Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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But I knew I could, pretty easily, take the book project to Aperture because I knew a lot of people working there. I just wasn’t sure they’d bite. I think I showed it to Mark Holborn [an editor there] before I showed it to Michael Hoffman [the former director of Aperture], but when I showed the work to Michael and he said, “We’ll do it,” I thought, Whoa. Whoa, we did that. Spread from the original maquette of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, ca. 1985 In 2000 Goldin went into rehab at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, taking photos of the skyline outside her window in the series “57 Days in Roosevelt Hospital.” These pictures would become a part of her 2003 book “The Devil’s Playground.” The photographs are now on display at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) some four decades after they were shot, but they don’t feel frozen in time. Maybe it’s something about the faces, pink and slightly wet, luminously crooked. Or the bodies that almost threaten to jump out of the frame, shaking with laughter, dancing in derelict apartments, twisting in bedsheets, refusing the camera’s focus. You know Sally Mann in her memoir earlier this year said essentially the same thing— how photographs destroy actual memory. She was talking specifically about her friend, the painter Cy Twombly. She said the reason she remembers him so well is that she has so few pictures of him.

Yes, the only people in those early audiences were people in the pictures. They were shown at a downtown space run by an amazing man named Rafik who is no longer with us. I think it’s a place to buy film equipment now. But at the time there was a screening room and I would show it regularly there. I’d be holding the projectors in my hands and the bulb would burn out and I’d run home and get another bulb. And the audience would wait. The slideshows were all really handmade.I wanted to do a show of Nan’s work, but the gallery didn’t want me to do it. Basically, Mrs. Castelli said she thought that Ellsworth Kelly would be horrified by the pictures. (I’m sure Ellsworth would have loved them.) Basically, I think she was afraid of them. And it was that kind of resistance that was a contributing factor to my leaving the gallery. Goldin’s friends were victims of their time, left defenceless. In this selection of The ballad, the gravity of AIDS is yet to be fully felt. We do not see Goldin’s photographs of hospital bed vigils, open caskets and devastated friends at funerals. Here, there is only slight dread casting a shadow over romance and possibility. This is certainly true

There have been a few relapses since, including a "major" one in 2000, when she was prescribed strong painkillers for a serious injury to her hand, but her work has always got her through. At the 2009 Arles festival, she showed The Ballad and a new installation, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, an ode to her sister, Barbara. It is a characteristically ambitious, sometimes symbolically overloaded, work in which she intertwined the lives of Saint Barbara, her sister and herself. "I brought myself into it as the third character to show the legacy," she says now, "but maybe there should not have been so much of me in there."Heiferman: That’s another quality of the work that’s wild. It is, in its own way, glamorous. You get to see this subculture that, for want of a better term, got turned into something cinematic. It’s a word that people tend to use a lot, but in this case the work really is. Nan always said she wanted to be a filmmaker, and I think that was always in her mind; she was always taking so many pictures. It was kind of like [Eadweard] Muybridge. She was both living life and capturing it in stop-motion. In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.”