After reading that the powers that currently be at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles shunted off a number of important exhibitions, we art girls resolved to track down some of these shows and support the museums picking up MOCA's slack. This was the impetus for our intrepid drive in hair-raising rush hour traffic down the 405 to see the retrospective of the Pictures Generation artist Jack Goldstein at the Orange County Museum of Art. Jack Goldstein was a central figure in southern California during the 1970s-80s, experimenting with non-traditional medias (such as video, sound, airbrush paint, photography) to explore the effects of the ever more pervasive hold of Hollywood movies, television and mass media on popular culture. He is perhaps best known for his airbrush paintings of lighting and natural phenomena executed in the 1980s, but I found the video and sound works of the 1970s to be the most successful in the exhibition. Admittedly, we art girls from the even more sophisticated and all encompassing mass media machine of 2012 found some of the works dated and/or (dare I say) tedious. Goldstein often focused on the passage of time and repetition in his video works. Images of simple beauty, such as colorful feathers falling softly on a dark chair, extend for minutes upon minutes in decidedly low-fi video. I found myself drawn to the lyrical and charming image, but could not stick out the nearly 6 minute (eternal! epic!) running time of the video. Goldstein's techniques drawing this art girl's attention to her own unimpressive attention span may be why some of his works could resonate even louder in today's instant-media-gratification society than in the now quaint seeming media culture of the 1970s.
Well, after all that driving and all that arting, we were famished! Lucky for us the tasty R & D Kitchen was nearby and accommodating with adult beverages and delicious dinner! Thanks OCMA for the thought-provoking show and for getting us down to Orange County on a Thursday!
No comments:
Post a Comment