Jack Goldstein

The work of Jack Goldstein (b. 1945, Montreal – d. 2003, San Bernadino) includes films, paintings, vinyl recordings and poetry. Keen to explore the representative power of the image and mass media, in the mid-1970s Goldstein worked with industry professionals to produce films employing the most advanced cinematic techniques.

Untitled is typical of his early works on canvas, which often featured warplanes in the sky or nocturnal aerial bombings. Apart from reflecting Goldstein’s fascination with film and photography, these works show the influence of minimal and conceptual art. Goldstein directed studio assistants to airbrush images that he had appropriated from various sources, often rendering images of death and destruction with exquisite beauty. They also draw attention to the augmented nature of visual perception, representing events that only technology can enable the human eye to see.

His 16 mm films, typically consist of short, repetitive and visually striking sequences. The Jump employs an old cinematographic technique known as rotoscopy to transform a film sequence into an animation. This short film retraces a dive made by an Olympic swimmer whose sparkling silhouette dissolves into fragments. Shane features a German shepherd dog who was filmed barking for three minutes. Sitting and looking directly at the camera, the animal appears to play a role, as if reciting a monologue, presumably following instructions from an inaudible voice off-camera. The dog becomes the protagonist for a short cinematic scene, the soundtrack of which also provided the material for a 7-inch record. Goldstein explained: ‘What I tried to do with the records was to break down the sounds in my films and treat the sounds as objects in themselves’. Whilst this technique of breaking down and isolating ‘objects’ to produce an image or ‘picture’ may be familiar to users of the internet, digital technology or social media, forty years ago when Shane was made, it represented an experimental break with tradition.