Jack Goldstein

Jack Goldstein (born in Montreal in 1945, lives in Los Angeles) has dedicated himself to such different media as sculpture, performance, film, sound pieces, photography and painting since he studied art in Los Angeles in the late sixties. His 16mm films play a central part within the whole of his work. After an initial concentration on the enacting of actions in performance-like way Goldstein's films from the mid- and late seventies deal with the imagery of the classic Hollywood movie and its techniques. Images borrowed from their context turn into components of a film or picture reality that gives information on its inherent rules. By simply sequencing a section of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer preliminary, for example, the roaring lion on its red background seems to be hissing like a cat, thus ridiculing MGM's hegemonic claim. Dramatic changes of light in The Knife evokes a sensation of suspense. In his films Shane and White Dove, Goldstein works with trained animals, which almost imperceptibly evade his attempt to control them within a precisely planned plot. In Bone China, Goldstein engaged a professional cartoon animator.

"My work has always been very much involved with sculpture in the sense that it's about defining something in space and time, very much about our relationship to it, our distance to that thing. I still feel that I have the same concerns, except that I've moved into subject matter. I'm interested in that Gap between minimalism and pop art: the objectness and autonomy of minimalism and the subject matter from our culture that's in pop art. But there is also a link to conceptual art. It's more about the content than the form' that its the same whether it's performance, films,records, etc. and that a lot of the experience take place in your head. Real time and real space don't matter."

On the occasion of the exhibition, we will show a selection of ten short 16mm films from the period between 1974 and 1978. The program features:

• The Portrait of Pere Tanguy, 1974 (16mm, colour, 4 mins)
• White Dove, 1975 ( 16mm, colour, 20 secs)
• The Knife, 1975 ( 16mm colour, 4 min)
• Shane, 1975 ( 16mm, colour, 2 mins)
• A Ballet Shoe, 1975 (16mm, colour, 19 secs)
• The Chair, 1975 (16mm, colour, 5 mins)
• Some Butterflies, 1975 (16mm, colour, 30 secs)
• MGM, 1975 (16mm, colour, 2 mins)
• Bone China, 1976 (16mm, colour, 2 mins 30 secs)
• The Jump, 1978 (16mm, colour, 13 secs)

The red wall with the rectangular white space for film projections corresponds to the installations Goldstein originally used when showing his films.

The films will be shown alongside a painting from 1983 which is painted from found images mostly transferred to the canvas by means of airbrush paint depicting natural phenomena.