Jack Goldstein (1945 – 2003) was born in Canada and lived in the United States. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally including major exhibitions: Stedelijk, 2017; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016; Walker Art Center, 2016; The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015; Gwangju Biennale, 2014; La Biennale di Venezia, 2011; Whitney Biennial, 1985; documenta 8, 1985 and documenta 7, 1982. Major solo exhibitions include: The Jewish Museum, New York, 2013; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 2012; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2009; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002; Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2002; Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, 1999; The Power Plant, Toronto, 1991; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1988; Städtische Galerie Erlangen, 1985 and The Kitchen, New York, 1977, 1978 and 1980.
Several monographs have been published including Jack Goldstein x 10,000, Orange County Museum of Art, 2012; Jack Goldstein, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2009; Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, Minneola Press, 2003; Jack Goldstein, Magasin, 2002; Feuer/Körper/Licht, Städtische Galerie Erlangen, 1985.
A poignant biography of the life and work of conceptual artist Jack Goldstein by Alexander Dumbadze.
A defining figure of the 1970s–80s New York art world, Jack Goldstein’s wide-ranging body of work, which included immaculate color films and radiant paintings of appropriated images composed by assistants, is both seductive and interpretively elusive. Goldstein’s legacy has been complicated by the mythology of his later years. Consumed by drug addiction, he dropped out of the art world in the 1990s, lived alone in an East Los Angeles trailer park, and resurfaced in a wave of critical fanfare at the turn of the millennium, before taking his own life in 2003.
Employing his signature blend of biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research, Alexander Dumbadze examines Goldstein’s life and career, homing in on the artist’s refusal to distinguish between mental and actual images. Progressing chronologically through key moments in Goldstein’s artistic and intellectual formation, the book offers a deeply complex portrait of this significant artist, along with a nuanced meditation on the nature of images, the meaning of artistic subjectivity, and the consequences of holding unwavering faith in art.
Published by University of Chicago Press
ISBN 9780226398655
2026
304 pages
12 halftones
6 x 9 inches
This important retrospective volume highlights Jack Goldstein's far-reaching influence. During the late 1970s, Jack Goldstein helped initiate an avant-garde art movement informally known as the "Pictures Generation." Along with fellow artists such as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Troy Brauntuch, Goldstein merged the concerns of Conceptual art with media issues raised by Pop art and helped initiate a paradigm shift in art that focused on the critical examination of images. Goldstein's films of the mid-1970s, among his most recognized achievements, appropriated and restaged imagery that referenced its media sources. This companion volume to a new retrospective of Goldstein's work, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, includes stills from these films as well as reproductions of sculptures, records, installations, paintings, and text-based works to show the breadth of his artistic production.
Publisher: OCMA / Prestel
ISBN: 978-3791351933
Exhibiting three of Jack Goldstein's lesser-known works—his Burning Window installation, 1977/2015, and two sets of text-based Aphorisms (both dated 1982) painted on the gallery wall—this show distilled a tension within Goldstein's practice between mundane observation and metaphysical introspection. Burning Window consists of a single window frame containing four panes of textured Plexiglas placed in the center of a gallery wall that has been painted bloodred. Behind this window, flickering red lights give the appearance of fire. But this faux flame produces no heat. Instead, Burning Window effects an unsettling experience with its uneasy marriage of implied trauma and camp. No spectator of this installation would reasonably assume that Burning Window was intended to simulate an actual fire. Its reality is far more ambiguous. Goldstein commented in the compilation Portfolio Performance, 2001, that "the window functions as a 'safe' but fragile barrier in front of which the spectator is witness to the world outside as a measureless inferno." Burning Window evokes film but is not quite "cinematic"; suggestive of a narrative, in actuality it more acutely dramatizes the staged quality of its moving images. Per Goldstein, the spectacle "calls into question the 'truth' of visual experience."
Jack Goldstein, Ballet Shoe, 1974-5
SCREENING AND LIVE EVENT: Downtown New York Film: The 1970's and 1980's launches today with Amos Poe's "Unmade Beds" and short films by Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, and Ericka Beckman at 3PM. With Amos Poe in person.
Tickets are $12 for adults, $9 for senior citizens, and students and $6 for children.
Museum of the Moving Image is located at 36-01 35th Ave. in Astoria.
via movingimage.us