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.