Research article: 'The Murder' on the art of Jack Goldstein

I've written a research article called 'The Murder' for the publication A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture by Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, published by If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, 2014.





Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979) presents a movie in a regular cinema environment, but without any moving images. A Movie accentuates the experience of watching a movie and foregrounds the performative aspects of the practice of an artist who is perhaps best known for her photographs of ‘arranged’ artworks and objects. This publication is the result of an extensive research project into A Movie and its 2012 iteration, undertaken by researcher Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme during Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication.




The publication includes a research essay by Lütticken that places A Movie in the context of cultural developments in the 1970s and contemporaneous works by the Pictures Generation, a sequence of images from Lawler’s archive selected by Lütticken and contributions by art historians Debbie Broekers, Eve Dullaart, and Daniël van der Poel.





Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture

By Sven Lütticken, Louise Lawler

Edited by Tanja Baudoin, Sven Lütticken

Designed by Will Holder

Distribution by Idea Books

Published by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2014

ISBN: 978-90-814471-6-4

Order via shop@ificantdance.org

Price: €15,–



Excerpt from 'The Murder'

by Debbie Broekers

Memory plays an important role in this context and Goldstein was very interested in the workings of the memory, working with sound precisely because sound sets memory in motion: “sound deals with depth, so it is much more analogous to memory – and that is what a lot of my work is about; trying to remember something or picturing it in your head”.[1] Goldstein’s usage of the verb ‘to picture’ is striking. As Douglas Crimp has also pointed out, ‘to picture’ can refer both to a mental process and to the production of an aesthetic work.[2] Both are at issue in The Murder, in which Goldstein created an image, or better yet, a representation of an image, in the minds of his viewers, with nothing more than a soundtrack and related light effects.


[1] Video interview with Jack Goldstein and Michael Smith conducted by Van Lagestein and students from the department of Art History (Groningen, 1979), archive of Art History Department, University of Groningen, Groningen. A copy of this interview is kept on DVD in the Corps de Garde archive.

[2] Crimp, D., ‘Pictures’, in October, Vol. 8, Spring 1979, pp 75-88.