The Brooklyn Rail

Jack Goldstein is known for his magnificent large-scale paintings crafted with great precision, showcasing dramatic themes such as lightning storms and eclipses, among other sublime imagery. Anticipating this show, one might expect his legacy to consistently captivate viewers with a display of visual spectacles. However, the current exhibition at Galerie Buchholz takes a refreshingly different approach, bringing us full circle to Goldstein’s origins. This introspective and pensive exhibition primarily features his more intangible works, shedding light on a sensitive and philosophical artist who explored the relationship between duration, objects, spectacle, mortality, and desire. Goldstein’s material oeuvre is extensive, encompassing a broad spectrum of painting, film, music, sculpture, and installation, meticulously controlled through a distilled lens to address themes of objecthood and iconography.

The exhibition at Galerie Buchholz goes beyond alluring imagery, focusing instead on Goldstein’s early sculptures, later text-based pieces, and a comprehensive survey of his vinyl records. Most of the works in this show present a streamlined conceptual and sculptural vision. Signature elements like text and vinyl records transform the viewers’ experience, guiding them back to the materiality and technology of the objects themselves. If the image no longer directs the audience toward a specific relationship or encounter, then sound, and the technological remnants of its immaterial existence, takes center stage. In today’s oversaturated, image-driven society, sound and breath resonate more powerfully than ever.

At the beginning of the show is an eight-and-a-half-foot column of a uniform stack of rectangular wood blocks flanked by a black-and-white block at each end. Upright and precariously balancing upon itself, this contingent yet precise form quietly hints at the emphasis on singularity and repetition that would endure throughout his later vinyl and film works. Nearby is a corner piece consisting of a vulnerable string tautly stretched between one black and one white square of photographic paper, white associated with overexposure and black, underexposure. Placing this piece in the first room subtly signals the exclusion of Goldstein’s meticulously polished images from this show. Instead, we discover photographs by his friend and colleague, James Welling, which offer an intimate glimpse of Goldstein in his studio. These pictures uncover intriguing details about Goldstein’s process and life.

In the next room, one encounters several of Goldstein’s vinyl records. Goldstein completed A Suite of Nine 7-inch Records in 1976, shortly after finishing various film projects. Each vinyl in this suite has a similar design but features a unique sound effect, while their colors reflect the aesthetics Goldstein associated with the corresponding sound. For instance, The Tornado (1976), the first piece created for this collection of sound effects, was initially inspired by Goldstein’s ambition to film a tornado. Finding this endeavor too challenging, he opted instead to use a foley recording of the event, pressing it onto translucent purple vinyl—a color typically seen in color photos of tornado formations. The record remains encased in a simply designed white jacket that prominently presents its title in capital letters.

Although we cannot play the records in the gallery, several soundtracks can be accessed digitally online. Once encountered, the significance of the minimalistic register becomes evident. Freed from visual associations, the vinyl records unmistakably refer back to themselves, connecting sound with physical duration, movement, and change (as one turns the record from side A to B). The recordings differ in length and encourage an intimate engagement from the listener. This intentional openness facilitates an interactive exchange of control and response. While sitting and listening to a recording of A Swim against a Tide (1976) (presented on electric blue vinyl) might seem peculiar, the encounter takes up the objecthood of listening. The notion that one could possess and objectify any of these moments, including The Quivering Earth (1977), is absurd. However, these works, enriched with an aural presence, transform into a relationship with duration, creating an imageless cinematic simulacrum.

As the vinyl works from 1977 progressed, they flourished into temporally complex soundtracks, with the distinction between sound and image becoming more pronounced and reconfigured. Two Fencers (1977), which was accompanied by an announcement of live performances in Geneva and later at the Kitchen in 1978, highlights the interplay between sound and theatricality. I am unsure if Goldstein was aware of Étienne-Jules Marey’s Two Fencers from 1891, but I find the connection to early cinema quite compelling.

Technology was significant to Goldstein’s work, but it is unlikely that he could have predicted the future of digital media archiving in 2024. The digital realm offers incredible flexibility in uploading and transferring information yet relies entirely on an intangible data file structure. This results in limitless possibilities for reuse while simultaneously leading to constant erasure, creating a traceless existence. Our crisis of digital immateriality has prompted a renewed physical appreciation for vinyl, where the need for tangibility supersedes mere nostalgia.

In contrast to the unique vinyl works, Goldstein’s final installation, The Planets, created in 1984, boldly confronts viewers with an installation beside the vitrines. This work showcases six black vinyl records arranged in a circle against a fluorescent yellow wall, alluding to Jannis Kounellis’s untitled installation featuring a black horse before a yellow wall at the Sonnabend Gallery. The Planets’ striking display represents six distinct planets, each accompanied by a unique soundtrack from a science fiction film, the scores of which evoke the styles of composers such as Giorgio Moroder and Robert Fripp. Attentive listening is essential to immerse oneself fully in the experience, as the sounds align closely with the celestial bodies represented. Given the progressive arrangement, I speculated that the experience begins with Mercury and journeys outward to Saturn. Disc five was particularly captivating to me, as its musical ascent conjured a cosmological feeling, leading me to deduce that it was themed around the giant planet Jupiter.

Goldstein had a talent for generating presence from absence. The technological container (the vinyl), which imposes a temporal limitation, draws attention to itself and its reproducibility. The sounds are often simple and occasionally appropriated, and authorship is de-emphasized; thus, the works exist simultaneously here, elsewhere, and nowhere. They phenomenologically suggest that physicality is both tangible and ephemeral. Goldstein’s aphoristic texts engage with the audience similarly. Although they may appear visually understated, they are rich with existentialist ideas that sometimes foreshadow death.

Goldstein had the unique ability to disappear. Born in Montreal but primarily based in California, he was one of the first students from the CalArts cohort to study with John Baldessari, impressing his teacher by burying himself underground, visible only through a flashing red light synchronized to his heartbeat. Despite being featured in the significant Pictures exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in 1977, Goldstein’s work has remained curiously underrated, his presence fading into semi-obscurity after his premature death in 2003. Over the last twenty years, his work has only occasionally resurfaced in New York, appearing at venues such as the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, and group shows at Galerie Buchholz and Dunkunsthalle.

The current exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Helene Winer, the co-founding director of Metro Pictures and former director of Artists Space. Thanks to Galerie Buchholz and Winer’s curatorial approach, Goldstein’s work reappears—simplified yet boundless. While his disappearing acts may be familiar to some, Goldstein’s art embodies the essence of a dormant vinyl record, patiently waiting for its turn to be played, ready to restore the mysterious spectacle and symphony that has always existed in his work. This show’s enigmatic simplicity communicates a hermetic sensibility that encourages deep engagement, leading us toward Goldstein’s ambiguous threshold of simultaneous absence and presence, a space that makes his work so enduring and unforgettable.