Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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urn:oclc:record:1349254867 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nangoldinillbeyo0000suss Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2rptqthgz9 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0874271029 Part of what made The Ballad feel so refreshing was the way that Goldin drew on cinematic techniques in her photography, using carefully arranged sequences of images to invite the viewer to form narratives over time. In All The Beauty, Poitras highlights the filmic quality of Goldin’s work, dedicating long sections of the film to processions of images, set against music and voiceover, which are delivered in the style of the artist’s famous slideshows. At the same time, Poitras also lingers on single images, and in doing so draws out the inherently filmic quality of Goldin’s individual compositions.

Mazur, Adam and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska. “Nan Goldin interviewed by Adam Mazur and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska,” foto tapeta, Warsaw, February 2003, http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php Web. 13 April. 2021.Standardisation and Variation in English Language(s) / 2. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives: Rewriting Modernism The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing the emancipation of the mind. Women’s Liberation Movement, Sexual Liberation Movement, Ecstasy Culture, Hippies, and Anti-war Movement, etc, have emerged in the United States. At same time, the hippie culture of the West Coast changed the attitudes and ways of life of young Americans, and in the frenzy of sexual liberation, a large number of LGBT groups began to respond. They abandon the secular ethical constraints, liberate themselves, admire freedom, that deeply attract Nan Goldin, who runs counter to traditional class thinking. When we think of Goldin’s love and understanding of queer subculture, she presents the articulation of drag as a form of authentic self-expression. Jimmy Paulette is not quite dressed yet, but he is in a state of becoming. He is not vulnerable. He is relaxed and confident.

In 1985 The Ballad slideshow was selected for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The following year, Goldin worked with curator Marvin Heiferman (who’d helped produce her slideshows for public viewing) to edit and compress The Ballad into a 127-image Aperture photo book of the same name. In a review in the New York Times, art critic Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s. . . . Goldin, at the age of 33, has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live.” Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe. In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. Hujar and Morrisroe had already died of AIDS before the exhibition opened, as had Scarpati, Cookie Mueller’s husband. At the end of her essay, Goldin included a photo she’d taken of a grieving Mueller in front of her husband’s open casket. Mueller, too, would die of AIDS just a month after Goldin wrote the essay. Wojnarowicz would succumb to the disease in 1992. (Adding insult to injury, the National Endowment for the Arts initially withdrew its funding of the exhibition due to its “political” nature, but reinstated it as long as the money wasn’t used for the catalogue, where the “political” language appeared.) At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more se

Pandemic to Now

course, Nan Goldin’s narratives are activated by the appearance of recurring characters —Gina, Bruce, Cookie, Sharon, Gilles —people we see again and again, people we see evolve over the years. This repetition brings us close to the heart of the matter. Says Goldin: “To represent someone what is needed is not a photo, but an accumulation of photos. I don’t believe in the single portrait. I believe only in the accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person. Because I think people are really complex” (Armstrong and Keller, 454). Essentially then, Nan Goldin’s signature is not in the isolated unit, like that of a photograph by Edward Weston, it is in the sequence. This is how the artist herself puts it: “My genius, if I have any, is in the slideshows, in the narratives. It is not in making perfect images. It is in the groupings of work” (Mazur, np). Arbus’ young man in curlers is relaxed as well. But the mood is different. Like Jimmy Paulette, he is not dressed yet and he’s in between his masculine and soon-to-be feminine expressions of self. Arbus is prodding at his psyche. She’s investigating the young man’s liminal state within his own state of becoming. She’s curious about him, but she is less invested in his authentic self than his naked self. Is an investment in one better than the other? It does raise questions about authenticity and intention, but the world of documentary photography is full of practitioners who have their own agendas. Lejeune, Philippe, Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime : histoire et anthologie. Paris : Textuel, 2006. In her photos, everything is real and there are no fictional elements. “I don’t like the forged world, we need the real world, so we need photography as evidence to tell us the truth,” Golding said.

Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001. self-celebration but self-effacement, or self-confrontation, then is Goldin’s pursuit. Nan one month after being battered, 1984, which may evoke Bacon’s disfigured self-portraits, foregrounds the artist’s desire to look at herself whatever the situation, and to face up to herself when it comes to the consequence of the toxic relationships that form the narrative of the Ballad. In this operation, the camera is a tool for self-preservation and the self-portrait performs a therapeutic function. Goldin has said that after a stay in a detox clinic she used the self-portrait to re-identify with her body: “When I came out of the clinic… I really understood how I was using the camera to reassemble myself” (Sartorius 452). Ibars, Stéphane. “Entretien avec Yvon Lambert” in Nan Goldin. Trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods. Les Cahiers de la Collection Lambert. Arles : Actes Sud, 2020. s Self Portrait Writing my Diary, Boston MA (1989) foregrounds the connection between verbal and visual self-writing; how does the much-vaunted kinship between verbal diary and visual diary work in the case of Goldin and to what extent is the analogy between verbal and visual autobiography pertinent in her case? To answer those questions, I will examine what the term self-portraiture means with respect to Goldin’s work, and then analyze the way the construction of her work is akin to verbal autobiography. To conclude, I will bring out Goldin’s aim in creating works like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency which I propose to consider as an extended self-portrait. I. Mon semblable, ma sœur at Self Portrait in Bed, New York City reminds me that Goldin kept as material for a possible work the tapes from her answering machine of the 1980s, an action that is close to the performances of French artist Sophie Calle. There is, in other words, an essential and undistinguished drive in Goldin’s work to record her life, an energy behind both her visual self-portraits and behind the written diaries that she has been keeping since adolescence. In Self-Portrait Writing my Diary, Goldin hides and yet highlights the written text in the bottom left corner and dramatizes the visual text of the whole image, sharply contrasted in its recording of light. This work, as it were, captures the double project: light writing and life writing. Barthes the Semiograph has elaborated on the complicity between what he calls “scription” and “piction” ( Sociologie de l’art 172) and in Goldin there is a drive that goes in both these directions, towards the story and towards the image, towards a narrative in pictures and towards narrativized pictures. Goldin’s hybridity, and her hesitation between media, tempt me to highlight this urge by referring to her most famous work as the Graphing of Sexual Dependency. We could also think in terms of Rancière’s “phrase-image.”

Armstrong, David and Walter Keller. “Conversation”. I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996.

Barthes, Roland. “Délibération.” Le bruissement de la langue. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1984, 399-413. have examined the ways Goldin’s photographic work is a portrait of the self: first in the literal self-portraits, then in the portraits of self and friends in the same frame, and more largely in the “family portraits.” I will now explore how the construction of Goldin’s work is akin to verbal autobiography. For this, I would like to make use of an idea formulated by Eric Marty while editing Roland Barthes. For Barthes, Marty tells us, thinking is anchored not so much in concepts, but in the rhythm of writing: “Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre, pour lui, ce n'est pas le concept, mais la phrase rythmée” (Birnbaum, np). II. Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” When I was a kid people would say, You didn’t see that; that didn’t happen […] You know, there was this web of denial […] And the only way I could feel that I could survive that, and maintain my own truth, was to start writing a diary when I was really young. […] Writing was the way I held on to my version of things… […] When I started taking pictures, I realized it was a way to make a real record of what I had actually seen and done.” (Armstrong and Keller 451)Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin’s photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and “social portraiture” approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world. In “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Nan also preserved her many years of memories: the death of family and friends, the breakdown of relationship, the gathering of friends, and Naomi wearing a gorgeous dance dress with laughing. . Through these photos, Nan not only reveals the fragile and sensitive side of human nature, but also expresses the relationship between desire and loss, joy and sorrow, sex and lovelorn, which seemingly contradictory but symbiotic coexists. She first wants to prove is the universal theme of human destruction: the inevitable collapse of love relationships, the indulgence of desires, the loss of loved ones and friends, and the illusion of escape from reality. The work is called “Nan, who was beaten after a month”. I was surprised when I saw this photo for the first time. Although Goldin in the photo reveals awkwardness and the bruises on her face are clearly visible, her eyes are firm, calm, but helpless. This is completely different from the self-portraits I have seen before. In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years.