Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz

In “Jack and the Jack Paintings” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curator Kitty Scott brings a suite of Terada’s works, readable across canvases (more or less forming a chapter from Hertz’s book), in contact with a large-format 1983 lightning painting of Goldstein’s from the AGO’s collection, made at the height of Goldstein’s New York fame. Since 2011, Ron Terada’s Jack paintings have been excerpting various passages from this book, all Goldstein’s words, on uniformly sized canvases, with white type on black backgrounds.

Purchased with the assistance of Eleanor and Francis Shen, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 14 panels, 2.03 x 1.63 m each. Hertz’s work contains so much truth-telling that it can feel positively seditious, an effect compounded by its subjects speaking through transcription, rather than through the jargon-laden and morally detached “texts” we are used to expect from contemporary-art insiders. Not enough can be said to recommend Hertz’s haunting, revelatory book, which interpolates transcribed conversations with Goldstein, a Jew from Montreal and an art-world misfit, with transcribed conversations with those who knew him, including John Baldessari, James Welling and Robert Longo. Only months before, in March of that year, Goldstein had died of suicide, with enough time for his death to be acknowledged in the book’s introduction by its writer-compiler Richard Hertz. Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia was a book published by Minneola Press in 2003. What indeed should the art world have to do with caring for and saving lives, when the romantic myth of art abnegates bodies relegates suffering only to its relationship with art-making and, vulture-like, stalks the death (whether premature or mature) of those for whom decline, by, say, old age or mental-health issues, has made living unmarketable? When lives have been at stake, and lost, in the art world- Dash Snow, Annie Pootoogook, Jack Goldstein-there is a predictable, revolting shrug. “We’re not saving lives here,” one of my former colleagues used to announce to the office on particularly stressful days, her tone sarcastic but also encouraging, as if the thought of us not saving lives would inherently calm us down. It seems odd to speak of the horrors of the art world when there are so many more urgent horrors to speak of.

Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz