Nan Goldin - The Ballad of Sexual Dependency - MOCA U - MOCAtv
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Mixing an in-depth interview with slides of her career-defining work, this video presents the strategies and stakes of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency: "I didn't care about good photography, I cared about complete honesty," Goldin says. Certainly, from its elastic life as slideshow series exhibited across the globe, to its structured legacy as a photo book and collection of prints, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency underscores the camera's documentary function, offering not just enthralling compositions but proof of experience. Creating intimacy with rather than distance from her subjects, Goldin sought to "to show exactly what it was," whether that it was her friends, housemates, lovers, or the plague of AIDS that hit her community. Discussing Larry Clark's influence on her "saturated vision," the dueling desires for intimacy and autonomy that haunt human relationships, Goldin re-orients the dominant perspective on this vital work, setting the record crooked: "We were never marginalized. We were the world."
Directed by Emma Reeves
Shot by Eric Teti
Sound by Max Cooke
Edited by Tom Salvaggio
Make-up by Maud Laceppe at Streeters Agency
Thanks to Neal Franc
Transcript
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Transcript
0:02
[Music]
0:06
the Bel of sexual dependency has been
0:08
the defining work of my life and it's
0:12
the thing that sustains my name and that
0:17
people most want to hear about I started
0:20
it in the early 80s it is a slideshow
0:23
this is almost a book of a film in that
0:27
the slideshow existed long before the
0:29
book
0:30
and it continues to exist I just made a
0:33
new interpretation of it a new edit of
0:36
it in 2008 actually two one for the MoMA
0:42
and one for a private collector so the
0:45
slideshow is about now 48 minutes with
0:50
maybe 30 different songs that um texts
0:55
of the songs act as The Narrative of the
0:58
film before the book came out I
1:02
did variations of the slideshow all over
1:05
the world that's what I did to make a
1:09
living is I traveled around Europe
1:11
showing the slideshow in underground
1:14
Cinemas in radical PL underground places
1:19
and then more more and more
1:21
museums and sometimes it was an hour and
1:24
a half sometimes it was 20 minutes I
1:28
used different songs and the definitive
1:31
version of the
1:32
slideshow was made in 1987 and then
1:35
that's the last time I cut a soundtrack
1:39
so when the book came
1:42
out a dealer gallerist bought one of
1:47
every picture in the book and then years
1:50
later he sold it to a collector who then
1:53
gave it to the
1:54
museum and the prints are just as
1:58
important to me as the slideshow
2:00
I think
2:01
books are the great medium for
2:04
photography and I think it's the only
2:07
art that really works in books but I
2:11
think that the
2:13
PRS also especially shown in
2:18
quantity have a very intense effect
2:22
similar to the book in
2:25
1985 epure actually came to me and and
2:29
asked to do a book of the slideshow and
2:32
it was a long and difficult
2:36
process
2:38
um we spent about 6 months on it we cut
2:41
it down three of us into the form that
2:46
the uh introduction is now the
2:49
introduction is really important
2:53
it's four pages three or four pages and
2:56
it
2:57
explains really what the mean meaning of
3:00
my work is first of all there's a
3:04
misunderstanding that my work is about
3:07
marginalized people and we were never
3:11
marginalized because we were the world
3:13
we didn't care what straight people
3:15
thought of us we had no time for them
3:19
they didn't show up in our radar so we
3:22
weren't marginalized from anything we
3:24
were many many people living a similar
3:28
lifestyle
3:30
and there were some political beliefs
3:34
behind it for some people but it was
3:36
somewhat transgressive against normal
3:39
society but it was not about outcasts or
3:42
marginalized people only the
3:46
most straight people can see it that way
3:49
still I grew up in a family where the
3:53
person I was closest to committed
3:55
suicide and this affected my whole life
3:59
and it at the time and it still does
4:02
what killed her was that she was born at
4:05
the wrong time and she had no tribe she
4:09
had no other people like her
4:13
and the family was very
4:15
revisionist so what happened didn't
4:19
happen and I wanted so much to know what
4:22
was going on in the neighbor's house and
4:25
I wanted the neighbors to know what was
