Laura Poitras’ documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed[1], which received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, takes us to the heart of the artistic and political struggles of Nan Goldin, a prominent photographer and figure of the New York counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s.
The trauma
Barbara, N. Goldin’s older sister, fulfilled the role of a mother to Nan, since her mother did not. A rebellious young girl, placed in a psychiatric institution, Barbara commits suicide at the age of eighteen, when Nan is eleven. Despite attempts to hide the circumstances of the tragedy, she took the role that the repression of sexuality had played in this self-destruction. In 1960, “angry women, who claimed their sexuality, were frightening, their behavior was uncontrollable, beyond acceptable” [2]. This drama is the foundation of N. Goldin’s artistic work. Very soon after, she had to flee the family for the sake of her survival. The encounter with her friend David Armstrong, then with photography, brought her back to life. She hangs out with a group of drag queens who spend their nights at a gay club in Boston called The Other Side. “Her first photos tell the story of these young people of a different kind, which America seems to refuse to see. It is the beginning of an obsession, with which, along with the camera she carries everywhere, Nan Goldin builds a family and a new life, of which she constitutes memories that she shares in real time.”[3]
In 1979, the presentation of a slideshow entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency made her famous: “the apparatus […] surprises and pleases as much as it disturbs. [It is] usually devoted to family evenings… looking at holiday memories. It [is not] in the codes of exhibition of photography in the galleries [of the 1970s]. It is actually the images themselves that baffle by their total refusal […] of any academicism. [They] affirm an unprecedented practice of photography, [which reveals] the beauty of beings, away from the established codes of the medium” [4]. They question notions of gender and normality.
N. Goldin subverts the family photo to give a frame to a gaze that traverses appearances. She radically substitutes the conventional images of shared happiness, of the clichés of her sister as a radiant young girl, with her own life, her intimacy and that of her loved ones. “What is personal is political”, this slogan of the 1970s is suitable for this work that maintains a constant vacillation between portrait and self-portrait, an undecidability between personal history and that of a community[5].
Beyond the historical aspect, the permitted/forbidden binary, the fight against the erasure of people who are not compliant, her determination to show everything brings to the forefront the affected bodies and gives form, beyond the specular image, to the mark of life and death on the body. N. Goldin thus endorses Lacan’s indication: jouissance “is approached […] by the gullies that are traced there from the place of the Other [and that] this place of the Other is not to be taken elsewhere than in the body”[6].
Survivor of an Oxycontin overdose, N. Goldin participated in 2017 in the PAIN[7] collective in the fight against the Sackler family, a family of renowned patrons responsible for the opioid crisis in the USA and around the world. By putting her name against theirs, she got the grand museums to remove this name, thus marking it with the seal of infamy. Two of her videos catch our attention:
In one of them, the Sackler family, summoned to step out of the shadows, was compared to the families of the victims; in the other, the reading by her parents of a text by Joseph Conrad, in connection with Barbara and her death, makes the emotion emerge.
Beyond denouncing the deadly power of patriarchy and norms, bringing shame for some, pain for others, N. Goldin’s vow responds: photography as a way to touch the other[8], and, in support of her art-symptom, produce a trace of humanity.
References from the author:
[1] Poitras L., All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documentary film, United States, 2022.
[2] Nan Goldin, Actes Sud/Les cahiers de la Collection Lambert, 2020, p. 28.
[3] Delvaux M., Herd J., « Comment faire apparaître Écho ? Sœurs, saintes et sibylles de Nan Goldin et Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye », Protée, vol. 35, n°1, printemps 2007, p. 29-39, available on the net : https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/pr/2007-v35-n1-pr1756/015886ar.pdf.
[4] Nan Goldin, op. cit., p. 30.
[5] Cf. Delvaux M., Herd J., « Comment faire apparaître Écho ? … », op. cit.
[6] Lacan J., « La Logique du fantasme. Compte rendu du Séminaire 1966-1967 », Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 327, (untranslated), our translation.
[7] Prescription Addiction Intervention Now.
[8] Cf. Delvaux M., Herd J., « Comment faire apparaître Écho ? … », op. cit.
Translation: Dana Tor
Proofreading: Sébastien Dauguet
Picture : © Martine Souren
