Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Posted on October 31 2017
Author Silvia Mazzucchelli
Translation LoosenArt
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It's the diary I want people to read," says photographer Nan Goldin. "It is commonly known that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the entourage to the party. But I'm not crazy. This is my party. This is my family, my story. " The diary has a title: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and is composed of a projection of photographs that has changed over time, at which center is the question of living and acting: the risks, the unpredictability, innocence, indifference, involvement, passion.
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The main charcaters are the photographer's friends: the writer and actress Cookie Mueller, her husband, Vittorio Scarpati, both passed away from Aids a few months apart from each other. Trixie, who looks like a little girl, while smoking with her shaken face in a floral dress, Brian the violent man from whom she is irresistibly attracted, Susan, on a train and in the bathroom, and then the moments they enjoy, making love, fighting, doing drugs, dying.
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Misty, Taboo, and Jimmy Paulette Dressing. Nan Goldin, 1991
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Cookie, Tin Pan Alley NYC. Nan Goldin, 1983
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What induces her to make shots are the feelings: friendship, love, physical attraction which move the image's boundary "inside" her world and redraw the boundaries of what we can consider as a credible visual subject.
The impression is that everything that exists outside is completely irrelevant. Whoever looks at the images understands that there can be no expectation unless of the subject caught up in his purity of referent: Cookie is Cookie, in her wedding dress and her eyes perenially made up in black, it's her indecipherable being,when suffering, in love. Or even better Cookie is a picture. She represents "the exact scene, literally " the real, although there is undoubtedly a reduction in proportion and perspective. And even if the image is not real, it's at least what Roland Barthes calls the perfect analogon, or "analogic perfection," "a message without a code," and as such a "continuous message".
Nan Goldin confirms this with his words: "The camera is part of my daily life like talking, eating or having sex." Life and photography also coincide with choosing to use color: nothing is static and everything is elusive. The perfect synthesis is the slideshow with its soundtrack: it is not real photography and it is not even cinema, but it evokes both experiences. In addition, music dislocates the meaning through the immediate reference of the sound suggestion: melody, intensity, duration, quantity, pauses dictate the rhythm of the Ballad and characterize the style with which the photographer wants to achieve an effect of reality, as it happens with images of traumatic situations.
The impression is that everything that exists outside is completely irrelevant. Whoever looks at the images understands that there can be no expectation unless of the subject caught up in his purity of referent: Cookie is Cookie, in her wedding dress and her eyes perenially made up in black, it's her indecipherable being,when suffering, in love. Or even better Cookie is a picture. She represents "the exact scene, literally " the real, although there is undoubtedly a reduction in proportion and perspective. And even if the image is not real, it's at least what Roland Barthes calls the perfect analogon, or "analogic perfection," "a message without a code," and as such a "continuous message".
Nan Goldin confirms this with his words: "The camera is part of my daily life like talking, eating or having sex." Life and photography also coincide with choosing to use color: nothing is static and everything is elusive. The perfect synthesis is the slideshow with its soundtrack: it is not real photography and it is not even cinema, but it evokes both experiences. In addition, music dislocates the meaning through the immediate reference of the sound suggestion: melody, intensity, duration, quantity, pauses dictate the rhythm of the Ballad and characterize the style with which the photographer wants to achieve an effect of reality, as it happens with images of traumatic situations.
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Since trauma depends on the certainty that the scene has actually taken place or, again to say it with Roland Barthes's words, "the more the trauma is directed, the more the connotation is difficult", "no verbal categorization may take place on the institutional process of signification ". And it is true: it is hard to say something more about her images than what we can see by looking at them.
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That's why one wonders what is the sexual dependence the artist talks about. "Want it or not, it does not escape its fate: Sexual slavery is the strongest," reciting with a sense of ineluciability the homonymous ballad included in Die Dreigroschenoper Opera by Bertolt Brecht, whose words have inspired the photographer . What's left over her self-portrait with a swollen face after having been violently beaten by his lover, or beyond the photograph of a body with a heart-shaped bruise imprinted on his thigh? It remains the dependence on what seems to be perpetually alive in its imperfection. All images are moments of this awareness. There is no gap between form and reality. Photographs and their flow contain what is inevitable to recognize in its effectiveness, what is empirically certain and linked to the freedom of the images, in front of our eyes,it may attributes attraction or repulsion.
