Gustaf Mantel

Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year is finally here: GIF. Not the noun, but the verb. In fact, the noun is boring, old hat. The first GIF (the first file ever formatted as a graphic interchange format, with lossless compression) dates back to the mid-‘80s; the first GIF posted to the Internet is now twenty years old. And contrary to what you think you know, GIFs don’t have to be animated. That first picture, for instance, featuring girlfriends and friends of a bunch of CERN scientists (yes, the Higgs Boson CERN), isn’t.

But “to GIF” is something different: not just to create a GIF file (as Oxford defines it), but to animate – to appropriate – cultural detritus in a unique fashion. And, like any medium, some artists are better at working with it than others, using it as a tool to challenge their audience to think in new ways. In reality, the GIF is just another part of a long lineage, from the collage to the ready-made, on through the Pictures generation and toward the mashup. If Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince and Jack Goldstein had been born millenials, their medium (or action) of choice may well have been the GIF.

It’s eerie how closely Goldstein’s looped films resemble GIFs, especially “MGM,” which features the MGM lion roaring over and over against a red background, or the illustrated birds in “Bone China,” which come alive and ceaselessly circle a dinner plate. Like many popular GIFs, the constant repetition of Goldstein’s films makes the normal abnormal and the bizarre laughable.

In my opinion, however, the most effective GIFs (beyond those that embrace a slapstick humor) offer an antidote or counterpoint to Goldstein. Take the work of Gustaf Mantel, for example, whose Tumblr, If we don’t, remember me, features animated gifs paired with quotes, snipped from films as diverse as The Conversation (1974), Suspira (1977), Ghost World (2001), and Sedmikrásky (1966). The most successful and haunting are those with only a whisper of movement, which somehow evoke the mood of the film without completely reanimating it.[1] Slowly but surely, Mantel and others seem to be playing with the form’s potential for something I can only call “suspended animation”: inviting us, as viewers, to occupy a single frame,[2] yet maintain an awareness of the image’s motion, and of passing time.

Artist Jack Goldstein and his dog, 1986. Image copyright Peter Bellamy.

“Jack Goldstein is currently at work on a new film called “The Jump.” It is to be nineteen seconds long and will show a diver performing a somersault from a high board. But the high board and the water into which he plunges will be absent from the finished film…Goldstein is performing a set of operations that isolate, distill, alter, and augment the filmed recording of an actual event. He does this in order to impose a distance between the event and its viewers because, according to Goldstein, it is only through a distance that we can understand the world. Which is to say that we only experience reality through the pictures we make of it.”[1]

So begins Douglas Crimp’s famous 1977 “Pictures” essay, which introduced not just a show, but a movement of young artists determined to draw attention to and capitalize on the way images mediated the late 20th-century experience. Fittingly, “Jack Goldstein x 10,000,” at the Orange Country Museum of Art, also opens with the now-iconic film, which features the glowing red figure of a diver against an all black background. The diver bounces on the invisible board, twists, and disappears smoothly in the nothingness of the erased water. The motion feels effortless and also exhausting.

“Jack Goldstein x 10,000” consists of thirty-plus years of work. The early films that put Goldstein on the map as a member of the Pictures group are there (including “The Jump,” 1978, and “MGM,” 1975), as are several immersive sculptures, text works, and records—not to mention the enormous, black-and-white paintings of the ‘80s and the paintings that followed.

The main draw continues to be the films, perpetually repeating and acting as counterpoints to each other. “A Nail,” 1971, “A Glass of Milk,” 1971, and “A Spotlight,” 1972, play opposite “Jack,” 1973, (amongst others); we see the artist agonizingly and slowly pull a nail out of a piece of wood with his teeth, empty a glass of milk by pounding his fist on a table, and try to run away from a spotlight. In the same moment, we watch a cameraman slowly back away from Goldstein, step by step, until the artist is engulfed entirely by the landscape.

In the next room, Goldstein’s edits keep the famous MGM lion repeating its roar, and in the room beyond a foot in a ballet shoe collapses when the ankle ribbons are untied (“Ballet Shoe,” 1975); a china pattern of birds comes to life and circles a dinner plate, trapped (“Bone China,” 1976); a dog barks and barks and barks (“Shane,” 1975); a knife fills with reflected color, empties, and fills again (“The Knife,” 1975). As mundane and tedious as all these actions are, the tension is captivating.

Much has been made of the fact that Goldstein used outside labor for his work, hiring animators for his films and using illustrators to complete the series of paintings that followed—wall-sized, black-and-white images of aerial raids, or the spectacular effect of lightning over Western skies. The technique allowed Goldstein’s conversation with his Pictures colleagues to continue; aesthetizing images of damaging events such as the 1941 bombing of the Kremlin. As Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight puts it, “It’s as if Goldstein’s photo-based works chronicle the upheaval caused by mesmerizing mass media, the daily blitz of modern life.” All with the hand of the artist removed.

From "Jack Goldstein X 10,000, "Untitled," 1981, acrylic on canvas. (Brian Forrest, Orange County Museum of ARt / July 12, 2012)

The exhibit wraps up with several abstract paintings that resemble thermal maps with the mapped object long gone, a more recent film in which Goldstein cuts between various sea creatures at the moment they pause in motion, and “Aphorisms,” written fragments presented as highly-designed images as well as less polished chunks of text that vary in between upper- and lower-case, bold and regular face.

On the whole, the exhibit is complicated and almost amorphous. Unlike his peer, Cindy Sherman, whose retrospective is currently on view at SFMOMA, Goldstein did not maintain one specific and particular focus or style. One can certainly map an obsessive fixation on time and nature, something obvious enough to be commented on but downgraded as a priority in the various conversations on Goldstein’s work. The exhibition pamphlet points out that much of the focus on Goldstein continues to be on his relationship to images and the idea of the spectacle, themes leftover from his association with Crimp and subsequent writing on the Pictures group. Honestly, what I see in “Jack Goldstein x 10,000” is an artist questing for his voice again after tiring of being stuck in the same loop. Unfortunately, we lost Jack Goldstein in 2003, but curator Philipp Kaiser provides a nuanced overview of his peaks and valleys.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.