Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
Nan Goldin's 'Fantastic Tales'
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
"I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place."
This statement by Nan Goldin seems as good a rationale for creating art as any other. But I can never be too certain of this photographer. Goldin has the ability to surprise. For instance, Pennsylvania Academy's small mid-career exhibition of her work is called "Fantastic Tales," yet for the most part it appears to consist not of fantasy, but of rather straightforward photojournalism.
I first became acquainted with Goldin's work through her first published book of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. I confess that I took it down from the shelf only because I was curious to see what sort of photographs would appear under the banner of a famous Brecht-Weill song lyric. Again Goldin fooled me. The project never began as a collection of photographs at all; it was a slide-show that Goldin had presented as performance art. (I still wonder how that worked. Did she croon the Brecht lyrics as the slides were shown? Did she provide a continuing monologue?) The publication of some of the slides between the covers of a book only came later.
Goldin photographs people she knows in settings she knows. She plays Jerry Lewis to Helmut Newton's sleek Dean Martin, which is to say she photographs beautiful people with pimples in settings that have seen better days. In the accompanying captions she insists that she’s not a fly on the wall or an example of the artist-as-voyeur, boldly asserting that "This is my party." It certainly is, and sometimes she cries, but mostly Goldin presents a fairly dispassionate analysis of passions at work.
Some of the partygoers in "Fantastic Tales" will be familiar from the Sexual Dependency collection, and Goldin's performers appear and re-appear throughout this portion of the show with all of the insouciance of "La Goulée" swaggering through a Lautrec dancehall interior. If Goldin is unable to avoid losing her subjects to death, she nonetheless celebrates and mythologizes them. Cookie Mueller— who once observed that people think their lives are screenplays, who probably informed Goldin’s entire Sexual Dependency series and who provided the title for this exhibit— figures in an entire series of images as Goldin desperately tries to hold on to this talented woman, her muse, her "sister" who died of AIDS. Then too there are the images of Gilles, who first displayed Goldin’s works in France, and his lover Gotscho, both healthy and taken in a hospital when Gilles too was dying of AIDS. This latter picture is as touching a display of emotion as any on display, but it may well offend the pure of heart and dirty of mind. But that too is part of Goldin's game. She's the hostess of a noisy party, remember--and not the guy who wasn't invited to the party, who calls the cops to complain about the noise.
I suspect that Goldin's photographs will always mean more to those who were there. Since she chooses to photograph a specific milieu, she sacrifices the notion of universality. True, Goldin's photograph of "Rise and Monty kissing, NYC" expresses much the same message as Rodin's sculpture "The Kiss." But more people will willingly expose themselves to the Rodin. Partially this is because photography is such an in-your-face medium. Then too there too is Goldin's absolute fearlessness in terms of taking the emotion and rubbing it in your face. (I think Gilles and Gotscho in the hospital would be equally upsetting to people if the photo depicted a heterosexual couple. The problem is Goldin’s unblinking depiction of intimacy in the shadow of death.)
One large piece, the "Ballad Triptych," takes up almost an entire wall in the Academy's Morris Gallery and is composed of 27 such brazenly intimate images. It pretty much sums up an entire epoch of the artist's life and undeniably wields a certain cumulative power, although several of the stand-alone images elsewhere in the exhibit are every bit as powerful and as moving.
The Academy has mounted the exhibit in such a way that the bulk of it is contained within the Morris Gallery, and if you're not careful you'll miss an important pendant group of photographs hanging in the outer lobby on either side of the grand staircase. These represent Goldin's more recent works, including examples of her newfound interest in mixed figure-and-landscape photography. All four of the large photographs illustrating this trend are excellent and hold forth the promise of good things to come.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.