Jack Goldstein The Planets, A Suite of Six 10-Inch Records (With Music), 1984
Suite of 6 10-inch 33-1/3 RPM vinyl records housed in a hand-made, painted slipcase
Edition size unknown
Published by the artist, distributed by Neutral Records, New York
Courtesy michèle didier
The Planets is a suite of six 10-inch vinyl records housed in a hand-painted cardboard box inlaid with a sand-like material, giving the surface the rough feel and/or appearance of sandpaper and/or the surface of a distant planet. The audio consists of appropriate 'atmospheric' electronic background music, in the style of the 1970s. These may be imaginary soundtracks to twelve celestial bodies or distant planets.
"In the midst of his pictorial period, Goldstein returned to records one last time with The Planets (1984): six LPs featuring Hollywood music from space odysseys.
Gustav Holst's Planets (1914-1917) were seven in number (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).
It is impossible to know which planet Goldstein's cosmology has lost, since the discs have no titles. On the other hand, thanks to these six discs, we know that music like Holst's has definitively lost its autonomy: it is no more than the soundtrack to images that a lion roaring in its cartridge might have introduced.
This music is given a curious status by being played in the exhibition space.
On the one hand, it can only evoke images from films - from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Star Wars (1977-1983), via Star Trek (1966-169); on the other hand, because the images are absent, its rhetoric and effects are undermined. Once again, Goldstein plays with a dialectic of presence and absence, programming the listening of music torn between the reference to images that alone justify it and the independence granted to it.
If The Planets' records are a work in themselves, they are also the elements of what Goldstein calls a performance".
Michel Gauthier, Les Cahiers du Mnam No. 125 autumn 2013
71.65 x 95.67 in ( 182,9 x 243,80 cm )
24.41 x 16.93 in ( 62,5 x 43,5 cm )
19.69 x 18.5 in ( 50 x 47,8 cm )
