METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER

by Jack Goldstein (1975)

16 mm, color, sound, 2 min. loop



“Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer”, Jack Goldstein’s iconic two-minute tour de force, brings media’s subliminal power to the fore. The roar of the movie studio’s trademark lion here is looped into a (neurotic) repetition, making it easy to discern that the picture moves partly in reverse. This attempt to pass off “backward” for “forward”–a quirk of the source material underscored by Goldstein’s manipulation–stands as a particularly compelling visual analogy for the cyclical nature of history and exploitation, as well as for the endless diet of recycled stories Hollywood dishes out.

“Going to the movies” represents a staged sequence of ordered entrances into the apparatus of cinema. Conventionally, after the public’s entrance into the architecture of the cinema space, and followed by the darkened interior and projection, the studio trademark always introduces the first visual access into the celluloid space, followed by subsequent entrances to credits, titles, and space of the filmic narrative. In Goldstein’s film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the lion’s roar gives an early example of an appropriated sequence: it floats isolated within a brightly red-colored field, thus commodified by the artist in a subtle but significant gesture, an endlessly repeating technological sample, its roar audible in a symbiotic relationship with the mechanical noises of its origins, the nearby 16mm projector.

Once this iconography was resituated within the institution of art, it turned into an entrance to itself. Instead of entering into the sublime of a sequel, the past, or the powerful spectacle of Hollywood cinema, it renders a contemporary signification of the moment, which is also more than the sum of its collectible parts. It represents a recollection of Hollywood cinema and the twentieth-century mass media as the producer of a very specific space/time continuum. The work offers an access to enquiry into the new cultural character of an era still unfolding and uncharted, and links to issues of media and power as characterized by the notion of the industry spectacle, that was already underway in 1975.

To start the video, click on the link below. Roar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlN5Jkr9Gew&feature=player_embedded