style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Recently there was a memorial for
Gary Goldberg, an enigmatic artist with a dry sense of humor that was always
just under the surface of his simple, plain-spoken demeanor. I have never met a
more genuine dada artist.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>That night we were presented with
glimpses of a number of his films and performance pieces. His films exploit the
period of filmmaking that was pre-talkie and even pre-walkie, extracting from
the era of the first moving pictures the most amazing, glorious silliness ever
seen. With Taylor Mead flapping about with dangling appendages and Bill Rice as
the straight man, with goofy props, a classic movie image comes to mind: a delicate,
graceful, demure ballerina, absorbed and enlightened by her craft. The sound of
the projector with the film moving through, sprocket-by-sprocket, provides the
soundtrack for the epic film activity presented on the screen, a kind of sonic
interference that adds to the dislocation of the moving images from the
audience. The occasional amplified sound of movement, or actual word spoken, is
a major event, and furthers the displacement that literally bathes the
audience. The quality of film stock and the fixed no-edit camera pov, amplify
the separation of actors and audience, live action abstracted at the moment of
simplicity. This dislocation encapsulated Goldberg and made his presence that
much more tangible as a component of the film itself.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Gary’s last moving image was a film
of himself draped in white transparent fabric, moving along a beach in front of
the endlessly breaking waves wiping time away. His body became ever more
transparent, becoming more and more ‘one’ with the waves until finally disappearing
all together in thin air, the sound of the shore and the framed image of an
overcast day at the beach being all that remained. Gary can now be reached
telepathically at Bryce Canyon, Utah. It’s the perfect spot.
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