Jack Goldstein
1945-2003
In a 1972 film by jack Goldstein, a blurred image slowly comes into focus, ultimately sharpening to reveal a man staring straight into the camera's lens. Although not conceived as such, the piece serves as an apt metaphor for the current state of Goldstein's oeuvre, which has lately emerged from the fog of the not so distant past. A seminal figure of the New York art scene in the 1970s and early '80s, Goldstein famously faded from prominence over the course of the years that followed, eventually moving to California in 1991 and ceasing to show new work. Recently, several exhibitions have brought the artist back into view: A pair of shows at the Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and a retrospective at Magasin in Grenoble gave European museumgoers a chance to reappraise Goldstein's output, while last year's rehanging of Douglas Crimp's 1977 "Pictures" exhibition at Artists Space whetted appetites in the United States (see Artforum, October 2001). Here at the Whitney, "Jack Goldstein: Films and Performance," organized by film-and-video curator Chrissie Iles, gave viewers a fuller picture of the artist's early work--restaging a performance and screening twenty-two films, the majority of which…
Films