, it would be possible to speculate about the splitting into a subject of the call (»Jack«) and a subject of the calling (the vanishing figure). But even more cogently, the film shows an artist in the process of distancing himself, beginning to withdraw from his pictures until he is no longer recognizable. The artist-subject is still behind the picture (or the picture construction) as its producer, so to speak, but the automatized process of creating the picture already points to a deeply desubjectivized form of picture making. This procedure is self-reflective in the way it records the gradual process of disappearance Goldstein undertook, across all media, during his productive period from 1970-1990, not least in an autobiographical sense. This was a practice that led him, like practically no other artist of his generation, from sculpture, performance, photography, film (not video), recordings, sound installations, to painting and, finally, to writing. »What a long strange trip it\'s been!«, one could say in sixties style about Goldstein\'s ceaseless shifts in artistic status.

The current retrospective in Grenoble\'s Magasin shows very clearly how Goldstein\'s disappearance and fall into oblivion in the nineties was preceded by an extremely productive career. It is not just that his work emphatically anticipated the variety of interdisciplinary productions usual today. His oeuvre was also a crucial focus for some of the most important US art theory approaches of the past 25 years, especially with regard to the transition from modernism to post-modernism.¹ As such, it played an important in the development of concepts like post-conceptualism, appropriation art and simulationism, without being reducible to any of these catchwords. All of these aspects come together in this exhibition, which has been organized by Yves Aupetitallot and Lionel Bovier, together with Fareed Armaly. In the eleven rooms of Magasin used for the exhibition, a complex installation tableau is put together in which media and forms of production merge into one another as if of their own accord, and where the entire resonance of this »controlled loss of control« can echo in the here and now. When Goldstein was rediscovered a good two years ago - first by Fareed Armaly at the Stuttgart Künstlerhaus (1999), then by the Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne - the galleries were forced to make a restricted selection of works.² The Magasin exhibition, on the other hand, has put together a more or less chronological overall view of his oeuvre. This makes visible the subtle transitions and gradations within the broad range of his production, in which no medium was so specific as not to be able to be replaced or enhanced by another; in which no picture was so autonomous as not to be able to be »theatricalized« through selective processing; and in which, finally, no subject position was so stable as not to be able to be resolved into or through medial effects.

This was, for example, the way Goldstein\'s transition from performance to film took place, when he remarked that he »didn\'t like working much with an audience ... and that filmmaking was a means of creating distance and removing the audience«.³ Previous to this first significant step of mediatization, he had been working, at the end of the sixties, on post-minimalist sculptures, five of which were reconstructed for the Magasin exhibition. These are fragile object ensembles made from comparatively cheap materials like wood, cardboard and string, whose poor state of balance was to anticipate a central element in his later works: the instability of the visual world of objects, which can only be met by intensified delusions of control. This contrary dynamic is an element in many of Goldsteins early films (1971-73), which are still very performance-oriented. Although there is no visual documentation extant of his »real« performances from this time, the films made at the same time can be read as a first medial shift from simple physical acts to cinematic mise-en-scène: »A Glass of Milk« (1971), for instance, in which a fist keeps pounding on the table until the glass of milk standing upon it falls over, pouring an abstract, white dripping-painting over the table\'s surface. This action painting on the basis of a remote cause-and-effect principle plays a long time with the idea of the controlled effect (the way the milk gradually splashes out of the glass) until finally entropic loss of control occurs (when the glass falls over and empties itself).

Another important distancing step occurred in Goldstein\'s work when he left the isolated setting of the studio or filmed one-man performances and became a »Hollywood producer«. His appropriation of the working procedures of the film industry, which occurred around 1974, was based, as he later once said, on the relatively easy availability of the means of production provided in Hollywood.⁴ In addition to this, there was a superfluity of pop-cultural or cinematic signs that could barely be dealt with subjectively. The step from performance film d\'auteur to pseudo studio film was, however, also founded on the fact that team production methods and increasing professionalism led to the artist\'s withdrawing behind the work, while giving him correspondingly new possibilities of control. The prime example of this control of the image, which works with both reductive and serial methods, is the film »Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer« (1975), which shows a two-minute loop of the logo of the MGM lion in front of a red background. At the Magasin exhibition, this film is presented as an endless loop, and placed like an emblem at the start of the whole exhibition. In the exhibition context, it forms an unending introduction to a variety of production in which medium after medium, image repertoire after image repertoire, is opened up, without a definite narration ever being reached. Although the mechanically roaring MGM lion at first appears to symbolize a form of production that can tame anything, as the film goes on the industry logo increasingly loses its functionality and contextual significance. The endless loop begins to feed more and more from itself or from the psychological effects it provokes.⁵ Expectation (that the film will start), desire (that the lion will stop its roaring), and anticipation (that the whole thing will end at some stage) are all equally disappointed.

The film »Shane« (1975) also consists of one single fixed shot showing a single object, in this case a sheepdog that barks on command. Here again, a functional part of the film industry - the specially trained animal that is therefore controllable at will - becomes the focus of the cinematic presentation itself; here again, production details like camera angle, lighting, make-up and post-production procedures take over the role of any concrete narrative content. The act of animal training shown reflects a small part of the visual exercise of power that takes place behind the scenes in Hollywood on a daily basis. »Shane« isolates one single cinematic motif that frontally »interpellates« the audience. The image is to be convicted of its performativity in as contextless a manner as possible.

But »Shane« reveals yet another transitional moment in Goldstein\'s work, in which one medium (such as film) can be transferred into another (such as a record) without any problem. One of his first record productions, »A German Shepherd« (1976), for instance, is a recording of a dog barking, like the ones stored in film industry archives. The single, pressed on blood-red vinyl with a typographically designed cover, is part of Goldstein\'s first do-it-yourself series of records, which combines the situationist method of détournement with the punk attitude of doing it yourself. For this reason, Goldstein primarily adapts Hollywood\'s acoustic databases (from barking dogs and fighting cats to burning forests and rumbling earthquakes) for his records. Again, this is a dissident dig at the entertainment industry, whose archives are full of tiny, manipulative imagic and acoustic building blocks. Goldstein\'s »reflection of culture« consists in presenting such functional building blocks as independent, pseudo-original artefacts. The (pop-cultural) archive is presented as a technological memory that cannot subjectively be caught up with any more. Again, the role of the producer thus undergoes another shift, this time towards being an authority that picks and chooses, ironically putting its name under standardized samples from the industry: a decentralization that cannot be fully described even by the idea of the »artist as entrepreneur«.⁶ »Primarily, the industry provides me with resources, effects, control ... If I had all Hollywood\'s resources at my disposal, I would make disaster movies: storms, uprooted trees, tidal waves etc.«⁷ From then on, Goldstein\'s record productions are dominated by such disasters, like »The Six Minute Drown« (1977), which - in the absence of anyone »really« drowning - consists of a mixture of bubbling water and a gurgling man\'s voice; or »The Quivering Earth« (1977), where the grinding, oceanic sound of an earthquake can be heard. In Goldstein\'s intermedial transfer system, it is no big step to go (back) to performance: the record »Two Fencers« (1977), for example, with music from appropriate cloak-and-dagger films, leads directly to the performance of the same name (also 1977). In this, two professional fencers carry out their fight, after which the same accompanying music is played once more on a darkened stage, evoking the performance in remembered images. Douglas Crimp saw in this performance the »presentation of an event with such detachment that it can be interpreted as representation«.⁸ Whether professional actors are used, or - as in the films - objects are torn from their symbolic contexts, the same temporalized act of an event construction always takes the place of »mere« referential reproduction. In this theatricalization, the new view of making pictures was brought to bear in which, a good 25 years ago, theoreticians like Crimp or Craig Owens saw a new paradigm: a making of pictures in which temporality, historicity, and constructedness are unalienably inscribed. There has been almost no one else that has directed the consequence of this so unsentimentally against their own subject status as Goldstein.

»A sort of drawing that is simultaneously an erasion«⁹: this is how Crimp described the procedure used by Goldstein in one of his last film productions, »The Jump« (1978). Footage of high divers processed using the rotoscopy technique is looped so that the sparkling silhouettes of three divers emerge from a black void, perform their glittering turns, and then disappear into the dark depths of the water. Whereas Crimp saw above all a contradictory structure of anticipation and disappointment in this »drawing and erasion«, in an interview, Goldstein gave a yet more existential explanation. He recalled a (fictive) story about a man who did a triple turn while jumping to his death from a ten-story high-rise building - a seemingly absurd physical discipline right up to the moment of death.¹⁰ Elsewhere, he mentions as a key work one of his early performances, which also combines the idea of the destruction of the subject with the fragile presentation of his (last) traces. Buried in a hollow in the earth, Goldstein was connected up to a pulse-measuring device that sent his heartbeat to a lighthouse, causing it to flash rhythmically.¹¹ The abstract high divers in »The Jump« pulsate in a very similar way before disappearing from the picture. What remains is the instable traces of bodies that were present but are no longer: representation based on non-existence.

Goldstein\'s own gradual disappearance as an artist-producer went still further, however. In the eighties, he turned his attention to (airbrush) painting, and commissioned works based on spectacular subjects, such as wartime and disaster scenarios he had »stolen« from various publications. Burning cities, planes, parachuters, and, repeatedly, the sky lit up by spot lights, explosions or flashes of lightning dominate these flat, simulationist pictures. Although this sometimes brought him close to a fascist esthetic,¹² these paintings are only a true reflection of a visual paradigm beyond »personality and presence«¹³ that is common today. In this (penultimate) change of direction and extension of his work, it is mechanisms of fascination and the diffuse power of techno-medial images that are emotionlessly adapted.¹⁴ Even though in these pictures - as in the later, completely abstract ones -the position of a reflexively acting subject is completely deleted, Goldstein\'s »Writing Project«, which he has been working on since the nineties, goes one (last) decisive step further. Fragments of quotes compiled on a thousand pages unfold the testament of a process of disappearance with a breadth almost appropriate to world literature. The fragmented archive entries do not allow any more individual emotions to arise. »The buried individual in individualism«, is one, or in another place: »EACH ONE OF US SPEAKS BUT A SINGLE SENTENCE, WHILE ONLY MY DEATH CAN BRING TO A CLOSE«. Sentence fragments like these could have been called out by the subject vanishing at the horizon in »Jack«. What is left are burst chains of signs that revolve around a lost self.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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