- A performance artist with roots in minimalist sculpture, a conceptual artist who made experimental films and their audio equivalent on vinyl records, Goldstein divided his time between Los Angeles and New York City during the 1970s.
- He received his training at Chouinard Art Institute and was a member of the inaugural class of California Institute of the Arts, where he worked in post-studio art under John Baldessari, receiving an MFA in 1972.
- He was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial as a major film influence alongside Stan Brakhage, less than a year after he committed suicide by hanging himself.
- While still a student at CalArts in 1972, he buried himself alive; with a stethoscope attached to his chest, he breathed air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his beating heart.
- Goldstein's paintings were based on photographic images of natural phenomena, science, and technology--the result of his intention to produce "the spectacular instant" through photographic means.
- A posthumous documentary was made on Goldstein in 2014, titled Jack Goldstein: Pictures and Sounds: ART/New York No. 67.
- A large-scale retrospective was originally scheduled for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles but was canceled in 2010 by its then-director, Jeffrey Deitch; it was instead shown at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York in 2013.
- The demand for "salon paintings" ( = art works designed to be sold to the very rich and to secure his place in the history of art) decreased as the decade progressed, leading Goldstein to leave New York in the early 1990s to return to California where he lived in relative isolation.
- A new exhibit called "Disappearing" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth showcased Goldstein's work (along with two other artists) in the summer of 2019.
- Jack Goldstein was an important member of the 1980s New York art scene. He exploited the medium of film - using Hollywood-style techniques and effects and hiring actors and stuntmen - to expose our usually unthinking relationship with what we see on the screen and how we psychologically experience imagery.
- In the early 1970s as audio and video recordings became more accessible to the general public, Goldstein seized the opportunity and began producing his own records, although not ordinary records. Among his records were "A Swim Against the Tide", "A Faster Run"(a recording of a stampede), "The Tornado", "Two Wrestling Cats" and "The Six Minute Drown". "The Six Minute Drown" in particular gained traction; in it, the dreary, agonizing sounds of a drowning man reverberate for six minutes in total isolation.
- His works were exhibited in New York at Metro Pictures at this time, as well as John Weber Gallery and other galleries in America and Europe.
- Goldstein's films addressed the gesture; by recontextualizing the moment, and changing or removing the meaning of his subject, his practice would influence generations of artists.
- A key member of what came to be known as the Pictures Group, Goldstein never received the same sustained attention that fellow conceptual artists and experimental filmmakers like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman did.
- Most of Goldstein's work revolved around the concept of experience, the concept of grappling with the conflation of experience and our recording of it. It asks whether documentation has become primary in our experience.
- Goldstein may be remembered for a certain conceptual/representational approach to picturemaking that helped shape a generation of artists and beyond, even though they might not even be aware of him.
- Goldstein compiled an extensive exhibition record during his productive years. Even after he stopped painting and moved back to Southern California, museums continued to exhibit his work. In 2002, a show of his films and performances was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and retrospectives were staged at the Maison de la culture de Grenoble in Grenoble, France, and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles.
- His early work was revived at the turn of the century and he resurfaced briefly to some renewed acclaim.
- Goldstein eventually became one of the linchpins of the Pictures Group, which gained its first recognition at Artist's Space in New York City in the fall of 1977. During this time, he shared a studio building with James Welling.
- Goldstein was a Canadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter in the 1980s art boom.
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