Review
“The current retrospective in Grenoble’s Magasin shows very clearly how [Jack] Goldstein’s disappearance and fall into oblivion in the nineties was preceded by an extremely productive career. It is not just that his work emphatically anticipated the variety of interdisciplinary productions usual today. His oeuvre was also a crucial focus for some of the most important US art theory approaches of the past 25 years, especially with regard to the transition from modernism to post-modernism. [1] As such, it played an important in the development of concepts like post-conceptualism, appropriation art and simulationism, without being reducible to any of these catchwords. All of these aspects come together in this exhibition, which has been organized by Yves Aupetitallot and Lionel Bovier, together with Fareed Armaly. In the eleven rooms of Magasin used for the exhibition, a complex installation tableau is put together in which media and forms of production merge into one another as if of their own accord, and where the entire resonance of this “controlled loss of control” can echo in the here and now. When Goldstein was rediscovered a good two years ago—first by Fareed Armaly at the Stuttgart Künstlerhaus (1999), then by the Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne—the galleries were forced to make a restricted selection of works.[2] The Magasin exhibition, on the other hand, has put together a more or less chronological overall view of his oeuvre. This makes visible the subtle transitions and gradations within the broad range of his production, in which no medium was so specific as not to be able to be replaced or enhanced by another; in which no picture was so autonomous as not to be able to be “theatricalized” through selective processing; and in which, finally, no subject position was so stable as not to be able to be resolved into or through medial effects.”
(Excerpt)