Sayre Gomez Revisits Jack Goldstein

Sayre Gomez’s X-Scapes 2019 show at François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles gallery is one of the exhibitions I remember from that year before the pandemic broke my viewing habit. This was an exhibition that made the everyday, worn banality of the Los Angeles streetscape into a near-apocalyptic melodrama, a whirlwind of signs blown against a chain link fence and left to fade into obscurity. Grand paintings of lurid sunsets and wrecked cars were confronted by replicas of the faded yellow bollards used to delimit parking areas, the almost invisible elements of street design given pride of place in the center of the gallery. Replicas of storefronts and locked doors seemed real enough to offer access to secret backrooms.

Everything in the show was layered, every surface an accumulation of signs and signifiers. Many of the paintings featured dramatically lit strip mall signboards, paired with fences looming in darkness. The twilight skies foretold catastrophe, from fire or chemical spill. There were stickers everywhere, worn and peeled. The longer you looked, the clearer it became that these were constructed images, built in Photoshop before being airbrushed onto canvas. They operated as a kind of seamless collage, a piling up of fragments into a rhetorical whole that told a story about Los Angeles.

But one detail nagged, in one painting the chemical sky was replaced with the spectacular display of cloud to ground lightning, bringing to my mind the lightning field paintings Jack Goldstein made around 1983. Was this some kind of quote or homage? And what could that mean? Was the focus on Los Angeles something of a red herring?

Five years later, Gomez invited me to breakfast to talk about Goldstein, and how he had been obsessed by the older artist’s work since his student days. We had an interesting conversation, his reading of the critical record against my memory of a time and place. Not that these were necessarily in conflict, only that there is a different quality to the understanding of an abstraction and a lived experience. Jack Goldstein was someone I knew, not the closest of friends, but an ally, a source of inspiration and also of exasperation. But for Gomez he was a revered predecessor, an older artist whose work opened up possibilities. Here was the seed for the current exhibition, Jack Goldstein | Sayre Gomez at The Ranch in Montauk, New York.

Later that day, reflecting on our conversation, I found myself thinking back to Harold Bloom’s book of literary theory from the early 1970s, The Anxiety of Influence. Although largely forgotten now, this was an important contribution to the arguments over originality and appropriation that took hold in that decade. His main claim was that ambitious artists both confront and misinterpret the work of their predecessors in an act of creative correction, that the "main traditions since the Renaissance (consist of) a history of anxiety and self-serving caricature of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry could not exist." In Bloom’s view, the young artist uses a creative misreading of the earlier art to create space for their own work to be seen, for it become original. One path to this development is for the younger artist to elaborate on the precursor’s ideas and methodology, but to construct the parts differently, with the suggestion that the earlier artist did not take things far enough. In Bloom’s thought paradigm, the earlier work remains incomplete, a fragment of some intended whole and the newer work seeks to repair that lack.

This brought me back to the drama of the lightning, and the incomplete legacy of Jack Goldstein.

In his essay accompanying the Pictures show at Artists Space, New York in 1977, Douglas Crimp identified the use of recognizable images as the salient feature of what he was identifying as the latest trend in radical art making. But he also pointed to the ease with which this new generation of artists moved between mediums, incorporating newer technologies like photography and film alongside, and in some cases replacing, the traditional forms of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Goldstein was central to this argument, providing in his film and sound work a through line between the older narratives of modernist progress and whatever this new "pictures" paradigm might be.

This older narrative was basically that Cubist collage had wrought a tear in the fabric of representation, that artworks no longer offered some kind of window onto the world, but were objects in the world. As a result, the arts of illusion were mostly sidelined to various forms of popular entertainment, movies above all. Part of the excitement around Pop Art in the 1960s was that it seemed to herald a legitimate return to the thrills of representational art, that Warhol’s stacks of Brillo boxes almost looked like the real thing. The Pictures artists took this appropriation of popular culture further––Richard Prince rephotographed and re-edited real Marlboro ads––collapsing the space between the real and the represented to create an airless realm for interpretation.

