For the past four decades, Zvi Goldstein (born 1947, Transylvania) has been working to shift the direction of contemporary art towards areas which were historically shaped 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, Goldstein left Italy for Jerusalem. He made Jerusalem his own artistic and intellectual habitat, his own intermediate zone located between Europe and the peripheries of the Middle-East and Africa.
In 1978 Goldstein foresaw the notional-hypothetical space, in which his body of work would occur from then on, in the configuration of his Methodology—a hybrid decentralized map compiling all his future works in six groups: Serial Constructions; Black Hole Constructions; Perfect Worlds, Possible Worlds; Anomalies; E.T.N.O.; and Botanology. The Methodology, outlined in the form of a graphic diagram, is a preliminary given which, ever since 1978, has enabled Goldstein’s body of work to fulfill a sovereign vision that does not require an external context, to prevail as a separate autonomous system with its own independent syntax within a private historical narrative.
Fundamentally unclassifiable, Goldstein’s works are neither readymades, nor traditional sculptures. Their industrial-technological allure is deceptive, since they are always unique, singular outcomes. Goldstein’s works reject the Duchampian mechanism of displacing a found everyday object into the realm of art by means of redefinition, because then they would require an external, non-artistic context. Yet Goldstein’s works have the appeal of an object that suddenly appears in the world, while the labor invested in its production remains almost entirely obscure. As a consequence, the works emerge as inexplicable, unavoidable phenomena, as the fulfilment of a necessity, as a matter of urgency.
Therefore, presenting an archive disclosing the process and referential material of Goldstein’s entire body of work is an unpredictable move within the artist’s universe. It reveals the background and sources of that which seemed to emerge out of nowhere as the pick of a yet to be discovered culture.
However, Goldstein’s archive is also an independent work titled Perfect Worlds, Possible Worlds - From My Archive (1978-2021). Therefore, one should not approach it as a strictly informative database, but as an act of demystification amounting to a mystification of different order, as a moment in which the context becomes a text and the ‘backstage’ of the works is pushed to the front.
Ory Dessau
