Bleak Reality in Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ - The New York Times

Bleak Reality in Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ - The New York Times


Bleak Reality in Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’
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Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art.Credit...Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times


By Ken Johnson
July 14, 2016


Thirty-three years ago, Nan Goldin began taking the photographs that would make up the first iterations of her astounding, autobiographical slide show, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Named after a song from “The Threepenny Opera,” it eventually came to consist of more than 700 images of friends, lovers and herself disporting themselves with shameless abandon in the bohemian squalor of the Lower East Side. Set to a rousing, eclectic selection of music including opera, pop, rock and blues, and projected for about 45 minutes, it was in its time an emotionally wrenching revelation, and it was almost immediately recognized as a defining achievement of art in the 1980s.

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Nan Goldin’s “Nan and Brian in Bed.”Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, Museum of Modern Art


A lot has changed in the world since then, but the “Ballad” still packs a wallop as viewers can discover at the Museum of Modern Art, where it is showing continuously, pausing only for five-minute intermissions. Although Ms. Goldin, 62, has added and subtracted images in the intervening years — the 690-slide, 43-minute version here is dated from 1979 to 2004 — its center of gravity is still the 1980s. That is years before practically all sentient humans would be carrying around miniature visual recording devices and sharing pictures of every great and small event in their private lives with the whole world via the internet.

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Nan Goldin’s “Nan One Month After Being Battered.”Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, Museum of Modern Art



The show is presented here in the form it first took in the early ’80s: as a sequence of actual 35-millimeter slides projected one at a time by a carousel projector. This analog presentation adds to the feeling of sweaty reality that Ms. Goldin’s images convey, their sometimes excruciating, you-are-there immediacy, as in close-ups of people making love and having orgasms or in pictures of people shooting up heroin. Digitization surely would attenuate the sense of nearly palpable physicality.

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Nan Goldin’s “The Hug” (1980).Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, Museum of Modern Art


When Ms. Goldin arrived in New York at the end of the 1970s, fresh out of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with a photography degree, her kind of social realism had fallen from favor. The new star in photography was Cindy Sherman, creator of the “Untitled Film Stills” of 1977-1980, in which she appeared as different characters in artfully staged scenes that seemed to have been taken from 1950s noir films. In their parodic stylishness, Ms. Sherman’s pictures highlighted artifice, disguise and gender stereotypes, and they cast doubt on photography’s putative truth-telling capabilities.

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Nan Goldin’s “The Parents’ Wedding Photo” (1985).Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, The Museum of Modern Art


Ms. Goldin was, in a sense, the anti-Sherman, a romantic poet of unvarnished truth. Her pictures recalled documentarians of the margins, like Diane Arbus or Larry Clark, whose 1971 book of photographs of young delinquents in Oklahoma called “Tulsa” had a galvanizing effect on her.


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Nan Goldin’s “David and Butch Crying at Tin Pan Alley” (1981).Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, The Museum of Modern Art


As a teenager in Boston, Ms. Goldin befriended and photographed drag queens. After moving to New York at the end of the ’70s, her subject became herself and her own world, and her aesthetic diverged from that of traditional fine art photography. The pictures in “Ballad” often are blurry, badly lit and haphazardly composed, taken on the fly as if by an embedded combat photographer. In one of her most famous works, the self-portrait “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” she appears with two black eyes, a wounded veteran of domestic abuse.

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Nan Goldin’s “Rise and Monty Kissing” (1980).Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, Museum of Modern Art


The music acts as emotional connective tissue, imbuing the images as they pass with an episodic, operatic quality. Edited into thematic groups, the whole program has an elemental narrative arc. People make love, marry, become pregnant, have children, grow old and die. Certain characters recur, including Ms. Goldin’s boyfriend, identified only as Brian, who seems always to be unnervingly brooding and glowering. There are cameos by demimonde celebrities like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, John Waters and Jim Jarmusch. Near the end come lingering images of cemeteries and gravestones as Dean Martin warbles “Memories Are Made of This.” It’s heartbreaking. The final slide shows a graffiti image of two skeletons making love, rendered in white paint on a black door, a severe send-off that a 17th-century Puritan would endorse.

While there are moments of beauty, comedy and festive joy, especially in pictures of irresistibly cute and energetic children, and the full range of the sexual-orientation spectrum is lovingly embraced, the world according to Ms. Goldin is not a happy one. The “Ballad” mostly feels bleak, claustrophobic and funereal. It’s far from the deliriously liberating optimism of the ’60s. That’s partly because so many of Ms. Goldin’s friends were derailed by addiction or died from AIDS. One of the saddest pictures shows the actress Cookie Mueller in her open coffin after her 1989 death from AIDS.

Ms. Goldin’s darkly circumscribed vision also may have something to do with her heavy drug use during the ’80s. She has said that after Aperture published its book version of the “Ballad” in 1986, she fell deep into addiction, finally going into a detox center two years later.

Ms. Goldin will be seen by some as a forerunner of today’s internet selfie culture. Her “Ballad” is open to charges of narcissism, exhibitionism, voyeurism and the glamorization of bad behavior, qualities that are partly what make it so riveting. Ms. Goldin’s snapshot candor also influenced untold numbers of serious artists like Wolfgang Tillmans and Ryan McGinley, both of whom became known in the 1990s and 2000s for diaristic photographs of friends and lovers naked and clothed. What she has that few others have so fully possessed are the gifts of a captivating storyteller, the ability to turn messy life into a tale for the ages of lost innocence and squandered youth.

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“Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” continues through Feb. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; 212-708-9400, moma.org.
A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2016, Section C, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: A Testimony to Sex, Drugs and Ravaged Youth. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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