Introducing Zvi Goldstein
by Ory Dessau
For the past four decades Zvi Goldstein (born 1947, Transylvania) has been working to shift the direction of contemporary art towards areas that have traditionally been seen as the peripheries of the Western world. In the early 1970s Goldstein, by then a young student in Milan, played an active role in the conceptual art scene in Europe. In 1978, as he became increasingly dissatisfied with the art of late Modernism and the Post-Modernist trends of that time, he left Italy for Jerusalem. Goldstein made Jerusalem his artistic and intellectual habitat, his own intermediate zone located between Europe and the peripheries in the Middle East and Africa.
Simultaneously with this move Goldstein developed a multifaceted artistic strategy for Third World countries, combining objects and texts in sculptural installations that initially alluded to Russian Constructivism, which was the first movement to influence modern art from the margins of Europe. Since then, following Goldstein’s close engagement with the rich, premodern traditions of Asia Minor, the Middle East and Africa – regions to which he repreatedly travelled, making contact with hermetic monastic communities and societies still only partially touched by modernity – his work has successfully anchored at least one strand of contemporary art practice in non-Western contexts.
This exhibition reflects on Goldstein’s unique artistic method, which incorporates a variety of perspectives – climate, botany, ethnography, and eschatology1 – as metaphors of peripheral cultural environments designated by the artist as Emergency Societies. The exhibition begins with Goldstein’s Methodology, a diagram-like map conceived in 1978, listing the six groups of works that constitute his oeuvre: ‘Serial Constructions’, ‘Black Hole Constructions’, ‘Perfect Worlds, Possible Worlds’, ‘Anomalies’, ‘E.T.N.O.’ and ‘Botanology’. A footnote indicates that the Methodology was set out in parallel with his move to Jerusalem yet prior to the actual execution of the six groups of works. As a preliminary, independent map Goldstein’s Methodology marks his work as a separate entity, an isolated, autarkic world that defines itself by itself. Defending the work from external infections and interpretations the Methodology is a form of self-periodization that forms the basis for Goldstein’s oeuvre, which thus exists as a fulfilled vision, as a distinct history.
The autonomy of the oeuvre is further enhanced in the cases where wall texts are embedded in sculptural works. In Perfect Worlds, Possible Worlds (A, B) (2nd Version) (1989/2000) and Cactus Model (1991), texts provide the works with context, with keys to their meaning. Whilst disclosing the underlying theoretical and ideological motivation of Goldstein‘s art practice, the texts also control the interpretive horizon of the oeuvre, which, as a result, becomes even more impenetrable.
In the sound installation Room 205 – The Voices (2011) Goldstein activates text in another way. This installation is an off-shoot of Goldstein‘s book of poetry, Room 205 (2010). The cave-like white cube with recordings of recited passages from the book emitted through its walls introduces us to the artist’s elaborate poetic delirium. Room 205 was originally published as an independent, poetry-based work of art. It was only later that certain passages were animated and spatialized by this sound installation, which, unlike other works by Goldstein, not only absorbs the written text as its contextual referent but also transmits it as its content.
Room 205 is Goldstein’s second book. It followed On Paper (2004), a piece of ‘written art’, or rather, a hybrid of a memoir, a travelogue, an art-theoretical manifesto and a philosophical novel. It features, among other things, descriptions of both realized and unrealized sculptural works by Goldstein; these descriptions are situated within a larger, panoramic narrative that provides a context for the sculptural objects. In the opening scene of On Paper we read about Goldstein’s interrogation by agents of the Chadian secret service who detained him on suspicion of espionage during one of his trips to Africa. Remarkably, Goldstein’s answers to his interrogators clarify his artistic credo. Despite the circumstances in which they were given these answers read as an unconventional artistic manifesto, as theory in the guise of a narrative and vice versa. As Goldstein tries to convince his interrogators to release him from custody, he shares with them (and with the reader) the principles of his art practice:
‘Therefore, there are no distinctions in my artistic work between different Modernist categories:
FANTASY AND THEORY
CONCEPT AND AESTHETICS
CONTEXT AND ONTOLOGY
BIOGRAPHY AND IDEOLOGY
BETWEEN BEING CENTRAL AND GEOGRAPHICALLY PERIPHERAL.’2
Fundamentally unclassifiable Goldstein’s works are neither readymades3 nor traditional sculptures. Their industrial-technological allure is deceptive, since they are in fact always unique, singular outcomes. Goldstein does not deploy the Duchampian mechanism of displacing a found everyday object into the realm of art by means of redefinition, because then his works would require an external, non-artistic context. His works have the appeal of objects that suddenly appear in the world, with the labor invested in their production remaining almost entirely invisible. As a consequence these works loom into view as inexplicable, unavoidable phenomena, as the fulfilments of a necessity, as a matter of urgency.
Goldstein has always striven to lessen the presence of the artist’s hand in his works. As results of technological production they are immaculate and spotless, denying the traditional connection between the peripheral and the exotic, the manual, the immediate, etc. Unlike Post-Colonial theoretical discourse Goldstein’s oeuvre is not deconstructive. It does not affirm the ‘epistemological4 centrality and permanence of European dominance’5 by way of a negative critique. Instead, it suggests an inclusive-constructive platform for thinking and acting, which turns aesthetics into a political tool for reshaping the predispositions of Western cultural perception. Goldstein brings contemporary art to unfamiliar terrain, to situations whose historical basis is located in marginal areas that came into contact with modernity in an inorganic way. His works reveal the hybrid nature of the world, the fluid inconsistency of things, the unfixity of identities, and the fact that meaning is obtained and transformed ad hoc. Embodying the paradoxes conveyed by the term ‘peripheral avant-garde’ Goldstein’s works confront us with situations in which characteristics of place and time cannot be determined unequivocally. In these situations ‘peripheral’ stands for the blurring of boundaries between center and periphery, West and East, here and there, while ‘avant-garde’ stands for the amalgamation of the modern and the premodern, the progressive and the ancestral, as a premise for radical contemporaneity.
1 Eschatology is the doctrine of the end of time.
2 Zvi Goldstein, On Paper, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2004, p. 13.
3 A readymade is an everyday object that may – by virtue of the creative act of selection and designation by an artist – attain status as a work of art. The term ‘readymade‘ is associated almost exclusively with the aesthetic activities of Marcel Duchamp during the period 1915 to 1917.
4 Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature of knowledge, the rationality of belief and justification.
5 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985), p. 144.
(The text was originally published on the occasion of Zvi Goldstein — Distance and Differences, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, June–October, 2016, curator: Ory Dessau.)