By Harry Laventure
The Photograph: 695 x 1005mm, 1984.
More precisely, one month after being battered. The eyes neither project nor accuse, but retain a grandiosity in the look of two distinct acts. White as marble, crimson as blood, her twin axes speak in the binary colour-coding of a pill. Bruises orbit like the curls of withered petals, autumnal, but the vulnerability here is only physical. Sparked coils, almost regal, drape over the shoulders in simple decadence, and frame the punctuation mark of the picture: the rouge glamor of lips in pout, hardened. It is in this defiant diarism that we meet Nan Goldin face to face in her early career, stoic and honest to the beatings she received to conclude the “crav[ing], dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security” of her relationship with an older man. Follow through to 1st July 2019, and we are electrified by the same spirit as she lies Louvre-side, still as a corpse, below a rippled slab of vermillion accusation: “SHAME ON SACKLER”.
It is in admiration of this vital force that ArtReview have recently awarded Goldin the top spot on their Power 100 list for artists of the highest influence. Such recognition titillates even the casual observer as to the merit upon which it is rewarded, and it is under the admission of such scepticism – I blame the Englishness – that I found myself investigating the life and work of Nan Goldin. What a mockery would come of my brambles.
On 12th September 1953, Nancy ‘Nan’ Goldin was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Washinton D.C., before growing up in the deliciously named Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her early years were bedfellows to numerous tensions and tragedies, and by the age of eleven both the claustrophobia of her parents’ expectations and the suicide of her elder sister Barbara had amputated Goldin from any sense of domestic comfort. At the mercy of a carousel of foster homes, she would next find permanence in her enrolment at Satya Community School in Lincoln, aged 16. Perhaps as well timed as it was ostensibly trivial, a Polaroid camera found its way into Goldin’s possession here on the back of a grant. This has since been autobiographically retrojected as the artist’s first finding of her “voice”.
Within two years, Goldin had “[fallen] in with the drag queens” of downtown Boston. These would become her subjects, her muses, but most importantly her family. Indeed, the raw tenderness of Goldin’s first major publication The Ballad of Sexual Dependency resonates to this day, and gently showcases the intimate haze of neon Lepidoptera that defined the queer scene of the time. The style and content of The Ballad cannot be over pronounced in their influence. Her ‘snapshot’ portraits of friends at their most open capture the universal humanity of that desire for connection, in whatever manifestation of sexuality it is to be realized. In her own words, the direction of The Ballad was “to kind of glorify them” in admiration for those “who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly”.
Perhaps there is no more lucid an expression of this than Trixie on the Cot, New York City, 1979. Between the carelessly sensual debris of magazines, empty bottles, and cans of beer, the eponymous Trixie luxuriates like a psychedelic take on Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour. Draped in an anthology of ivories and rubies, cigarette perched between fingers and lips, she casually cradles her battered high heels. A camera lies to her left, its back ironically turned to the scene, and deaf to the bohemian elegance beyond. Quite a wily if unintentional symbol, one could wager. Further still, the magnetism of Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City, 1980 bottles the salacious lightning that pulsates through Goldin’s early work. The pair are unapologetic, absorbed, and as ignorant of as ignoring the observer in the orbit of their desire. Here, as in so much of The Ballad, Goldin articulates a truth that does not have to be staged for it to be demonstrated.
The diaristic, deliberately unchoreographed style of these works has contributed to their endurance and continued resonance as much as the content. The hagiographists among us enjoy the idea that Goldin precipitated the social-media-style of photography that is so omnipresent in contemporary content. While I may not share such retrospective elasticity of optimism in the aesthetic components of this argument, what sings to me is the spirit behind her work. The courage to capture so much of one’s life and lives is a factor that has become all too familiar to us. And yet, Goldin’s insistence on elevating it to the boldest walls of galleries (and consequently below the loftiest noses of criticism) was unquestionably radical and revolutionary.
As such, it was not without consequence. Freely exposing so much of oneself to the caprice of review is a posture for the confident or unwitting. In this period, Goldin has freely admitted to wanting to be a “junkie”, the “slum goddess” of whom bands like The Velvet Underground and Television wrote. The honest portrayal thereof, in all its excess and masochism, has been criticised as glamourising images in the circuit of the “heroin chic” tagline, with grave implications for those under her influence. The tortured artist trope is nearly as old as art itself, and Goldin’s intimate reflections of her own bouts of addiction personify the archetype without the usual protective distance of a name on a novel’s title page or below a painting. Perhaps there is a particularly cruel if tenuous parallel between Dostoevsky writing “The Gambler” to pay off his gambling debts, and the commercial success of Goldin’s “heroin chic” epoch funding her crippling OxyContin habit later in life.
The nature of the criticism she received becomes more twisted still in its accusations of voyeuristic tendencies. For all the vibrant and animated beauty of her corpus, it is not without darkness. Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris 1993 captures the ravages of the AIDS crisis in a personal, private setting. The former gently presses his lips onto the forehead of the latter, whose eyes weakly pry themselves open to burrow into the camera lens, and our sympathies behind. It is a brutally uncomfortable image. We cannot help but feel invasive, inappropriately forced into a setting of mourning usually reserved for the related. Questions of being imposters in this arena are natural, and easy to extend to the person behind the camera. The moment certainly raises disconcerting questions about the relationship of subject and object in art more generally. Does the solidification of a few images as representative of a person leave too much space for unfair projection or manipulation? Where is the border between the person behind and in front of the lens, and is it immoral to add such inflection of meaning to a scene that should or could be “objective”?
My apologies for the evasion, but this is neither the right writer nor setting to provide confident answers to these issues and their accompanying fragrances. And yet, perhaps we may poke at cadence with respect to Goldin herself. There is an obvious if implicit resolution in Goldin’s practical responses to such claims. I do wager that she is unquestionably a force for good in her exposure and humanisation of the more taboo queer subjects within her contemporary scene. The sincerity and intimacy of her works in this field are revelatory in their glorification of her family’s then-unorthodox beauty. Moreover, following her own struggles with addiction to OxyContin, Goldin has proclaimed that becoming an activist is “more important to [her] than propelling [her] art career”. Indeed, the “die-in” rallies and personal missions of Goldin’s P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have found such gravitas as to remove the Sackler name from gallery after gallery, even dissuading the Royal Portrait Gallery from taking a £1.5 million donation from the Purdue Pharma magnates.
With respect to the queries of voyeurism and the recklessness of her biography, I think it of the utmost importance to appreciate just how much of herself is in the work. With the camera as her “voice”, Goldin gives us a flipbook dialogue through which she negotiates her own personality through immense tragedy and hardship. Whilst I do not claim a total absence of artistic direction within her work, we must note our privilege of responding to it rather than participating in it. The characters of her corpus are not topics under examination, they are her “party”, and perhaps the family she deserved. The love affairs had their reverberations in the strands of her social spheres; the deaths and victims were sincere losses to the community that she was a member of. Placement thereof in a private, intimate setting only magnifies the impact on an observer detached from personal connection to it. Perhaps I mean to say that, to me, Goldin is not clipping the wings of butterflies to collect them, so much as she moves to accompany and admire them in flight.
These remarks are of course my own, and my only desire in writing this is to stimulate your own interpretations of her work. The critics continue to laud: her 2022 biopic All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was peppered with awards and applause, and her placement on ArtReview’s list will only prompt more panegyrics and vitriol. Goldin’s original pledge to her friends was to “reflect to you the beauty that you are ”. In her constellations of ragged decadence, excess, intimacy, sincerity, trauma, and ultimate splendor, we must grant her that.
Brava, Nan Goldin.