4:26
going on in my house I saw the wrong
4:30
things were kept secret and that I still
4:33
do and I think that revisionism is so
4:36
dangerous and it's still popular for
4:40
people to revise what happened to them
4:42
in their life so this book for me and
4:45
why I took the pictures from the
4:47
beginning was proof that I lived this
4:51
and no one could revise it I think the
4:54
essence of the ballad is about the
4:57
struggle in relationships between
5:00
intimacy and autonomy that's what the
5:03
piece is really about and it's about the
5:06
dependency one can get on another person
5:10
that's totally inappropriate for them on
5:12
every level but the sex is good and the
5:17
sexual connection is so strong so the
5:21
bottom line is about male female
5:24
relationships and why they don't work
5:28
and the different land language that men
5:30
and women speak the different ways
5:33
they're brought up violence that can
5:36
occur in
5:37
relationships the ambivalence that
5:39
people find hard to
5:42
sustain and the struggle for autonomy
5:45
within a relationship and to let the
5:47
other person be autonomous so it's about
5:50
the difficulty in relating and it's not
5:53
about what kind of people it's about my
5:56
friends I think there's almost no one in
5:58
the book that I didn't live with at some
5:59
sometime and in those days before there
6:02
was any
6:04
gentrification I sometimes had 13 people
6:06
living there I ended up living there
6:09
alone or with a lover but in those days
6:12
in the early 80s people came and went
6:15
for periods of time and all of these
6:19
people were my friends unfortunately a
6:22
lot of people are dead from
6:25
AIDS and that was a plague that hit my
6:29
community
6:31
really unbelievably
6:34
intensely and the ballad is also about
6:36
that for me is how many people have
6:41
disappeared and how essential they
6:44
were I think my friends are particularly
6:47
sensitive people particularly
6:51
creative
6:52
um fabulous people with a great
6:56
imagination and I'm showing them in
6:59
their own home lives in sometimes out in
7:03
the world in their relationships to each
7:08
other and their relationships with
7:10
themselves the camera was like an
7:12
extension of my hand and I just shot all
7:16
day I never moved anything for me it was
7:20
a sin to move a beer bottle out of the
7:23
way because it had to be exactly what it
7:27
was and that was really the bottom line
7:30
about photography for me was to show
7:34
exactly what it was basically I used
7:37
whatever camera came into the bar that I
7:39
was working in and bought you know off
7:43
the um people who stole equipment I
7:48
always hated people who talked about
7:51
their cameras and their equipment and
7:54
their printing for me it was the content
7:57
that mattered and not the quality of the
8:00
print but I did care about my film stock
8:04
because I have a very saturated Vision I
8:09
decided recently that it came because I
8:11
didn't wear glasses for years and I
8:14
can't really see without glasses so all
8:17
I see is colors I don't see the details
8:20
of things there was a lot of flash also
8:23
in the ballad pictures which I no longer
8:26
use I didn't know there was any natural
8:28
light I thought there was day and night
8:32
and I lived at night I seriously didn't
8:35
know until about
8:37
1989 that the color of everything is
8:42
changed by the Light of the day that was
8:45
a huge Epiphany for me so a lot of these
8:48
because they're taken inside and there's
8:52
a sense of claustrophobia you could say
8:54
there's a lot of flash photography this
8:57
was at a time when people like Harry
9:00
Callahan Edward
9:03
Weston were the kind of gods of
9:07
Photography so nothing like the ballot
9:10
had happened as a book before except
9:13
Larry Clark's book that was published in
9:15
the 70s called Tulsa and that had a huge
9:19
influence on me because he was shooting
9:23
and print publishing work from his own
9:26
life and there weren't people doing that
9:28
at the time the work wasn't taken
9:32
seriously um particularly by male
9:35
photographers I was booed I got into a
9:38
lot of
9:40
fights a lot of men told me it wasn't a
9:42
lot of people told me it wasn't
9:45
photography it wasn't good and I didn't
9:49
really care about good photography I
9:51
cared about complete honesty and it's
9:54
not something you can try to do it's
9:57
something that I had to take pictures to
10:00
stay alive and I believe that any artist
10:04
has to do their work to stay
10:28
alive
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