Glenn Goldberg’s little pictures, in effect abstract miniatures, are eloquently, stylishly uncanny. By esthetic uncanniness I mean the phenomenon whereby an arrangement of formal elements comes to seem a hallucinatory representation, or a would-be realistic representation comes to seem a purely formal presentation. Such ambiguity in appearance, implying emotional ambivalence toward and even primitive projective identification with some object, occurs frequently in the history of Modern art. It is already evident in the caricatural Cubist portraits of 1911, and by 1922, with El Lissitzky’s Story of Two Squares, becomes a set mode, even a mannerism, within Modernism. Freud stated, “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality,” suggesting that “the uncanny is a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.” The imagining of the real in abstract, formal terms, or the “realizing” of a representation out of formal elements, are inherently uncanny activities.
I would argue that the uncanny is far more pervasive in contemporary art than is commonly considered, and that it manifests itself in the work of numerous artists operating in various media. In Goldberg’s case, the artist begins with a quasi compendium of clichéd, generally biomorphic formal elements, and configures them into an uncannily real scene. When not simply cavorting like spectral if very colorful dancers, they seem participants in some important drama whose character is unfathomable. Some unspecifiable microcosm of emotional experience seems implied. Goldberg generates a kind of latter-day Paul-Klee-like world, as feverish and whimsical as Klee’s but a little less introverted, and with similar decorative, illustrative, and meditational traits. In Goldberg’s images, it is form that has undergone repression and emerged as uncanny content, rather than, as in Cubist portraits, content that has undergone repression and emerged as uncanny form.
But the key to these jewellike miniatures, each of which can be regarded as an apotheosized sensational emotion, is not the abstract scene of varying complexity, but the stage on which it is presented—the inner frame on which the form/figurines are mounted. This frame within a frame almost always has an air of tentativeness about it. Goldberg deliberately sets up a borderline between the real outer world and the inner world of art, a borderline which, while sustainable, is implicitly elusive. This frame signals artistic transcendence, permitting the existence of Goldberg’s limbo of speculative abstract articulation, straining the limits of legibility.
In line with this discreet emphasis on what seems secondary to the imagery but in fact makes it resonant, Goldberg articulates the ground on which his shapes rest. A master tactician, at once subtle and coy, he sets his imagery on a ground which, like the frame, has a certain preciousness about it. This is particularly evident when he uses gray paper, but it is also implied by the fact that the ground seems strengthened by every figural element that appears on it. The paper does not disappear into the space surrounding what is figured on it, but acquires solid presence. The power of frame and ground manifests itself indirectly by way of the disoriented, off-balance character of much of the imagery, which often involves levitation in indeterminate space. A grid/cross design makes the point succinctly: it zooms diagonally, as if about to burst the frame and lift off on its own, but not doing so. This understated insistence on the frame and the ground precludes total eccentricity—anticipating decadence—but remains utterly peculiar, for it tends insidiously to undermine whatever illusion is supposed to be the subject of focus and support.
—Donald Kuspit