Goldstein’s films are short, usually less than half a minute, but played on a loop. This means that a simple action, the MGM lion roaring, a dog barking, or colored light passing over a knife, is presented as an endless repetition, a story without end. Crimp claimed this creates a sense of dread in the viewer, but I am not so sure. To me, what gets foregrounded is a detail of movie-making technique; a trained dog barks, different light gels are deployed, a simple animation makes a drawing move. Unlike Stan Brakhage, who explored the physical attributes of film, or Jack Smith, who created his preferred universe out of makeshift costumes and lots of glitter, Goldstein looked at film as an archive of effects. These effects had been developed as part of the repertoire of tricks needed to create the illusions that propel movie narratives convincingly. But Goldstein was not interested in storytelling; he appropriated these methods and archives to show how representation was actually constructed, hiring skilled technicians to carry out his direction. He shifted the work of the artist from individual discovery through direct engagement with materials to a cooler, more distanced process dependent on the collective skills of a team to analyze a process.

A good example of this is The Jump from 1978. Goldstein took stock footage of three athletes performing high-dives, with pirouettes and somersaults, and hired some animators to use the rotoscoping technique to render the figures into shimmering abstractions disappearing into a dark void. Rotoscoping was an old technique in Hollywood, dating back to the 1930s, but it had a sudden notoriety in 1977 amongst film fans because George Lucas had used it to create the light saber effects in Star Wars. To those in the know, from movie buffs to art school geeks, rotoscoping was cool. In Goldstein’s film, the figures glow red, then fragment into shards of colored light, before disappearing into darkness. The final work, also shown as a loop, assaults the senses with its bravura display, bright color flashing and sparkling, then abruptly fading to black, again and again. The repetition draws attention to the technique in the way that special effects do, overwhelming the eye even as they are supposed to provide a seamless illusion of mysterious spectacle.

The importance of this move on Goldstein’s part lies in the reinscription of the entire machinery of illusionist movie making, and illusionism in general, back into the realm of serious visual art. In these films, we were looking at lighting design, makeup, scenography, animation and special effects, everything that brings razzmatazz to movies, and everything that had been banished from the serious realms of modernism for over a century. Critics with an eye towards history had championed artists who looked to process and material to seek limits and edges. Several writers, including Crimp, followed this argument and declared that painting could have no further relevance, that it had run its course as a cultural marker. I wrote an essay for Artforum in 1981, taking issue with this idea, and one of the artists I featured in my argument was Jack Goldstein, who had unexpectedly, and radically, turned from the conceptually progressive production of film and performance to a kind of produced painting.

In many ways this was simply an extension of what Goldstein had been doing with film. To make  this new body of work, he hired a crew of skilled backdrop painters able to use an airbrush  technique to blow up a photographic image to the scale of a medium-large painting. The  images he chose were in a sense from the back catalogue, images culled from old copies of  LIFE magazine found at a flea market, or checked out from the New York Public Library’s  Picture Collection. For his first series of paintings, he used a used a group of black and white  nighttime cityscapes illuminated by streaks of light. There was something oddly out of time  about these pictures, the silhouettes of buildings seemed archaic, certainly not contemporary,  but the streaks of light throwing them into relief had all the modernity of modern warfare. It  turns out that the images record a nighttime bombing raid during World War II. Goldstein had  appropriated the work of the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White from a series she shot in  Moscow in 1941, while the city was being bombed by the German Luftwaffe. That is a lot of  provocation: painting as backdrop, an aestheticization of warfare, especially Nazi warfare, a  random appreciation of media spectacle. And, a male artist plundering the work of a woman,  the same year that Sherrie Levine was pointedly taking possession of Walker Evans’ Depression era documentary photographs as a feminist critique of the male view of the world  so often embodied in photography.

During a recent studio visit, Gomez and I talked about technique, and how for an artist the meaning of a work often lies in the making. I come from a moment that devalued the representational skills learned at art school, that instead valued the three-chord minimalism of punk. The point was to show the cracks in the façade of appearances. Gomez comes at the problem differently; he wants to create such an impeccable illusion that his viewers experience a kind of vertigo. To do this he deploys the latest technology and a workshop full of highly skilled artisans to conjure up as seamless an image as possible. The image itself is painstakingly built up in Photoshop, with original photographs edited, cropped, filtered, and variously adjusted to a maximum level of "rightness." The larger canvases are prepared with a rigid backing to allow the surface to be sanded to an extreme level of smoothness, which makes it possible for the painters to achieve an extra-fine pictorial finish. And then the airbrush specialists transform the digital file into a spectacularly precise image of the world, an illusion so perfect that it immediately draws attention to its artifice.

