mfc-michèle didier>Editions>Jack Goldstein> Jack Goldstein Presents Two Boxers, 1979

Jack Goldstein created the poster, Jack Goldstein Presents Two Boxers, 1979, for the creation of a performance that took place at the Sporthal Selwerd Eikenlaan, in Groningen, Holland: the audience occupies seats in front of the boxing ring of a sports hall in total darkness. Rousingly loud Prussian marching music, lasting 4 to 5 minutes, gives way to a fanfare of bugles which heralds the appearance of two professional boxers dressed identically in white. The bout is fought in silence and illuminated by a white strobe light. When one boxer is knocked out, a red light comes on and the two figures freeze. The performance ends here with a repetition of the martial music played at a lower volume.

The three parts to the work allude to three different distances on or possible modes of representation of, the same spectacle: the music in darkness which evokes mental images of the "heroic" contest; the bout, whose flickering strobe lighting simulates the mechanically operated effect of the silent movie; and the final image of the motionless red-lit figures which assumes the appearance of a still photograph. The boxing bout is seen as a cleanly defined event, in their neutrality and the subservience to the game, they become perceived as idealized, perfectly tuned machines, strictly confined in the space of the spectacle; their bodies are as contained by the ropes of the ring as a film image is framed by the rectangle of the screen.