Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz

Nearby, Goldstein’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975) was projected on its own wall, a repetitive looping appropriation of the few seconds of the classic film credit sequence from MGM films with its lion roaring over and over again under the banner ‘ars gratia artis’ (art for art’s sake).

Kaiser’s installation then cut to a set of conceptually inflected films, such as the strangely affecting Jack (1973), in which the camera moves one step back from a lone figure in the desert every time he yells the name ‘Jack’, until the figure dissolves into the landscape. With the exception of The Jump, the exhibition followed Goldstein’s career chronologically, breaking in the middle with the artist’s mid-career shift to a painterly practice. The Jump was the establishing shot in Philip Kaiser’s necessary and deftly curated retrospective ‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000’ at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), which brought together more than 60 of the artist’s works in sculpture, film, photography, sound recording, writing and painting, for the first time in the US.

The diver tumbles over and over again in an eternally recurring leap into the void. It was Goldstein’s 26-second 16mm film The Jump (1978) that would take on the form of a barely visible avatar for the artist himself: starting with a piece of found footage of a diver appropriated from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia, he employed the painstaking animation technique of rotoscoping (which he paid technicians to perform) to black out the background of the film clip while illuminating the body with points of prismatic light. It was in this medium that the artist would initiate his disappearing act by taking himself out of the production loop and working with film crews. It was the result of this convergence of talent and anxiety (the sine qua non of any artistic success story) that made Goldstein something of a poster boy for artists whose promising careers went off the rails.Įmerging from CalArts in the early 1970s, Goldstein extended his then post-Minimalist-inspired sculpture into the realm of film. Hertz gives a collaged portrait of an artist who was at once talented, paranoid, ambitious, intellectually sophisticated and fatally flawed. As recounted in Richard Hertz’s 2003 book Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, the artist had a tempestuous relationship to his work, to the art world and to his own life. Jack Goldstein always seemed to be running away from himself.

Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz