Bruce on top of French Chris, Fire Island, N.Y. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
(Gagosian Davies Street, London W1, until 21 March, free)
Couples, sometimes in flagrante, in amorous embrace, or just posing casually, caught on the fly. Groups of friends, arms around shoulders, or dancing, or clustered together for a celebratory picnic, or hunched tensely around a Monopoly board. Single individuals – looking at the camera, looking out of windows or into mirrors, looking down (head in hands), smoking, avoiding eye contact, sleeping, working, masturbating, posing. Couches: raucously patterned. Beds: usually unmade. Red: hearts, walls, dresses, trousers, flowers, car seats, cans, cigarette packages, bruises, a bloodshot eye. A particular vantage point: up close.
It’s difficult, in spite of the singular nature of her work, to say exactly what defines a Nan Goldin photograph. They feel instantly recognisable if encountered in a sea of other images; and even if you didn’t guess the authorship immediately, you might not be surprised to find out it was the prolific photographer and activist – born in Washington DC in 1953, known for her gritty and intimate work and, more recently, for facing off with the Sackler opioid machine.
Dieter on the bed, Stockholm. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Over the decades, Goldin’s work has chronicled her life and inner circle of creatives, but always in varied and surprising ways — I’d say, somehow, that love is always at the centre of her vast body of work. Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed chronicles Goldin’s founding of the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) — which ultimately led to many museums cutting ties with the powerful pharmaceutical monolith of the Sackler family — interwoven with the artist speaking about her own opioid addiction and unsettled upbringing, including her sister’s suicide aged 18.
At Gagosian’s Davies Street location in London, you can see and wonder (in both senses of the word) for yourself in an exhibition of 126 photographs from Goldin’s celebrated series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Or one version of it, at least: the selection of images that were published in a 1986 book of the same name. (The title hails from a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 socialist musical The Threepenny Opera.) Other versions of the work date from 1972 to 1996, as Goldin added to and adjusted the images over decades living in New York, where she staged the Ballad as a slideshow in the city’s clubs and bars – sometimes including nearly 700 photographs, played rapid fire, lasting under an hour and accompanied by music: the Velvet Underground and Nico, James Brown, Nina Simone, Yoko Ono, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Charles Aznavour, Maria Callas.
In Goldin’s work, nothing is off the table, judged or shamed, tossed aside as meaningless, taboo, confessional, too much
Immaculately displayed in an evenly spaced grid that covers the entirety of three pitch-black walls, this is the first time the entire body of work has been shown in the UK and also marks its 40th anniversary – astonishing given how immediate, fresh and familiar the images still seem: friends and family caught off the cuff with the skill of a keen street photographer whose eye has been turned inward, to those best known to her, instead of outward. “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party, but I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history,” Goldin has said of the series. She has also described it as “the diary I let people read”.
And yet the photographs, as they proliferate around the walls – the same faces glimpsed again and again in different guises, gestures, angles, emotional states – begin to transcend their individuality. The more we see through Goldin’s eyes of her very specific milieu, the more we understand the subject of the work is human relationships, and the preciousness is not in the art object but in its connection to everything else, including the person who took the photograph. What else is sexual dependency, after all, but the compulsive, all-consuming, intense urge to gain ultimate proximity to others, sometimes to one’s own detriment? Often framed as pathological, it is also the stuff of life, and one of its great animating forces.
Sandra in the mirror, New York City. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Goldin herself appears in numerous images, most strikingly a now well-known self-portrait, sometimes exhibited on its own, entitled “Nan one month after being battered” (1984). Face puffy, expression inscrutable, the artist looks straight at the camera. Under and around her eyes, bruises have all but faded, but her left eye is bright red around its brown iris; a red that, uncannily, matches her neatly applied lipstick. In this version of the Ballad, photographs of Brian, the boyfriend who battered her, hang nearby. He smiles, glowers, hugs Goldin as she sits on his lap, smokes, reposes nude: a love object that defies sense and yet compels continued looking. In Goldin’s work, nothing is off the table, judged or shamed, tossed aside as meaningless, taboo, confessional, too much. In the Ballad, as in the artist’s wider oeuvre, looking at life in all its complexity is difficult and sometimes painful, confounding. It’s also beautiful and necessary: and anyway, life doesn’t really exist without our attention to it.
Emily LaBarge is the Nerve's art critic. A Canadian writer living in London, her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, New York Times, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Paris Review and more. Her debut book, Dog Days, was published last year by Peninsula Press.