Nan Goldin at MoMA

I recently spent $22 to buy the recent Aperture reprint of Nan Goldin's 1986 classic, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. No regrets, but if you had only $20 to blow, it might be better spent going to MoMA and watching the "original" version of "The Ballad" -- i.e., the 45-minutes long, 800-picture slideshow / multimedia presentation (i.e., with soundtrack selected / edited by Goldin), the universe from which the 130 or so pictures in the book are culled. I found it quite a moving experience, as well as a confirming one: She's one helluva photographer.

Anyway, the multimedia Ballad is being shown as part of the current rotation in the contemporary galleries, "Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art." (On view until March 23, 2009.).

Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983.

The slideshow is better than the book for another reason -- it is up-to-date (or close to it), and the last images in it are from the past few years. Goldin continues to update it (I think), so the slideshow offers a continuous look at Goldin and her life. No small thing for an artist whose subject matter is, essentially, her life.

The breadth of the slideshow also helped me better understand my feelings about Goldin. I've been of two minds about her -- I generally think the early work is wonderful, but the later work flat and uninteresting; fake, in the worst cases. And, sitting there in the dark watching the 800 pictures float by, I came up with a few reasons for why this might be so.

Nan, 1984.

First reason: Her subjects became aware, after the successful of The Ballad, that it was famed demi-monde artist Nan Goldin taking their picture -- and not just "Nan with a camera." The later pictures seem less real to me; more posed. Perhaps this is the reason.

A large part of Goldin's genius was her subjects' response to her (as with any portraitist). She was at one with them -- a friend, a member of the same tribe -- and they sensed this, and they allowed her to see them without masks. Nan with a camera was just Nan, but with a camera.

Once Nan became famous, and the images widely published, some of this may have changed. When a subject is aware that it's Nan Goldin taking her picture -- does she still respond the same way? Or does she try to look like someone in a Nan Goldin Photograph?

Cookie, 1983.

Second reason: Most of her close circle -- i.e., the principal subjects of her work -- died in the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 90s. Surely a diarist-artist like Goldin, whose relationship with her subjects is essential to her work, will be affected by the catastrophic, untimely deaths of those subjects.

The Hug, 1984.

Third reason: The zeitgeist absorbed her work so well that, eventually, you couldn't tell whether you were looking at a Nan Goldin photograph or an ad for underwear. Purveyors of commodities mine daily the cultural-image landscape for appealing nuggets. Very quickly, Goldin's "East Village" aesthetic was absorbed by the commercial culture.

Goldin, of course, had a direct hand in (and profited from) this: Since becoming successful in the late 1980s, she has accepted commercial assignments and shot fashion / product photography for magazines and advertisement. Which, unfortunately for Goldin, has had the effect (at least for me) of cheapening the earlier, non-produced work of "the Ballad".

Photo by Nan Goldin, 2007/2008, for Dior, Canali, and Valentino, fashion spread in Times Sunday Magazine.

Also, celebrities / famous people begin showing up in Goldin's photographs (I recognized Jim Jarmusch and William Eggleston), replacing the mostly anonymous subjects of her East Village work. The people depicted become distinctly prettier, with straighter and whiter teeth, more suitable for display in perfume ads than punk rock zines. This one, e.g., is from 1995, of model James King backstage at the Karl Lagerfeld show in Paris:

Nan Goldin is now rich and famous, and lives in Paris. I wonder if it all seems a dream to her, a universe away from the East Village scene that made her a star. The last survivor, for better or worse.