Some things about Nan Goldin

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Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988, from the Bal­lad of Sex­ual Depen­dency.

I was in Hous­ton almost a week before I both­ered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It hap­pened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Hous­ton. I went to see it with Bryan Schut­maat and it was ter­rific. The Bal­lad was there, play­ing every hour on the hour, along with gal­leries full of grids of Goldin pho­tographs, clas­sic and recent.

Goldin is per­haps enjoy­ing a sec­ond Golden Age. Her influ­ence can be seen every­where from a Wolf­gang Till­mans show to an Amer­i­can Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-​​biographical doc­u­ment of the seedy Down­town scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Bal­lad as some­thing of a cau­tion­ary tale. Con­versely, much of the con­tem­po­rary work it has inspired is far more cel­e­bra­tory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remem­ber read­ing some­thing about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actu­ally means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more men­ac­ing place than ours. For all the cama­raderie and inti­macy on dis­play in her work, dan­ger, death, were lurk­ing every­where. AIDS claimed many of her clos­est friends and she strug­gled with addic­tion, all fully doc­u­mented in here work and on dis­play in the Hous­ton exhi­bi­tion. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-​​something dis­ci­ples. We live in a low-​​risk envi­ron­ment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years res­o­lu­tion: more dick in my pictures.

Posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 6:34 am

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