As we talk, Gomez recounts the history of the airbrush technique, how it started as a means for retouching photographic prints, a way to improve on the reality of the image captured on film, erasing blemishes and unsightly details, removing unwanted elements. It was originally an instrument for the commercial arts, advertising and book design, and also for propaganda, an insidious tool for changing the historical record. And in time the technique expanded to movie sets, allowing for the speedy creation of illusionistic backdrops. In Gomez’s telling, these attributes are the foundation of Photoshop, and as it has developed the software has come to absorb the entire apparatus of image management into one digital package.

Photoshop is the engine of Gomez’s work. There is perhaps nothing remarkable in that, since nearly all artists now use it. The software provides an efficient way to work up an image, alter colors, change details, adjust scale. It offers the possibility of creating endless variations on a theme. As Gomez says, "In the computer everything is permeable, everything is possible. The file is always loose––printing something out makes the decision." And this is where Gomez elaborates on his precursor’s methodology, while hewing close to its root. Today's digital tools vastly expand the possibilities, not just for sourcing imagery, but also editing it. But in the end, it is the editorial decision that counts.

In my 1981 essay, I talked about faith, and I think I was trying to get at the slippery space of truth in art making. I wrote about both photography and painting, and the space between them. The artists I was considering worked in the slippage between these mediums, recontextualizing found images in hopes of revealing something of the ways in which meanings are constructed. For this to work, the original pictures had to be familiar, either straight up recognizable as in the case of Levine’s appropriations of Evans, or something more suggestive, like Cindy Sherman’s restaging of movie stills or Goldstein’s paintings. The critic Craig Owens would identify this process as an "allegorical impulse."

Owens' long, two-part essay of that name in the journal October sought to reclaim allegory from the disdain of modernism, seeing it as the framework of the post-modernist enterprise. He described it as a method of recapture and reinterpretation, a way of giving new meaning to rediscovered evidence. Interestingly, this sounds like a reworking of Bloom’s argument about how a younger generation supersedes a previous one by remaking in new terms. For Owens, there were two elements at play in this, a conviction that the rediscovered past seems familiar, but is unknowable, and a desire to recover its significance for a contemporary audience. In Western art the high point of allegorical work was the Baroque period of the 17th century, a time when artists and their patrons shared an encyclopedic knowledge of Classical and Christian iconography. A pertinent example can be found in Claude Lorrain’s large landscape, Apollo and the Muses from 1652. This was commissioned by a well-connected cardinal in Rome, and is an evocation of a mythical world built, piece by piece, from elements that the patron would have recognized––archaeological discoveries from ancient Rome and widely known features from the surrounding countryside. The image is constructed of fragments and ruins, casting the whole in an elegiac mode that depends on the viewer's recognition of its constituent parts to come together. A certain resonance of the familiar is necessary for the painting to work.

But where an artist like Lorrain intended for a final meaning to come into focus, Owens contends that the "pictures' artists were less concerned with that kind of closure." In a sense, he was arguing that modern allegory could be understood as the model for a kind of conceptual art, the rereading of a primary text or object in terms of another as a form of play. We know that dazzling weather effects are not really the subject of Goldstein's lightning paintings, that he is not talking about the climate change. He is using spectacular images that burn the eye and trouble the mind, denying easy meaning to hold the machinery of image making at arm's length and so provide a critique of ways of seeing.

Gomez seems to push the idea of subject matter closer to the surface. What we first encounter in his work are signs of urban despair, of ruin, waste, and fire. There are burned out cars, abandoned storefronts, faded signs, chain link fencing. Everything appears battered and worn out. In some of the paintings, there are clues that suggest we are being shown something about Los Angeles, but these clues function somewhat like the Roman artifacts in the Lorrain, eye candy for the cognoscenti. Despite the hyperreality of the finished image, what we see is unreal, "Unreal city, Under the fog of a winter dawn," or, in this case the twilight of a chemical sunset. So, to return to my beginning question, the idea of Los Angeles is something of a red herring in Gomez's work, what he is after is an evocation of place within a more abstract consideration of how images, and in particular, highly illusionistic images, work on the mind. The work is manipulative, tricking eye and mind to accept illusion as truth. But the illusionism is so extreme that we end up seeing through it, the manipulation is laid bare. To mangle Frank Stella's famous quip about his early abstractions, what you see here is not at all what you get, but what you get has a lot to do with seeing.

August 2024