Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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Richard Phelan is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Aix-Marseille Université. His doctoral thesis was devoted to aesthetic questions in modern American painting. His recent research concerns contemporary visual art and to zones of collaboration between visual and verbal art forms. He has published on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Allan McCollum, Ernest Pignon-Ernest and (Elaine) Sturtevant. Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”? 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).

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.” Delvaux, Martine et Jamie Herd. “Comment faire apparaître Écho ? Sœurs, saintes et sibylles de Nan Goldin et Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye.” Protée, volume 35, number 1, printemps 2007, 29–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/015886ar Web. 3 May. 2023. Although Nan Goldin has a wealthy family, she did not have a happy childhood. At the age of eleven, her sister committed suicide in the rails, which is undoubtedly a fatal blow to Nan Goldin. Nan once said in an interview: “Everyone is always careful about everything around him. It is an environment that corrects all untimely things. For example, the matter of suicide by my sister is also said to be a cause.” 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 seGoldin was born in Washington in 1953. Her work began to emerge in the New York of the 1980s, when the artist was in her early thirties. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that founded Goldin’s place in contemporary art (“The thing that sustains my name,” MoCA) began as an ever-changing slide show projected by the artist herself in underground clubs in New York and around the world. Sound was added in 1980 and the work received its name in 1981 from a song in Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. In 1985, it was reviewed in the Village Voice and presented at the Whitney Biennial; it reached its definitive form, running for 48 minutes with over 700 pictures and with 30 songs, in 1987. That year it was also shown during the Rencontres de la photographie in the Roman theatre in Arles. Goldin’s work began to be exhibited in France in the early 1990s, first by Agnès b. and then by Yvon Lambert whose gallery she joined in 1995. Lambert chose Goldin and other artists working with photography precisely because she was not a photographer, but an artist using photography: “I’ve always supported the work of that generation which called themselves artists, and used photography as one medium among others, by reinventing it. People like Louise Lawler, Andres Serrano…” (Ibars 67). manner in which the presentation of works in museums is constructed rhythmically can be seen in the room devoted to Goldin in 2020 in Avignon (third and fourth slides) or in the hanging at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2014 (MoCA). Goldin’s founding work The Ballad is indeed a show, a work whose parameters are those of time as much as that of the space of the visual object. Moreover, when presenting a sequence of photographs in slide shows, the artist further transforms the still images into temporal works through the use of music. The songs not only tell stories akin to those in the pictures (the Brechtian story of alcohol, the Kitt story of solitude, or the Lou Reed and Nico story of partying and of fatal attraction), they also make the viewer sensuously aware of experiencing the images in time. What most structures the work therefore is its syntax, the assembly of one image with another. Tellingly, Goldin insists that The Ballad is not just a show or a wall display, but also a book, a sequential form she feels suited to photography—“It’s the only (visual) art that really works in books,” she says (MoCA). Goldin struggled with her addiction for three years, at one point almost dying from an overdose of fentanyl. When she emerged after regaining her sobriety in 2017, she once again found that the world around her had changed. This time the epidemic was opioid addiction, the aftereffect of the widespread overprescription of powerful pain-relieving drugs like the OxyContin that had been her downfall. 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. work of Nan Goldin is a dialogue between the self and the other and, in her own words, a “struggle between intimacy and autonomy” (MoCA), an account of how the I can approach the you without losing itself (or, in the Ballad’s terms, without withdrawal symptoms). “Nan Goldin: I’ll be Your Mirror” was the title of an exhibition and a publication in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2020 the Collection Lambert in Avignon, which contains a great many of Goldin’s self-portraits, held a show with a similar title that presented a large section devoted to Goldin. The latter exhibition has served in the present article which contends that when Goldin’s photographs reflect specific others, the artist is reflecting herself, and ultimately, the viewer.

Hoberman, Jim. “Nan talking with J. Hoberman.” I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. 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.) 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 Nan believes that this is the ultimate act of autonomous independence. In decades of photography life, Nan is not shooting her transvestites, transgenders, and gay friends, but set up a mirror to faithfully reflect the world. She insists on telling people the truth: physical limitations do not hinder the height of the spirit.In the photo, her transvestite friends, determined, calm, and unduly to show their beautiful posture, this is the Nan’s early photography, which reflects the characteristics of the traditional documentary photography at that time: the photographer and the model are two individuals. They are only indifferent in their own space, with relationship but does not intimate. Moreover, the photographer records the life and state of the model, but can’t describe the essence behind the photo. Lccn 96017659 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.6404 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000368 Openlibrary_edition Lejeune, Philippe, Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime : histoire et anthologie. Paris : Textuel, 2006. 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.