Orange County Museum of Art rescues Jack Goldstein show scrapped by MOCA
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Fans of the late Montreal-born, L.A.-based artist Jack Goldstein, who recently learned that MOCA scrapped plans to organize a survey of his work, will be happy to know that the show has found a home. Director Dennis Szakacs of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) tells Culture Monster that his institution will present the first U.S. Goldstein retrospective in the summer of 2012.
‘This kind of show is right in our wheelhouse, because it’s about a very important artist who has not been recognized widely enough,’ says Szakacs. He calls Goldstein, who died in 2003, ‘one of the instigators of what many people consider one of the last cohesive, avant-garde movements in American art: the Pictures Generation.’
The subject of a 2009 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger are known for using appropriation strategies and wrestling with the rise of mass media such as television in their work. Goldstein, who once made a film remix of the MGM lion roaring (again and again and again), shown at right, was not only part of the sprawling Met show but one of the five artists included in the original ‘Pictures’ show at Artists Space gallery in New York in 1977 that helped solidify this loose movement.
Szakacs says he contacted Philipp Kaiser, an adjunct curator at MOCA, about the show a few months ago.’I had heard like everyone else that the MOCA show was canceled, so I called Philipp to see what we could do. He had been given the green light to bring the show elsewhere.’
OCMA’s lineup for 2012 includes a retrospective of another pioneering L.A. artist, Richard Jackson, who has experimented for years with making various machines for painting. Also that year is ‘Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,’ billed by OCMA as the ‘first major museum exhibition to explore the artist’s most celebrated series.’
Meanwhile, OCMA is ramping up for one of its most wide-ranging biennials yet, including more San Diego and San Francisco artists than in years past, opening Oct. 24.
--Jori Finkel
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