WHAT: “Jack Goldstein x 10,000”
WHEN: June 24 – September 9, Wednesday – Sunday 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Thursday 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
WHERE: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, California
WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: The name Jack Goldstein may not be familiar to everyone, since his career was cut short when he died at the age of 57 in 2003. Nevertheless, Goldstein's contributions to the New York art scene of the '70s and '80s — and generations of artists who appropriate imagery from film and media — are vast. This month, the Orange County Museum of Art has mounted a posthumous retrospective of his work, the first survey of Goldstein's work in the United States, including 21 film works alongside paintings, sound recordings, and installations.
The artists he encountered in New York have become known collectively as the “Pictures Generation,” a name that grew out of a seminal 1977 Artists Space exhibition, curated by Douglas Crimp, which included Goldstein. His legacy can be seen in the work of contemporaries Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Philip Smith, and James Welling, among others, and is well documented in the now-classic book he edited with Richard Hertz, “Jack Goldstein and the Cal Arts Mafia.” Among his own best-known early pieces is a 1975 work that incorporates a clip of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion roaring on a neverending loop, turning this iconic moment into a hollow gesture, emptied of meaning.
To see artwork from the exhibition click the slide show.