That's why one wonders what is the sexual dependence the artist talks about. "Want it or not, it does not escape its fate: Sexual slavery is the strongest," reciting with a sense of ineluciability the homonymous ballad included in Die Dreigroschenoper Opera by Bertolt Brecht, whose words have inspired the photographer . What's left over her self-portrait with a swollen face after having been violently beaten by his lover, or beyond the photograph of a body with a heart-shaped bruise imprinted on his thigh? It remains the dependence on what seems to be perpetually alive in its imperfection. All images are moments of this awareness. There is no gap between form and reality. Photographs and their flow contain what is inevitable to recognize in its effectiveness, what is empirically certain and linked to the freedom of the images, in front of our eyes,it may attributes attraction or repulsion.
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Twisting at my birthday party, NYC. Nan Goldin, 1980
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Trixie on the cot, NYC. Nan Goldin, 1979
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The Ballad is all this: the rhythm of a fierce intimacy that resists its consistency in front of everyone's eyes, fully exposed, beyond the flowing of time and its consuming things. It suggests that with creation you can really fill the void of loss. The excess of life is opposed to nothing. It does not matter if the pictures are moved, blurred, imperfect. Isn't passion a mess? Nan Goldin's life has this form, and it is a misshapen and desperate form that can hold our gaze to the faces and places depicted in the same way as it happened to her. Her way of photographing has opened up to the experience of daily life and excess and has transformed these into relationship, passage, contact. Photography becomes a form of experience, one could say the direct experience of the "original". We all are also in the picture: we look at the sea in Coney Island, sit on the benches in Tompkins Square Park, admire the Bowery roofs from above. And then we are in Boston, Merida, London, Munich, Berlin overwhelmed in a ballad, an uninterrupted flow of photographs, the story of a life: that of Nan Goldin.
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Jimmy Paulette & Misty in the taxi, NYC. Nan Goldin, 1991
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Since the early 1970s Nan has documented every aspect of her own existence and that of her dearest friends. Her first photos taken while she was 20 were a series of images titled Drag Queens, who portrayed the circle of two drag queens friends with whom she lived. In 1978 she moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and continues to photograph the friends and artists she frequents; one of the first times Balla1d is screened is at Frank Zappa's birthday at a nightclub in New York City in 1979: the audience is mostly composed by photographed friends. The last time she has been in Italy dates back to 1986, when she projected the Ballad at the Plastic in Milan.
In 1985, the inclusion in New York's Whitney Biennial , marks the first important institutional interest in her work and the following year the publication of her first book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In the introductory essay, Nan Goldin tells of her childhood, the desire to escape, the suicide of her sister to whom se was very attached and to whom the Ballad is dedicated. She recounts the story of her love for Brian, the bad guy "on the Bowery roof", the violence she suffered, her addiction to his body.
Yet there is no nostalgia. You do not go back because everything is alive, everything is in the photographs. "If each image is a story, then the collection of these images approaches the memory experience," the photographer says. "It's a never-ending story." For this reason, each of her images does not represent the past, but a lot more: an excerpt of what we can continue to see in its infinite present. As one song in the soundtrack says:I' ll be your mirror ".
Yet there is no nostalgia. You do not go back because everything is alive, everything is in the photographs. "If each image is a story, then the collection of these images approaches the memory experience," the photographer says. "It's a never-ending story." For this reason, each of her images does not represent the past, but a lot more: an excerpt of what we can continue to see in its infinite present. As one song in the soundtrack says:I' ll be your mirror ".
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The Hug, NYC. Nan Goldin, 1980 │ French Chris at the Drive-in, NJ. Nan Goldin, 1979
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Skeletons coupling, NYC. Nan Goldin, 1983 │ Couple in bed, Chicago. Nan Goldin, 1977
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Author Silvia Mazzucchelli
Translation LoosenArt
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